CHINESE MODERN

POST-CONTEMPORARY INTERVENTIONS

Series Editors: Stanley Fish and Fredric Jameson

CHINESE MODERN

The Heroic and the Quotidian

XIAOBING TANG

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS Durham and London 2000

©  Duke University Press All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 
Designed by C. H. Westmoreland
Typeset in Carter and Cohn Galliard with Eras display
by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Title page art: Woodcut, ‘‘Pursuit of Light’’ (ca. ),
by Li Hua, originally published in China in Black and White:
An Album of Woodcuts by Contemporary Chinese Artists, New York:
Asia Press, .
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear
on the last printed page of this book.
 For Fred,

who first explained to me Brecht’s insight:

‘‘Woe is the land that needs a hero’’

(Galileo, Scene ).

This page intentionally left blank
CONTENTS

List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction 

PART I
1 Trauma and Passion in The Sea of Regret: The Ambiguous
Beginnings of Modern Chinese Literature 
2 Lu Xun’s ‘‘Diary of a Madman’’ and a Chinese Modernism 
Excursion I: Beyond Homesickness: An Intimate Reading of
Lu Xun’s ‘‘My Native Land’’ 
3 Shanghai, Spring : Engendering the Revolutionary
Body 
4 The Last Tubercular in Modern Chinese Literature:
On Ba Jin’s Cold Nights 

PART II
5 The Lyrical Age and Its Discontents: On the Staging of Socialist
New China in The Young Generation 
6 Residual Modernism: Narratives of the Self in the s 
7 The Mirror of History and History as Spectacle: Reflections
on Xiao Ye and Su Tong 
8 In Search of the Real City: Cinematic Representations of Beijing
and the Politics of Vision 
9 New Urban Culture and the Anxiety of Everyday Life in Late-
Twentieth-Century China 
Excursion II: Decorating Culture: Notes on Interior Design,
Interiority, and Interiorization 
10 Melancholy Against the Grain: Approaching Postmodernity
in Wang Anyi’s Tales of Sorrow 

Afterword 
Glossary 
Selected Bibliography 
Index 
This page intentionally left blank
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

. Folk painting, Tianjin cheng maifu dilei Dong Junmen dasheng xibing tu
(A depiction of Commander Dong winning a great victory over Western
troops by laying mines in the city of Tianjin) () 
. Commercial advertisement, ‘‘International Dispensary Co. Ltd.’’
(ca. ) 
. Commercial advertisement, ‘‘The Central Agency, Ltd.’’ (ca. ) 
. Woodcut, Bodou (Confrontation) () 
. Film poster, Nianqing de yidai (The young generation) () 
. Stage design, Nianqing de yidai (The young generation) () 
. Stage design, Nianqing de yidai (The young generation) () 
. Film poster, Benming nian (Black snow) () 
. Film still, Beijing nizao (Good morning, Beijing) () 
. Film still, Beijing nizao (Good morning, Beijing) () 
. Peasant painting, New Look of a Village () 
. Peasant painting, The Whole Family Studies the Communiqué () 
. Peasant painting, The Motor’s Roar () 
. Peasant painting, Old Party Secretary () 
. Photograph, Bringing You the Colors of the World, Giordano () 
. Oil, Dream Girl () 
. Photograph, ‘‘Xiandai jushi’’ (Calendar: modern living) () 
. Photograph, ‘‘Jia / Home’’ (Calendar) () 

Following page 

Plate  (fig. ). Photograph, Bringing You the Colors of the World, Giordano ()
Plate  (fig. ). Oil, Dream Girl ()
This page intentionally left blank
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Since the writing of Chinese Modern spanned more than an entire de-
cade of my life, to compose a succinct acknowledgment on the eve of
its publication looms as a sobering exercise in remembrance. I have all
my friends, teachers, colleagues, students, readers, and editors to thank
for being there and for allowing me to pursue the ideas that I present
in this book. Fully aware that my memory may falter, I still wish to ex-
press my appreciation to the following individuals for encouraging me,
commenting on earlier drafts, and/or assisting me in my research. I list
their names to reflect the order in which the chapters were written and
revised: Jeff Twitcell, Fredric Jameson, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Dawn LaRo-
chelle, Hu Ying, Mary Scoggin, Gan Yang, Howard Goldblatt, Laurels
Sessler, Li Tuo, Meng Yue, Ivone Margulies, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lydia
Liu, Judith Zeitlin, Norma Field, Prasenjit Duara, Paize Keulemans, Ted
Huters, Patrick Hanan, Ma Tai-loi, Arif Dirlik, Xudong Zhang, Tang
Xiaoyan, Dongming Zhang, Arjun Appadurai, Yingjin Zhang, and Wu
Linqing.
Special thanks are due my parents, Tang Haibo and Xie Lingling, who
never stop looking after me from afar. A major motivation for my investi-
gating the dialectics of the heroic and the quotidian was indeed my desire
to understand the passion and confusion that I have witnessed in the lives
of my parents’ generation of Chinese.
Over the years, audiences at Hong Kong University, the University of
Colorado at Boulder, the University of California at Berkeley, Indiana
University, and the University of Chicago heard presentations of some of
the essays that in different form are presented in this volume. Students
in my seminars at the University of Colorado at Boulder and at the Uni-
versity of Chicago read and discussed, always politely, several chapters. I
enjoyed all of the queries and comments generated by these memorable
occasions, and I hope that the final version will give rise to just as much,
if not more, response and interest.
My research assistant, Jason McGrath, capably helped me prepare the
manuscript in the final stages and did a superb job of proofreading, index-
ing, and asking the right questions. The excitement that Jason felt while
going through the chapters, I hope, outweighed the tedium of standard-
izing an academic manuscript.
xii Acknowledgments

Yet the one person whose emotional and intellectual investment in the
volume is at least as significant as my own is Elizabeth Baker, always my
beloved first reader, critic, editor, and cheerleader. I sometimes feel that
all the words that I wrote for this book came to life and began to make
sense only with the gentle but searching touch that Liza would bestow on
each one of them with her exquisite red pen. When my mood became agi-
tated by either ‘‘the lyrical age’’ or ‘‘heroic melancholy’’ that I intimately
probed, Liza would often calm me down by making me feel and taste the
lasting joy of everyday life.
In addition to all the invaluable personal support, I am grateful for
different forms of institutional aid. During –, a residential fellow-
ship at the Chicago Humanities Institute allowed me to concentrate and
achieve a conceptual coherence for what was emerging as a book project.
One of the earliest essays was finished in the summer of , when I re-
ceived a Rockefeller postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Psychoso-
cial Studies, directed by Benjamin Lee. At the University of Chicago,
the Center for East Asian Studies provided me with timely research and
course development funds with which I could collect visual material and
put it to use in my undergraduate teaching.When the manuscript was fin-
ished, Ted Foss and Jim Ketelaar at the Center graciously made available
a subvention, with which color illustrations could be reproduced for this
publication. I hope Ted will find this book both good and elegant.
Several chapters have been published before, and I would like to thank
PMLA, Modern Chinese Literature, East-West Film Journal, Public Culture,
boundary , and Westview Press for permitting me to republish my work.
I know how deeply indebted I am to the editors and copyeditors of these
journals and presses. All the previously published essays, however, were
carefully revised, in some cases extensively, before their appearance here.
I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to work again with Rey-
nolds Smith at Duke University Press. His enthusiasm for the project
was reassuring from the beginning and made the publication process
amazingly painless for me. The three readers for Duke University Press,
although vastly distinct in style, were equally generous with their com-
ments and suggestions. I may or may not have taken all of their advice,
but I have great respect for their professional rigor. I would also like to
thank Bob Mirandon for copyediting the manuscript and Pam Morrison
for capably managing the production of the book.
Finally, I understand that any remaining errors in the book are entirely
 Acknowledgments xiii

my own and that I am responsible for all my arguments. My ultimate re-

sponsibility, however, lies in revealing the contemporary relevance of the
Chinese experience in a most remarkable century. This task will demand
just as active a part from readers of this book as it has from its author.

A number of chapters of this book have appeared in previous publications, all in

an earlier and shorter form.
Chapter . , ‘‘Lu Xun’s ‘Diary of Madman’ and a Chinese Modernism,’’
PMLA . (October): –. Reprinted by permission of the copyright
owner, The Modern Language Association of America.
Chapter . , ‘‘Residual Modernism: Narratives of the Self in Contempo-
rary Chinese Fiction,’’ Modern Chinese Literature . (Spring): –. Reprinted
by permission of Modern Chinese Literature.
Chapter . , ‘‘The Mirror of History and History as Spectacle: Reflections
on Hsiao Yeh and Su T’ung,’’ Modern Chinese Literature . and  (Spring/Fall):
–. Reprinted by permission of Modern Chinese Literature.
Chapter . , ‘‘Configuring the Modern Space: Cinematic Representation
of Beijing and Its Politics,’’ East-West Film Journal . (July): –. Reprinted
by permission of the Program for Cultural Studies, The East-West Center.
Chapter . , ‘‘New Urban Culture and the Anxiety of Everyday Life in
Contemporary China,’’ from In Pursuit of Contemporary East Asian Culture ed.
by Xiaobing Tang and Stephen Snyder, Copyright ©  by Westview Press:
–. Reprinted by permission of Westview Press, a member of Perseus Books,
L.L.C.
Excursion II. , ‘‘Decorating Culture: Notes on Interior Design, Interior-
ity, and Interiorization,’’ Public Culture: Society for Transnational Cultural Studies
. (Spring): –. Reprinted by permission of Duke University Press.
Chapter . , ‘‘Melancholy Against the Grain: Approaching Postmoder-
nity in Wang Anyi’s Tales of Sorrow,’’ boundary : an international journal of litera-
ture and culture . (Fall): –. Reprinted by permission of Duke University
Press.
This volume is published with a subvention from the Center for East Asian
Studies, the University of Chicago.

XBT, Hyde Park

This page intentionally left blank
INTRODUCTION

This study of modern Chinese literature and culture observes a chrono-

logical order in which a series of significant twentieth-century literary
and visual texts are studied and interpreted. Varied in both focus and
length, the study’s ten chapters and two excursions delve into represen-
tations of virtually every decade of the past hundred years. Some works
discussed here are canonical, but also included are texts that, although
not as well-studied, bring into relief a particular issue or moment. One
main objective of the book is to demonstrate the pleasure of engaging
specific, complex texts along with the need to continually assemble an ex-
planatory historical narrative. Through its exercises in intimate reading,
Chinese Modern offers interpretations of dense fragments gathered from
a yet-to-be-written cultural history of modernity in China.
While the chronological arrangement acknowledges a need to situate
individual creative works along a historical continuum, the wide range of
topics and materials engaged in this study illustrates, I hope, how rich
and multilayered the symbolic domain of modern Chinese literature and
culture has been in the twentieth century. The book’s underlying con-
cern is to recognize not merely the traces and memories of a profoundly
traumatic age, but also the recurring excitements and anxieties that com-
peting visions of the modern continue to generate. These memories and
visions are retrieved through a patient inquiry into some of the central
themes of modern Chinese literature and culture: formations of subjec-
tivity, the rural/urban symbology, historical consciousness, individual re-
sponsibility, and social transformation. The dialectics of the heroic and
the quotidian, which I pursue here as an interpretive framework, de-
scribe an embedded structure of ambivalence, whereby the maelstrom of
modernity is understood both to stir in us passions for a utopian future
and to make us long for a fulfilling everyday life that is however con-
stantly postponed. I examine how heroic actions as much as quotidian re-
assurances amount to a production of meaning that is nonetheless called
into question in twentieth-century Chinese history and consciousness;
my central argument is that the dialectical movement of the heroic and
the quotidian constitutes an inescapable condition of secular modernity.
The book is divided into two parts that reflect a prevailing sense of dis-
2 Chinese Modern

continuity or new beginning that the founding of the People’s Republic,

after decades of war and social turmoil, engendered in midcentury. Up
until that rupture, my reading deals exclusively with literary works, all
of them seminal texts for twentieth-century Chinese literature and cul-
ture. In the first chapter, which explores the ambiguous beginnings of
modern Chinese literature, I discuss the invocation of mythical pathos
in Wu Jianren’s  novel The Sea of Regret, arguing that the narrative
presents an intricate study of war trauma and human resilience. The dis-
course of passion that sustains the narrative articulates a cultural politics
of virtue, which is nonetheless compounded by libidinal desire and shares
the psychic structure of obsessional neurosis. Its indeterminacy between
hagiography and pathography makes the novel an apt instance of chang-
ing literary conceptions and practices in the century’s opening years. The
divergence between meaning and experience painstakingly negotiated by
the text also makes it a core narrative of modern Chinese literature.
The other four chapters in Part I draw on several analytical approaches
—one of them psychoanalysis—to cast a fresh light on important works
by the canonical writers Lu Xun, Ding Ling, and Ba Jin. A constant
theme is the psychological depth and ambivalence that intensely self-
conscious, albeit disparate, experiences of the modern have enabled these
writers to reach and represent. The chapters on Ding Ling and Ba Jin can
be taken, in turn, as microscopic studies of revolutionary romanticism of
the early s in metropolitan Shanghai and a somber poetics of failure
in the Chinese interior during World War II. My selection of these texts
may appear random, with little relationship of direct influence revealed
among them, but each narrative is an overdetermined historical interven-
tion that provides a crucial link in modern Chinese literary and cultural
practices. It is not my intention in these pages to construct a systematic
literary history, although a sharply focused interpretation of any given
literary text—Lu Xun’s ‘‘Diary of a Madman,’’ for instance—invariably
involves our conception of the entire tradition of modern Chinese litera-
ture. The overwhelming challenge of such an intimate engagement with
literary texts, it seems to me, stems from the uneven, multifocal histories
that continually surface and demand our imaginative reconfiguration.
Between the book’s two main parts, there is a noticeable shift from
psychoanalyzing Ba Jin’s novel of virtual interior monologue to disman-
tling a carefully orchestrated theatrical spectacle. This change also fore-
shadows a broadening scope of investigation. In addition to literary texts,
 Introduction 3

I introduce cinematic and other visual materials in the book’s second

part. The ecstatic ‘‘lyrical age’’ in the wake of a time of unbearable de-
spair, as I show in my reading of the  play The Young Generation, is
nonetheless fraught with anxiety and even terror. It thrives on an aes-
thetics of exteriority that extends the politics of sublimation, timidly em-
braced by Ding Ling in her fiction during the early s. The exhila-
rating new life projected on the socialist stage, upon close examination,
appears painfully incoherent and manipulative. In revisiting characters
that galvanized the passion of an entire generation of Chinese youth and
more, however, I view the play as valuable testimony to the grand project
of a Chinese modernity, particularly to its utopian yearnings. Part of what
I call ‘‘revolutionary mass culture’’ from the socialist period, The Young
Generation directly confronts the question of everyday life and advocates
self-abnegating heroism as its effective overcoming.
For all of its blatant propagandist style and intent, revolutionary mass
culture calls for critical decoding rather than dismissal—as do the fleet-
ing images, logos, and narratives that bombard a consumer society. Both
socialist realism and capitalist realism, their best specimens being politi-
cal propaganda and commercial advertisements, stimulate our dormant
or unconscious longings for a transformed, more fulfilling environment.
Ultimately, they are two interchangeable forms through which an ideo-
logical system may be mounted to help society better absorb the raw im-
pact of secular modernity. Chinese culture and history after midcentury
privilege us to witness an extraordinary metamorphosis of mass culture,
with its socialist past ingeniously cannibalized by ever more voracious
consumerism. To better understand late twentieth-century China, in-
deed, we must keep in sight the utopia of the lyrical age and all of its
discontents. Therefore, my analysis of The Young Generation is crucially
placed, not least because the play dramatizes a fundamental problem that
I explore throughout the book in different contexts. In addition, the play
declaratively speaks for a period when literary production was coordi-
nated by the state to hasten the demise of solitary and sentimental readers
of novels and when art as an autonomous activity was institutionally re-
aligned to be continuous with life.
On an allegorical level, the second half of the book retraces a grad-
ual journey from the spectacle of collective euphoria to a disconsolate
moment of melancholy reflection and nostalgia as the century’s end ap-
proaches. With the collapse of utopia grimly confirmed in the aftermath
4 Chinese Modern

of the Cultural Revolution (–), we observe a resurgence of inti-

mate and personal narratives of trauma, one of which I present in great
detail through the chapter on ‘‘residual modernism.’’ The revival of a
modernist refusal to conform finds its fertile ground in an increasingly
disorienting urban landscape. Hence, a subsequent chapter on cinematic
representations of Beijing, where two separate visions of the city are
brought together to reflect on each other. This tension is further elabo-
rated against a larger historical background in the chapter on the anxiety
of everyday life, in which I argue that recent Chinese cultural history vac-
illates between two logics and two value orientations: a rural but whole-
some communal life versus an urban, disconnected, and detail-centered
existence. Such a cultural dilemma is not by itself unique, but the imagi-
native efforts to resolve it often acknowledge a specific historical condi-
tion and heritage. In the final chapter, I conclude that a postrevolutionary
disavowal of all heroic efforts is at the root of Wang Anyi’s expression
of a global melancholy in the mid-s; her contemporary tales of sor-
row, against a transnational landscape of postmodernity, openly mourn
the lost possibility of passionate devotion.
The book’s final two chapters bring us to the contemporary scenario
and compel us to rethink the implicit story that we are invited to ab-
stract from the volume as one grand narrative. This move toward his-
torical review is part of what I intend to provoke through this series of
intimate readings. Between Wu Jianren’s Sea of Regret and Wang Anyi’s
Sadness for the Pacific, for example, a similar evocation of passion calls
forth a felicitous discourse that gauges the emotional and psychic content
of modern Chinese literature. It also is uncannily befitting that theater—
the most expressive medium of the lyrical age—is now fondly recalled
by Wang Anyi’s narrator as her revolutionary father’s youthful fascina-
tion and commitment. No doubt it would be difficult to construct a uni-
form historical narrative from these chapters, but each of them arrests a
moment that will have to be reconciled with any future narration of the
twentieth century in China.
One explanatory description of the basic structural movement that
brings together these texts and ties them to me is the dialectical engage-
ment of the heroic with the quotidian, or a global utopianism with every-
day life. While utopian politics often exact a terrible human toll, everyday
life is never a complete or completely exhilarating experience; one choice
always seems to reveal an unbearable lack in the other. If the revolution-
 Introduction 5

ary commitment of modern Chinese literature expresses itself in the drive

for a grand heroic life, then the frustrated desire to reclaim an everyday
life, now either actively disremembered or helplessly out of synch with
the times, constitutes its political unconscious. As Zhang Ailing, one of
the century’s most important writers, remarked in the s when the
Sino-Japanese war was dragging on in the Chinese hinterland, there are
two types of literature: one extols what is exciting and high-flying in life,
the other affirms the stable and harmonious. ‘‘Emphasizing the active, ex-
citing parts of human life gives something of a superhuman flavor. Super-
humans are born only in certain eras, whereas the stable in human life
has an eternal quality. Even though this calm stability is often incom-
plete and is bound for destruction every now and then, it is still eternal.
It exists in all ages. It constitutes the sacredness of humanity, and we can
even say it is womanliness itself.’’ What attracted Zhang Ailing as a writer
are not heroes with extreme determinations, but ‘‘the vast majority of
people who bear the burden of our time.’’ ‘‘They have no tragic heroism,
just desolation. Tragic heroism amounts to a completion, whereas deso-
lation offers a revelation.’’ 1 This private, often internalized, experience of
revelatory desolation possesses its own beauty and grandeur, forming an
integral part of what Charles Baudelaire in the s anticipated as the
‘‘autrement héroïque,’’ ‘‘the heroism of modern life.’’ 2
Yet, according to the dialectics, the stable and constant aspect of life
is lived only when its ruination appears inevitable or complete, whereas
high-flying aspirations often grow out of impatience with norms or reali-
ties. The complete revelation that Zhang Ailing hints at, therefore, arises
when we grasp the necessary incompleteness of both the heroic and the
quotidian aspirations in life. Indeed, through an acute awareness that
her own era was disintegrating, a time when ‘‘old things are falling apart
while new ones are emerging,’’ Zhang Ailing eloquently defended her
work as unmistakably modern and yet nostalgic, and her aesthetic pursuit
as one of uneven contrasts. She also succeeded in firmly grasping the rest-

. Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang), ‘‘Ziji de wenzhang,’’ in her Liuyan (Gossip), Zhang
Ailing quanji (The complete works of Zhang Ailing), vol.  (Taipei: Huangguan,
), –. For an English translation by Wendy Larson, which I consulted, see
Kirk A. Denton, ed., Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, –
 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, ), –.
. See Baudelaire, ‘‘De l’héroïsme de la vie moderne,’’ in his Oeuvres complètes (Paris:
Gallimard, ), –.
6 Chinese Modern

less soul of a literary tradition that she participated in shaping. Hence,

the heroic and the quotidian—two complementary visions of reality that
constitute the inner dynamics of Chinese literature in the twentieth cen-
tury. These twin impulses may be a variation on what Jaroslav Průšek
once characterized as ‘‘the lyrical and the epic’’ in his pioneering studies of
modern Chinese literature,3 although the heroic and the quotidian com-
prehend more than stylistic qualities or implications. They designate dis-
tinct artistic sensibilities and competing fantasies of becoming modern,
and, more importantly, they always belie each other.
In addition to my effort to reconstruct the inner logic of these works,
a more immediate motivation behind Chinese Modern has been to render
these modern Chinese texts more accessible and therefore more relevant
by means of theoretical discourse. My continual engagement with theo-
retical writings is certainly not aimed at stripping modern Chinese litera-
ture or history of its specificity. On the contrary, my objective is to high-
light the extent to which the deeper grains and layers of a text may remain
out of focus without the intervention of a theoretical lens. Every reason
is present to make our study of modern Chinese literature part of the
critical rethinking of modernity that often begins with a theoretical inves-
tigation. In employing various interpretive frameworks and vocabularies
in my readings, I also hope to define my position as a student of mod-
ern Chinese literature who writes in English and for a broad readership.
Nonetheless, during my research, as my notes testify, I relied heavily on
scholarship published in Chinese over the past decade. It has become in-
creasingly clear that modern Chinese literary studies in the United States
will benefit greatly from interacting with its ever more vigorous counter-
part in China. Also, wherever possible, I introduce existing English trans-
lations of the central texts discussed, hoping to facilitate readers’ access
to this body of literature.
A related effort of this volume is to make comparative references to
other literary and cultural traditions (from the meaning of sickness in
modern Japanese literature to neorealism in Italian cinema, for instance).
Comparisons may not always be comprehensive or in-depth, but they
begin to suggest, I believe, a historical as well as imaginative affinity
among literatures and cultures produced in apparently different places.

. See Jaroslav Průšek, The Lyrical and the Epic: Studies of Modern Chinese Literature,
ed. Leo Ou-fan Lee (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ).
 Introduction 7

They also indicate the multiple sources and influences that combine in the
making of modern Chinese literature and culture and in our conceptual-
izations of the formative process itself. For all of these reasons, I expect
this book to speak to an audience beyond those who are strictly students
of modern China; they will find here an unprecedented study that en-
gages texts from practically every decade of the past century. After all, this
book is as much about what we understand by ‘‘the Chinese modern’’ as
it is about how we make sense of the ineluctable condition of modernity.
This page intentionally left blank
I
This page intentionally left blank
1
Trauma and Passion in The Sea of Regret:
The Ambiguous Beginnings of Modern Chinese
Literature

The momentous emergence of the modern Chinese novel was greatly ac-
celerated in  when Liang Qichao (–), in political exile in
Yokohama, started the literary journal Xin xiaoshuo (New fiction) and in
its inaugural issue published a manifesto-like article to expound on the
vital connection between ‘‘new fiction’’ and social progress and democ-
racy. Hyperbolic rhetoric aside, Liang Qichao in this essay presents a
compelling argument that the popular novel should function, and there-
fore be respected, as the most effective medium for mass education and
spiritual cultivation.1 With its unsurpassed capacity for expressing emo-
tion and depicting reality, the novel is extolled as the highest form of
literature. This rather pontifical revaluation, according to the literary his-
torian Chen Pingyuan, ushered in a structural adjustment to the native
aesthetic order and helped push novelistic narratives to the center of lit-
erary discourse and production during what is commonly referred to as
the late Qing period.2 The unprecedented social and cultural prominence

. Liang Qichao, ‘‘Lun xiaoshuo yu qunzhi zhi guanxi’’ (On the relationship be-
tween fiction and the governance of the people), in his Yinbingshi heji-wenji (Collected
writings from the ice-drinker’s studio: collected essays) (Shanghai: China Books,
), :–. For an English translation, see Kirk A. Denton, ed., Modern Chinese
Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, – (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, ), –. For a discussion of Liang Qichao’s contribution to the mod-
ernization of Chinese fiction, see E. Perry Link Jr., Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies:
Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Cities (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, ), –.
. Chen Pingyuan, Ershi shiji Zhongguo xiaoshuo shi: di yi juan – (History of
twentieth-century Chinese fiction: volume one, –) (Beijing: Peking Univer-
sity Press, ), –, esp. . Also see his Zhongguo xiaoshuo xushi moshi de zhuanbian
(The transformation of the narrative pattern in Chinese fiction) (Shanghai: Shanghai
renmin, ), –.
12 Chinese Modern

granted to the popular novel, in retrospect, prepared a necessary condi-

tion for the beginning of modern Chinese literature at large, even though
not all that was initiated would later be recognized as legitimate or rele-
vant.3
In direct response to Liang’s tireless trumpeting as both a theorist and
an enthusiastic practitioner of the new fiction, the modernization of the
Chinese novel forged ahead in the first decade of the twentieth century,
often turning fiction into an open forum for either direct social commen-
tary or political fantasy. This generic transformation was further aided
by the contemporary influx of modern Western popular fiction (at first,
mostly by means of Japanese translations) that demonstrated a new set
of techniques, such as the rendering of narrative time, plot arrangements,
and perspectival shifts.4 Late Qing fiction or xiaoshuo (at the time the
term also included drama) generated enormous creative energy because
this once lowly literary form was now explicitly related to the reality of
the modern world as well as its representation. The overwhelming vol-
ume of fiction writing from this period attests to a historical need for
novelistic narration and, more importantly, for new narratable knowl-
edge. Indeed, the numerous and ephemeral labels that accompany the
new fiction point to a continual effort to name and order an estranged
world and its hidden logic. The first five issues of Liang Qichao’s New Fic-
tion, for instance, introduced a dozen different types of xiaoshuo defined
in terms of their subject matter, ranging unevenly from historical, scien-
tific, and diplomatic to adventurous and detective.5 If a general intersec-
tion of what David Der-wei Wang calls ‘‘confused horizons’’ took place
in the late Qing conception of the novel, the seemingly unstoppable fic-
tional output also signaled the active engineering of an epistemic restruc-
turing, on the one hand, and a multifarious, often conflictual reality that
the new fiction would have to encounter and represent, on the other. The

. For a detailed study of this topic, see David Der-wei Wang, Fin-de-siècle Splen-
dor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, – (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, ).
. See Chen, The Transformation of the Narrative Pattern in Chinese Fiction, –.
. For an informative discussion of the various types of fiction that were labeled
during this period, see Chen Pingyuan, Xiaoshuo shi: lilun yu shijian (History of the
novel: theory and practice) (Beijing: Peking University Press, ), –. The Fic-
tion Grove Society listed, for example, twelve different kinds of fiction that it had
published by .
 The Sea of Regret 13

ideal reader, consequently, was bluntly instructed to acquire encyclopedic

knowledge and to respect the pedagogical seriousness of the new novel.6
However, the predominantly rationalist approach to fiction writing,
which fueled Liang Qichao’s ‘‘revolution in the realm of the novel,’’ 7 soon
led to an awkward situation. The new fiction writers were so absorbed in
popularizing new ideas and concepts that novels seemed more and more
like political or philosophical treatises. Even more problematically, such
compositions were often left unfinished either because no viable plot was
present to continue or because a central argument had been made.8 Also,
from the start, the new fiction carried strong elitist and moralizing over-
tones insofar as its readership was largely imagined to be a nation of new
citizens. While didacticism helped elevate the literary status of the novel,
inattention to entertainment value rendered the once popular form of
vernacular fiction increasingly abstruse and unpalatable to actual readers.9
Already there appeared an ideological strife between a serious proto-
literature of engagement and a literature for popular entertainment. This
divide was to yield greater and longer lasting shock waves during the May
Fourth period, when a thriving consumerist urban culture became one of
the declared adversaries of the modernist New Literature movement. In
historical hindsight, the intense enthusiasm for a new fiction at the turn
of the century may illustrate how modernity was largely anticipated to be
a mobilizing and morally uplifting mode of collective existence. The apo-

. See ‘‘Du xinxiaoshuo fa’’ (The method of reading new fiction), Xinshijie xiaoshuo-
she bao (Journal of the new world fiction society), nos.  and  (); collected in Jian
Yizhi et al., eds., Zhongguo jindai wenlun xuan (Selections from early modern Chinese
literary criticism) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue, ), –.
. This does not contradict the fact that in Liang Qichao’s theorization of the effec-
tiveness of fictional writing, emphasis also falls on the emotional impact of the novel,
although it is an efficacy ultimately serving the purpose of social administration and
democracy. For a helpful discussion of Liang Qichao’s theory of the novel in terms of
its intellectual sources, see C. T. Hsia, ‘‘Yen Fu and Liang Ch’i-ch’ao as Advocates of
New Fiction,’’ in Chinese Approaches to Literature from Confucius to Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, ed.
Adele Austin Richett (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ), –.
. This tendency was already indicated by Liang Qichao’s own  political novel
Xin Zhongguo weilai ji (The future of new China). See my discussion of the novel in
Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang
Qichao (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, ), –.
. See Chen Pingyuan’s documentation and analysis of the tension between elitist
and popular fiction in his History of Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction, –.
14 Chinese Modern

ria in the new fiction discourse reveals that its passionate endorsement
of a political modernity served to reduce, rather than reaffirm, the secu-
lar and fragmentary experience that called for novelistic representation in
the first place.
For Wu Jianren (–), a prominent late Qing novelist, one mor-
tal weakness of the rationalistic new fiction was precisely its departure
from being novels. Specifically, Wu Jianren deplored the new fiction’s in-
ability to appeal to readers both intellectually and emotionally. In his
preface to the first issue of Yueyue xiaoshuo (The all-story monthly), he cri-
tically assessed the achievements of the new fiction since Liang Qichao’s
revolutionary  essay on the symbiotic relationship between the novel
and social governance. Denouncing a facile conformity among fiction
writers, Wu Jianren vented his frustration with reading an ineffective
novel. ‘‘Of today’s hundreds of thousands of new works and new transla-
tions that are called fiction, I dare not say that there are not any that re-
flect a concern with social governance; yet I have seen more than enough
bizarre and fragmentary works, strenuous and unreadable translations.
With publications like these, I do not know what others may think after
reading them; as for myself, they all fail to move me emotionally.’’ 10 Wu
Jianren made these disparaging remarks in September , when he and
the translator Zhou Guisheng were invited to coedit the newly estab-
lished literary journal The All-Story Monthly. By then, he had already pub-
lished several novels in Liang Qichao’s New Fiction, including parts of his
widely acclaimed Ershi nian mudu zhi guai xianzhuang (Strange things
witnessed in the past twenty years). His affiliation with Liang’s journal,
however, did not entirely define his profile as a popular novelist. On the
contrary, although some of his own works may also seem ‘‘bizarre and
fragmentary,’’ Wu Jianren was never comfortable with a narrow under-
standing of new fiction as the forum for promoting modern cultural
values and practices. He may be best remembered for his contribution
to what Lu Xun once famously characterized as the ‘‘fiction of exposure’’
of the late Qing period, but the social criticism embedded in his exposé-
style fiction did not always lend itself neatly to an agenda of program-

. Wu Jianren, ‘‘Yueyue xiaoshuo xu’’ (Preface to The All-Story Monthly), Yueyue
xiaoshuo (The all-story monthly), no.  (). Collected in Wei Shaochang, ed., Wu
Jianren yanjiu ziliao (Research materials on Wu Jianren) (Shanghai: Shanghai guji,
), .
 The Sea of Regret 15

matic political reform.11 Nonetheless, Wu Jianren never disavowed the

grave social and moral responsibility on the part of a novelist. He firmly
believed that all novels, be they historical or romantic, should serve a
pedagogical purpose and lead their readers onto the proper ‘‘boundary of
morality.’’ For him, the value of a novel does not derive from its advocat-
ing the new over the old, but rather from its telling the good from the
evil. ‘‘At such a moment of moral disintegration, we all hope to find a
way to stop the general decline. We should then begin with nothing short
of the novel.’’ 12
As if to demonstrate his conviction of the novel as a means of moral
edification, Wu Jianren published in October , independently of The
All-Story Monthly that had come out a month before, a short novel titled
Henhai (The sea of regret). A carefully constructed romantic tragedy that
illustrates the novelist’s understanding of the social content of human
emotion and sentiment, the novel was an instant success. As A Ying
documents in his pioneering study of late Qing fiction, its enormous
popularity helped initiate and establish the subgenre of unfulfilled ro-
mance in modern Chinese fiction.13 The basic story line of The Sea of
Regret itself was repeatedly adapted and rewritten for the greater part of
the twentieth century, on stage and eventually in cinema.14 The sad tale
of injured lives that unfolds in the novel conveys Wu Jianren’s belief in
the healing power of votive attachment, but it also voices a deep-seated
anguish over the disintegration of the social and cultural fabric of life,
now threatened from both within and without. It is a seminal narrative
because it goes to great lengths to explore the internal journal of a dis-
placed individual, and in the process it represents the psychological con-
sequences of a traumatic encounter with the modern world.

. See Lu Xun’s discussion of Wu Jianren (Woyao), Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilüe (A

brief history of Chinese fiction) (Beijing: Beixin shuju, ), –. For an English
translation, see Lu Hsün, A Brief History of Chinese Fiction, trans. Yang Hsien-yi and
Gladys Yang (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, ), –.
. See Wu Jianren’s ‘‘Preface to The All-Story Monthly,’’ .
. See A Ying, Wan Qing xiaoshuo shi (History of late Qing fiction) (Beijing: Dong-
fang, ), –.
. According to Wei, Research Materials on Wu Jianren (–), the plot of The
Sea of Regret was remade for a theater production in , then adapted into a silent
movie in , and again for the theater in , the s, and .
16 Chinese Modern

The Writing of Passion

Contrary to the more confident, even militant, ethos of the reform-

minded new fiction, Wu Jianren’s first romance centers on the mental and
emotional impacts of violent dislodging, depicting a subjectivity formed
in fear. By means of exhorting devout passion as a stabilizing method
in the face of a familiar world being shattered, The Sea of Regret, among
other things, reclaims the writing of mythical pathos from the native lit-
erary tradition and turns it into a fundamental and yet equivocal theme
for modern fictional discourse.
The immediate motivation for Wu Jianren to write The Sea of Regret, as
Patrick Hanan suggests, was to counterbalance two contemporary texts
of considerable impact.15 The first was Joan Haste, a sentimental romance
by the then-popular English novelist H. Rider Haggard. In , an ab-
breviated rendition of the novel, in semiclassical Chinese, was serialized
in a translation journal from Suzhou and attracted much attention, espe-
cially among educated male readers, who found in Joan an ideal combina-
tion of bold love and self-sacrifice. For a while, Joan, together with Mar-
guerite of La dame aux camélias (by Alexandre Dumas fils, translated into
Chinese in ), deeply enchanted a male romantic, if curiosity-driven,
imagination and was idolized as the perfect embodiment of an affection-
ate, maternal, and universal femininity.16 In the reformist elite culture at
the time, the quiet infatuation with the sensual and emotional lives of
these two fictional characters seemed to share the same intensity as the
public and much-pronounced admiration for other heroic women fig-
ures, most notably Madame Roland of the French Revolution and Sofiya
Perovskaya, the Russian anarchist.17

. See Patrick Hanan, ‘‘Introduction,’’ The Sea of Regret: Two Turn-of-the-Century
Chinese Romantic Novels, trans. Patrick Hanan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
), –.
. For a discussion of Lin Shu’s translation of La dame aux camélias and the mas-
culine projection of a loving woman, see Rey Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity:
The Politics of Reading Between West and East (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, ), –, –.
. Liang Qichao wrote a moving biography of Madame Roland for his Xinmin
congbao (New citizen journal) in October , while the first influential biography
of Perovskaya, by a Chinese student studying in Japan, appeared under the pen name
Ren Ke in Zhejiang chao (The tide of the Zhe river) in September .
 The Sea of Regret 17

In , however, Lin Shu, the prolific translator of La dame aux camé-
lias fame, outraged the reading public by putting out a full translation
of Joan Haste, only the second half of which had been grudgingly di-
vulged in the first rendition.18 This new and complete translation caused
a righteous uproar because it revealed that Joan, whom one commenta-
tor had adored as a ‘‘celestial fairy in the realm of passion,’’ apparently
had sexual intercourse with her lover, was impregnated sans marriage,
and disgraced herself further by miscarrying. All these bodily details had
been judiciously edited out by the two initial translators. Yet the outcry
of disillusionment at the scandalous revelation had less to do with Joan’s
descending to the reality of human weaknesses and suffering than with
the realization that she behaved improperly. The same commentator who
worshipped the first immaculate Joan was compelled to bitterly denounce
the new Joan as slutty, indecent, shameless, and selfish—in short, ‘‘a fraud
in the realm of passion.’’ The difference between these two incarnations,
according to him, was that one Joan has pure passion (qing) but no lust
( yu), and the other has mere lust in the guise of passion. After banishing
the lustful Joan for good, the critic turned to inveigh against the meddle-
some Lin Shu, accusing him of posing as a novelist and of churning out
licentious translations that ‘‘bear the least benefit to society.’’ 19
Another critic, writing in the journal New Fiction, which by now had
been relocated to an increasingly metropolitan Shanghai, seized the occa-
sion to expound on the relationship between romantic fiction and the
new society. Acknowledging the formative influence of fiction, Jin Song-
cen postulated that the various genres in new fiction, best represented by
translations such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Heinu

. A common misunderstanding is that the  translation by Yang Zilin and Bao
Tianxiao contains the first half of the original. The fact is that they started paraphrasing
the text halfway through the novel, omitting unsavory details as they went along. See
Wang Xuejun, ‘‘Ye tan Jia’in xiaozhuan liangzhong yiben: dui xinban Lu Xun quanji
yitiao zhushi de buchong dingzheng’’ (Also on the two translations of Joan Haste:
amendments to a note in the new edition of The Complete Works of Lu Xun), in Lu
Xun yanjiu dongtai (Trends in Lu Xun studies), no.  (Beijing: ): –. In addi-
tion, see Chen Xizhong, ‘‘Guanyu Jia’in xiaozhuan de liangzhong yiben’’ (On the two
translations of Joan Haste), in Wenxian (Textual documents), no.  (Beijing, ):
–.
. Yin Bansheng, ‘‘Du Jia’in xiaozhuan liang yiben shu hou’’ (After reading the two
translations of Joan Haste), Youxi shijie (Playful world), no.  (); collected in Jian
Yizhi et al., eds., Selections From Early Modern Chinese Literary Criticism, –.
18 Chinese Modern

yutian lu) and Jules Verne’s Deux ans de vacances (Shiwu xiao haojie)
and Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Bashi ri huanyou ji), would
have a positive impact on society because they erected new role models.
‘‘Therefore I am pleased to read today’s new fiction, but I am terrified
to read today’s romantic fiction.’’ The popular romances that caused his
grave concern were none other than La dame aux camélias and Joan Haste,
reckless foreign novels that, in his view, would only mislead the young
and impressionable. The customs and mores suggested by these tales,
he warned, would aid and abet rampant Europeanization and result in
people abandoning their jobs and studies to frequent dance halls. In the
end, the fearful society that became imaginable in light of romantic fic-
tion meant not only the loss of a valuable national heritage, but, more
disturbingly, a veritable disarray in social order and boundaries.20
Also in this essay, Jin Songcen found it necessary to generalize about
romantic passion (qing) as part of human nature and a universal prin-
ciple. The prevalence of qing explains why the expression of love and
sentiment always occupies a key position in literature, be it Western or
Eastern. ‘‘Given the difference and lack of communication between these
two societies, it is the literary people’s unavoidable duty to take advan-
tage of the power of fiction to bring them together, employing passion as
the common source.’’ Since some novelists had failed to fulfill their obli-
gation, and, worse, because romantic fiction now threatened the future of
the country, the critic saw no option but to deny and demonize passion
altogether. Evoking a central myth of Chinese culture, Jin Songcen ar-
gued that he would sooner see the heaven of passion remain broken, and
any passionate awakenings be smothered with the help of Nüwa’s stone,
than witness what was bound to degenerate into unbridled carnality.
A fantastic figure in creation mythology, the goddess Nüwa is believed
first to have given life to men and women in the world. Then, in the wake
of a fierce agon between the gods of water and fire, which caused the
vault of heaven to collapse, she, as a caring mother, mended the broken
sky with colorful stones that she painstakingly melted and fused.21 In the

. Jin Songcen (Jin Tianyu), ‘‘Lun xieqing xiaoshuo yu xin shehui zhi guanxi’’ (On
the relationship between romantic fiction and new society), in New Fiction, no. 
(); collected in Jian Yizhi et al., eds., Selections From Early Modern Chinese Literary
Criticism, –.
. For a modern narration of Nüwa’s great deeds and identification of textual
 The Sea of Regret 19

folkloric tradition, Nüwa is usually associated with the themes of mother-

ing, fertility, and healing,22 but also with the spirit of dedication, even
romantic devotion, in a despairing situation. Since the late imperial age,
Nüwa has functioned persistently as a symbol of extraordinary dedica-
tion and endeavor, in no small part because of the wide-reaching impact
of Shitou ji (The story of the stone; also known as Honglou meng [Dream
of the red chamber]), particularly when Nüwa was paired with another
mythical feminine spirit, the bird Jingwei.23 Drowned in the eastern sea,
the young daughter of the god of fire came back to life as a bird named
Jingwei and was determined to fill up the sea with stones and twigs
that she carried from the western mountain. In their Sisyphean efforts to
mend heaven and fill up the sea, Nüwa the Ur-mother and Jingwei the
faithful daughter are believed to have committed themselves to a passion
that is at odds with reality. When Jin Songcen proposed to disrupt the
heaven of passion so as to prevent men and women from engaging in
dangerous free interaction, he was pointedly reversing the popular myth
and viewing romantic passion as an ominous threat. It is significant that
his endorsement of new fiction went hand in hand with his radical de-
nunciation of new romances, for the unconscious anxiety preoccupying
an elite-reformist social discourse at the time was precisely how to regu-
late the antihierarchical tendencies of sentiment and emotional exchange
that would conceivably break loose when the dynastic order was done
away with. Liang Qichao’s initial exposition on the positive relationship
between fiction and social governance, from this perspective, had hap-

sources, see Yuan Ke, Zhongguo gudai shenhua (Ancient Chinese myths) (Shanghai:
Commercial Press, ), –.
. For a review of these dimensions of the Nüwa myth, see Jing Wang, The Story
of Stone: Intertextuality, Ancient Chinese Stone Lore, and the Stone Symbolism in ‘‘Dream
of the Red Chamber,’’ ‘‘Water Margin,’’ and ‘‘The Journey to the West’’ (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, ), –.
. Here is how the narrator in The Story of the Stone describes the heroic effort of
Nüwa at mending a broken heaven: ‘‘Long ago, when the goddess Nüwa was repair-
ing the sky, she melted down a great quantity of rock and, on the Incredible Crags
of the Great Fable Mountains, moulded the amalgam into thirty-six thousand, five
hundred and one large building blocks, each measuring seventy-two feet by a thou-
sand and forty-one feet square.’’ Translation by David Hawkes, The Story of the Stone:
A Chinese Novel by Cao Xueqin in Five Volumes (London: Penguin, ), ‘‘The Golden
Days,’’ :. Also see Hanan, ‘‘Stones in the Sea,’’ in The Sea of Regret, – n..
20 Chinese Modern

pily envisioned literature as an unproblematic technology for advancing

modernity. A blind spot in this agitating vision had been the messy and
ambiguous status of romantic sentiment and longing, which Liang con-
veniently dismissed as a harmful legacy of traditional literature.
Not surprisingly, Jin Songcen’s dismay with the romantic rendering of
the Nüwa myth also found its explicit literary expression in at least two
novels belonging to the contemporary political new fiction. Haitian du-
xiaozi’s Nüwa shi (The Nüwa stone, –) and Qiu Jin’s Jingwei shi
(The stones of Jingwei, , in the form of an incomplete tanci script)
both advocate women’s emancipation and revolutionary action, and in
both narratives the mythological figures offer an edifying parallel to the
dedication of the heroines to their respective political causes.24 Yet while
Nüwa and Jingwei are incorporated here as symbols of heroic persever-
ance in these texts, they more often are called upon to serve as accepted
images of an individual’s romantic devotion or, even, destiny. A number
of novels written during this period evoke the myth of either Nüwa or
Jingwei to highlight this mythical reinscription.25
Both the political and romantic appropriations of the mythical figure
seek to elevate a human course of events and action. The mythical as-
sociation consecrates an extraordinary dedication of the will, or of self-
sacrifice, as, in and of itself, an admirable and therefore virtuous act. Once
mythologized, even neurotic obsession has the potential of turning into
a virtue, although the pathological origins of such a virtuous dedication
are swiftly forgotten or repressed. The intent and structure of hagio-
graphical narratives determine that a traumatic condition be overcome
and turned into the source of sainthood rather than insanity or neuro-
sis. For this reason, The Sea of Regret is all the more intriguing a literary

. Catherine Gipoulon’s French translation of Qiu Jin’s text in Pierre de l’oiseau
Jingwei: Qiu Jin, femme et révolutionnaire en Chine au XIXe siècle (Paris: des femmes,
) offers a contextualizing study, especially of the choice of tanci as the preferred
medium (–).
. For example, Zou Tao (Sixiang jiuwei)’s Haishang chentian ying (Shadow of the
dusty sky in Shanghai, ) closely imitates Dream of the Red Chamber and evokes
both Nüwa and Jingwei. Other titles include Fei Min’s Hen hai hua (Flowers in the
sea of regret, ), Xin Meizi’s Jingqin tianhai ji (Story of Jingwei filling the sea,
), Wahun’s Butian shi (Stones for mending the sky, ), and Wanshi’s Qingtian
hen (Regret of the passionate sky, ). Several popular pen names used by authors,
such as ‘‘Wanshi’’ (Tough stone), ‘‘Wahun’’ (Spirit of Nüwa), and ‘‘Lian shi’’ (Welding
stone), also refer to the stone myth.
 The Sea of Regret 21

text because it harbors as intensely a hagiographical intention as it does

a pathographical narrative. Between the book’s ideological statement or
message and its narrative content, a persistent tension develops, revealing
an incongruity that bespeaks the impossible task of making full sense of
an overwhelming experience. This incongruity between hagiography and
pathography is unconsciously explored in the novel and thereby endows
the text with a deep ambivalence that is symptomatic of the Chinese ex-
perience of modernity. The same structural ambiguity can be found in
two other, lesser texts that immediately preceded Wu Jianren’s story.

Toward a Tragic Passion

The text that Patrick Hanan believes to have directly provoked Wu Jian-
ren into writing The Sea of Regret was a slim volume, published in May
 by a certain Fu Lin under the suggestive title of Qin hai shi (Bird,
sea, stone; translated as Stones in the Sea by Hanan).26 The titular refer-
ence of this so far obscure novel is obviously to the Jingwei myth; its sec-
ond chapter also refers to Nüwa in describing a happier moment: ‘‘The
Heaven of Passion is repaired, as predestined lovers meet far from home’’
(; ).
Not much has been learned about the novel’s author, Fu Lin, although
the significance of his first-person narrative is widely recognized, even to
the extent of being recommended as ‘‘the first true ‘I-novel’ in Chinese lit-
erature, a few years before the genre came into vogue in Japan.’’ 27 Indeed,
the nostalgic tone and confessional structure of the novel clearly emit all
the generic signs of an intensely personal narration. Supposedly speak-
ing from his deathbed, the mortally ill hero, Qin Ruhua, tells of his ulti-
mately unfulfilled romance, recollecting, not without pride, his youthful

. Hanan also determines that the first edition of Stones in the Sea came out in May
, a few months before Wu Jianren’s Sea of Regret. See his ‘‘Introduction,’’ The Sea of
Regret, . The Chinese edition used here comes from Qing bian (Passion transformed)
(Shanghai: China Eastern Normal University Press, ), a volume in the recent an-
thology of modern Chinese romantic fiction. In the following discussion, page refer-
ences for Stones in the Sea and The Sea of Regret are included in the text, with the first
page number referring to the Chinese edition of Passion Transformed and the second
to Hanan’s translation.
. Hanan, ‘‘Introduction,’’ The Sea of Regret, .
22 Chinese Modern

ingenuity at becoming intimate with his first and only love. Of the same
age and in love since they were ten, the ‘‘predestined lovers’’ meet again
in Beijing, where their two families happen to share the same residential
compound. After much scheming and hand-wringing, including timely
sickness, they get their fathers to agree to a marriage, although Ruhua’s
generally inattentive father stipulates that the wedding ceremony not be
held until the groom turns sixteen.
What causes this almost frivolous love story to take a tragic turn is
the violent intrusion of historical processes. Just when all that the pre-
cocious Ruhua needs is some patience waiting for his sixteenth birthday,
despite the prevailing wisdom of the time that recommended twenty as
the earliest marriageable age for men,28 the turbulent Boxer movement
spreads to Beijing, and, in the face of sweeping turmoil, the two close
families go their separate ways. A specific reference to calendrical time is
offered at this juncture, although the disturbing events in  that lead
to the ransacking and occupation of Beijing by a multinational army are
described in an oblique, hearsay fashion. Yet the terror of a misguided re-
bellion is concrete enough for Ruhua’s father, who deems it prudent to
move the family south. After a tearful farewell with Aren his betrothed,
whose father sees little threat in the virulently antiforeign and pro-Qing
Boxers, Ruhua follows his own father and flees the capital; no sooner do
they reach Shanghai than Ruhua spots a newspaper headline about the
fall of Beijing. Tormented by an absence of news about Aren stranded in
the north, Ruhua becomes depressed and withers away. When he finally
sees her again, in a dingy Shanghai inn, Aren, accompanied only by her
distraught mother, is dying. Her health is badly damaged when she swal-
lows three drams of opium so as to avoid being sold into prostitution.
Upon seeing Ruhua, she dutifully reports that she is still a virgin and,
after voicing the belief that ‘‘so long as my dedicated spirit [ jingcheng] re-

. In a mock petition to the Qing court, an anonymous essayist at the time, citing
Herbert Spencer and listing all of the social problems caused by hormonal urges, ar-
gued that it was inhuman to require a young man to reach twenty-four before he
married. The proposed adjustments, however, were still age twenty for men and seven-
teen for women. See ‘‘Xini qingnian shang zhengfu qing chi jin zaohun shu’’ (A mock
petition by a youth to the government to demand a relaxation of the ban on early
marriage), collected in Biji xiaoshuo daguan: wubian (Grand exhibit of notation book
fiction: collection five) (Taipei: Xinxing shuju, ), –.
 The Sea of Regret 23

mains intact, there’s a chance we may meet in the next life,’’ she chokes
and expires (; ).
Sensing that he may soon follow Aren to the afterworld, Ruhua con-
cludes that the lack of a free marriage system has done them in. The con-
clusion of the narrative, usually reserved for a moralizing message, turns
into a bitter attack on the Confucian tradition, in particular its outmoded
marriage customs.

However, I blame neither Father nor the Boxer bandits for my ruin. In-
stead I hold Mencius responsible. But for his stale formula ‘‘by the par-
ents’ command and through the good offices of a go-between,’’ I would
long since have joined Aren in a free marriage. No matter how much tur-
moil the Boxers caused, she and I would still have been able to travel south
together. . . . I hope above all else that one day this China of ours will
change its marriage system and grant people their freedom, before the City
of Wrongful Death claims countless more millions of aggrieved and an-
guished souls. That would be a beneficence of unimaginable, incalculable
proportions. (; )

Such an antitraditional protest is not entirely unexpected at this moment,

for the narrator from the outset accuses the insensitive Mencius (; –
), but his plea for a liberal marriage system undercuts itself when he
refuses to link the cause of his demise to any specific historical agents. In
his insistence that even war and social upheaval will not derail true love
or personal happiness, there surfaces a juvenile willingness and need to
believe in a given cause. Ruhua’s resolution to advocate personal freedom
and individual choice reveals its ideological nature since his experience
obviously exceeds his rationalization or comprehension. Experience in
excess of discursive capacity, conversely, indicates a general crisis and frag-
mentation. A degree of neurosis becomes discernible when the narrator
steadfastly attaches himself to one piece of reality and invests in it all his
psychic energy, resulting in what Freud describes as a neurotic ignoring
of reality or a flight from it.29 This neurotic obsession entails certain nar-
rative content, even emotional appeal, but the subsequent claim to social

. For Freud’s discussion of neurosis and its difference from psychosis, see ‘‘The
Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis,’’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press,
), :–.
24 Chinese Modern

pertinence or even political protest appears markedly delusional. As one

critic remarks, this eager transference of the causes for personal unhappi-
ness onto some inimical but abstract external political force was common
in late Qing fiction.30
The metaphysical force that justifies such an obsessional narrative, Fu
Lin writes in a brief preface, is the mythical ‘‘passion’’ (qing) with which
the universe is created and held together as a whole. He posits ‘‘pas-
sion’’ as a more comprehensive concept than ‘‘benevolence,’’ which the
late Qing philosopher Tan Sitong set forth as the ultimate meaning of
nature as well as of the human world.31 Fu Lin goes on to argue that
although amorous attraction between the sexes is but a minor expression
of such a cosmic principle, yet, since humans are the supreme beings in
the universe, an obsession with passion, even to the extent of disregarding
life and death, ultimately agrees with the true purpose of creation. The
task of a good romance writer, therefore, is to closely depict all the emo-
tional excitement caused by love in order to reveal the creator’s secrets.
Supported by this belief, Fu Lin recommends his own ‘‘romantic fiction’’
( yanqing xiaoshuo) to all those endowed with passion. In keeping with
the proto-political sentiments of his times, he goes on to urge his readers
to develop a love for their race and country, which will supposedly be a
logical extension and fulfillment of their instinctual sexual yearnings (;
cf. ).
Although the emphasis differs, in a concise preface to The Sea of Re-
gret, Wu Jianren proposes the same qing as the fundamental principle
that his novel is to illustrate. This much-discussed preface reflects Wu
Jianren’s deep interest in the human capacity for passion, and it lays the
thematic foundation for his own tales of passion as well as subsequent
popular romantic novels of the early Republican era.32 As A Ying once

. See Yuan Jin, Yuanyang hudie pai (The mandarin duck and butterfly school)
(Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, ), .
. For a bilingual text of Tan Sitong’s philosophical treatise with an extensive back-
ground introduction, see Chan Sin-wai, An Exposition of Benevolence: The Jen-hsüeh of
T’an Ssu-t’ung (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, ).
. In Wu Jianren’s  novel Jie yu hui (Ashes after the catastrophe), the narra-
tor arranges for the virtuous widow, Zhu Wanzhen, to be rescued so as to hear an old
nun expound on the difference between passion, lust, and desire. It is an offense to
the all-embracing Buddha, according to the philosophical nun, to even claim that one
has seen through passion, for that would only indicate a confusion of sexual desire
with true passion. See Ashes After the Catastrophe, collected in Passion Transformed, .
 The Sea of Regret 25

commented, the philosophical foundation of Wu Jianren’s fictional world

was firmly laid in this novel.33 Apparently fraught with ambiguity and
couched entirely in traditional metaphysical concepts, Wu Jianren’s dis-
course of passion is self-consciously concerned with maintaining social
order and cultural continuity.34 Passion, according to the authorial voice,
‘‘is something that we possess from birth, well before we know the mean-
ing of the human world.’’ This innate quality of passion or emotional
attachment, moreover, ‘‘can be applied to any sphere of life, the only dif-
ference being in the manner of its application.’’ In fact, the four cardinal
virtues (loyalty, piety, parental love, and friendship) ‘‘all derive from pas-
sion’’ (; ). To convince the reader that much thinking went into the
writing of the story, Wu Jianren reaffirms the hierarchical order of pas-
sions: the virtuous, the infatuated, and the lecherous. While the virtuous
passion affirms the socially legitimate and foundational human relations,
lechery is a self-indulgent abuse of one’s emotion. As if anticipating accu-
sations that the passion he promotes through the central character Dihua
borders on ‘‘infatuation’’ or even ‘‘lechery,’’ Wu Jianren singles out the
case of chaste widows, arguing that ‘‘the occasions on which the widows
remained unmoved were precisely those on which their passion was at its
height’’ (; –). He stops short of naming which passion his romantic
tale will exemplify, but he promises that it is definitely not about lechery
or obsession.

Here the nun repeats the same understanding of passion as the foundation of social re-
lations between father and son, husband and wife, emperor and subject. Wu Jianren’s
unfinished last novel, Qing bian (Passion transformed), also examines the force of pas-
sion in a changing and haphazard world. For a discussion of this text in terms of Wu
Jianren’s development as a novelist, see Mugio Tomie, ‘‘Go Kenjin no ‘Kinjunen no
kaigenjo’ to ‘Johen’ ni tsuite’’ (On Wu Jianren’s ‘Strange things in the past ten years’
and ‘Passion transformed’), in Shinmatsu shoseitsu kenkyu (Late Qing fiction studies),
no.  (): –.
. A Ying, Xiaoshuo santan (The third collection of essays on fiction) (Shanghai:
Shanghai guji, ), .
. For a commentary on, and also an example of, the confusion that Wu Jianren’s
discourse of passion may cause, see Mao Zonggang, ‘‘Lun Wu Jianren de wenxue xie-
qing yishi’’ (On Wu Jianren’s literary awareness of describing passion), Ming Qing
xiaoshuo yanjiu (Ming and Qing fiction studies), no.  (Nanchang: ): –. See
also Zhao Xiaoxuan, ‘‘Wu Jianren ‘Xieqing xiaoshuo’ de qinglun yu daodeguan’’ (On
the discourse of passion and morality in Wu Jianren’s ‘‘romantic fiction’’), Zhongwai
wenxue (Chung-wai literary monthly) . (Taipei: ): –.
26 Chinese Modern

Both Wu Jianren’s and Fu Lin’s prefaces subscribe to the long philo-

sophical tradition of ‘‘passionism’’ (qing jiao) that during the late Ming
period rose to contest and complement a fully institutionalized Confu-
cian code of social behavior and propriety. The late Ming fiction writer
Feng Menglong went so far as to claim that all of the Confucian classics
are based on a broad ‘‘passionism.’’ 35 (Incidentally, in response to strong
demand, a modern illustrated lithographic edition of Feng Menglong’s
Qingshi leilüe [A classified history of passion] was reissued by the Self-
Strengthening Press in .) True to the ethos of a period of ‘‘radical
subjectivity,’’ as Wai-yee Li characterizes the late Ming intellectual and
literary life, Feng Menglong ‘‘celebrates the expansiveness and transfor-
mative power of ch’ing [qing] and at the same time insists that it must be
reintegrated into schemes of order.’’ 36 Historically, from the seventeenth
century on, the development and growing popularity of vernacular fic-
tion and drama are largely enabled by an aesthetic discourse on passion
that affirms private sentiments (as either ‘‘authentic’’ or ‘‘natural’’), on
the one hand, and strives to legitimate new forms of social contact and
intercourse on the other. The intensity of passion that vernacular fiction
explores may index the extent to which libidinal energy is meticulously
regulated by civilizational strictures or, simply, repressed. Yet even if it is
made a fully ontological force, passion in this cultural context does not
automatically translate into the modern Western notion of romantic love
between individual subjects. Conflicts between the individual and society
are not yet perceived as irresolvable, and passion in the final analysis func-
tions as a moral imperative that secures its legitimacy through social ac-
ceptance and universal harmony. As a result, traditional romances always
end on a comic note with true lovers happily united, either in this world

. See both You Zilong (Feng Menglong), ‘‘Qingshi xu’’ (Preface to A history of
passion) and Zhanzhan waishi (Feng Menglong), ‘‘Xu’’ (Preface), in Feng Menglong,
Qingshi leilüe (A classified history of passion), ed. Zou Xuemin (Changsha: Yuelu shu-
she, ), –. For a recent historical study of the concept of qing (passion), see
Martin W. Huang, ‘‘Sentiments of Desire: Thoughts on the Cult of Qing in Ming-
Qing Literature,’’ Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews  (December ): –
.
. Wai-yee Li, Enchantment and Disenchantment: Love and Illusion in Chinese Litera-
ture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ), . See – for a discussion
of Feng Menglong’s thinking on qing. For an English translation of Feng Menglong,
see Hua-yuan Li Mowry, Chinese Love Stories from the ‘‘Ch’ing-shih’’ (Hamden, Conn.:
Archon Books, ).
 The Sea of Regret 27

or through fantasy, and such emplotment only testifies to the fundamen-

tal rationality of the larger universe.
This general avoidance of tragedy as irresolvable conflict, with the
notable exception of Dream of the Red Chamber, apparently did not be-
come a significant intellectual problem until the imminent collapse of
the imperial tradition, which coincided with the arrival of the twentieth
century. In , Wang Guowei, inspired by a Schopenhauerian under-
standing of the human will as self-expression, published an essay that sys-
tematically discussed the tragic implications of perpetual desire and the
impossibility of its full gratification. For Wang Guowei the imaginative
critic, the function of literature, exemplified nowhere else but in Dream
of the Red Chamber, is to reveal this tragic condition as an existential con-
stant and to provide a way of deliverance from it.37
Soon after Wang Guowei’s pioneering study, another critic also would
recommend, drawing on a different intellectual source, tragedy as the
preferred and more effective dramatic form for modern times. In an arti-
cle published in Liang Qichao’s influential Xinmin congbao (New citizen
journal), Jiang Guanyun first relayed the contemporary Japanese criticism
of the Chinese theater and then lamented the absence of tragedy in the
native tradition. Only a tragedy given to portraying an indomitable ‘‘con-
centration of sincerity’’ ( jingcheng) will be able to ‘‘inspire far-reaching
ideals and cultivate a deep and reflective mind,’’ whereas a crowd-pleasing
comedy achieves nothing but the encouragement of licentious thoughts.
The most respected plays by Shakespeare, observed the critic, are all trag-
edies. ‘‘If there are many tragedies in the theater, society will benefit
from them and happiness will reign; if there are many comedies, society
will have a negative influence and sadness will result therefrom.’’ 38 Obvi-
ously, the critic wished to promote tragedy not because it might sug-
gest the vulnerability or darkness of the human world, but because it
would better serve the social purpose of encouraging the audience to
emulate greatness. Tragedy became part of the reformist agenda, and as

. Wang Guowei, Honglou meng pinglun (Commentary on Dream of the Red Cham-
ber), collected in Wang Guowei xiansheng sanzhong (Three works by Wang Guowei)
(Taipei: Guomin, ), –. For a comprehensive evaluation of this groundbreaking
essay and its limits, see Yeh Chia-ying, Wang Guowei ji qi wenxue piping (Wang Guowei
and his literary criticism) (Hong Kong: China Books, ), –.
. Guanyun (Jiang Guanyun), ‘‘Zhongguo zhi yanju jie’’ (On the Chinese theater),
Xinmin congbao (The new citizen journal), no.  (): –.
28 Chinese Modern

serious drama it purportedly provided a more effective forum than popu-

lar entertainment for nation-building through didacticism. The promo-
tion of tragedy, from a historian’s viewpoint, constituted a crucial aspect
of the modernizing of literary discourse during the late Qing, interjecting
significant shifts in literary and aesthetic conceptions.39
What is intriguing and historically revelatory about Fu Lin’s Stones in
the Sea, therefore, is that it contains a tragic plot within an essentially
comic notion of passion. The two young lovers obtain no happy ending
in this world, but their tragic fate is nothing short of a testimonial of
their deep passion for and dedication to each other. In this sense, Fu Lin’s
romantic novel accepts a new genre formula in which the comic justifica-
tions of passion are located outside or in spite of the characters’ tragic fate
and will have to be internalized as a spiritual compensation. This tragi-
comedy of passion, in which the experiential dimension is increasingly
separated from the rational or the ideational, will reach an impasse in The
Sea of Regret; it has its precedent perhaps in a  short story by Ping-
deng ge (Di Baoxian), a text that foreshadows both romantic novels by
Fu Lin and Wu Jianren insofar as the threat of colonialism and a national-
ist anxiety over the integrity of indigenous culture are brought together
in a tragic love story.
The short story, simply titled ‘‘Tang sheng’’ (‘‘Tang Sheng’’ or ‘‘A youth
named Tang’’), self-consciously alludes back to Pu Songling’s classic Liao-
zhai zhiyi (Records of the strange from the Liaozhai studio) of the seven-
teenth century by labeling itself as a tale from the ‘‘new Liaozhai Studio.’’
More significantly, it is the first story with which the journal New Fic-
tion, in its seventh issue, introduced the subgenre of ‘‘romantic fiction’’
(xieqing xiaoshuo).40 Romance evidently still fell largely into the category
of the strange and extraordinary. Composed in classical Chinese, ‘‘Tang
Sheng’’ also tells of the foiled romance of a young couple in the wake
of the Boxer movement of , except that the location is now set in
the United States, and the love story has an international and anticolo-
nial intricacy. The son of a wealthy Chinese merchant based in San Fran-
cisco, teenage Tang Sheng is in love with a beautiful American girl, Irene
(Yiniang), daughter of a businessman from Chicago. Of the same age,

. See Huang Lin, Jindai wenxue piping shi (History of modern literary criticism)
(Shanghai: Shanghai guji, ), –, –.
. ‘‘Tang sheng,’’ New Fiction, no.  (): –.
 The Sea of Regret 29

they grow up as siblings and in such intimacy that they often forget that
one is from the Old Empire and the other from the New World. When
the Boxer rebellion breaks out and American public opinion turns against
a reportedly xenophobic China, the boy reacts strongly and shuts him-
self off from all of his friends, including Irene, who fails to cheer him up
even by forecasting a Chinese renaissance after the current humiliation.
Deeply disturbed, Irene protests that he should not transfer his resent-
ment of America to her, since her heart already belongs to him and so
will her body soon. In short, she considers herself Chinese. The proud
boy, however, argues that, according to ancient teachings, the inequality
in their situations makes them unlikely spouses; further, his cruelty in
rejecting her only shows his great compassion because he is saving her
from future insults and derision. Sensing the boy’s stubbornness, the girl
stumbles out and kills herself by filling her room with gas, leaving behind
two suicide notes. In the note to her father, Irene blames Americans for
her death and requests that all of her belongings be left to the boy. In
the other note, for Tang Sheng who ‘‘knows and loves her,’’ she deplores
that heaven did not make her a Chinese or him an American. She also ex-
presses the wish that her soul will not perish and that they will meet again
in paradise. Upon seeing the note, Tang Sheng nearly dies of sadness and
decides to contribute the money left by Irene to a Chinese grade school
in San Francisco as a way of immortalizing her love for China.
In the lengthy authorial commentary, written in the same fashion as the
acknowledged model of the Historian of the Strange, who in turn had
followed in the footsteps of the Feng Menglong of A Classified History of
Passion,41 Di Baoxian first explains that the story was originally reported
in a Chinese-language newspaper in San Francisco. The thrust of the
commentary, however, comes from his summarizing a much longer essay
that, put forward by another commentator, commends Tang Sheng for
rejecting Irene in the interest of defending his nation and preserving his
race. The original essayist suggested that marriage had been the method
by which the white race had appropriated the property rights to Hawaii
and New Zealand, where native women were often eager to marry white

. For a study of the intertextual constitution of Pu Songling’s Historian of the

Strange, see Judith T. Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Clas-
sical Tale (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, ), chap. , –; also see
Wai-yee Li, Enchantment and Disenchantment, chap. , –.
30 Chinese Modern

men. ‘‘Such calamity will strike wherever no firm racial boundary exists.
How terrible! How terrible!’’ 42 Racial discourse and nationalistic senti-
ments incited by the story led the author to denounce the new tendency
to fawn on foreigners in the wake of the Boxer fiasco. Reaffirmed as the
hero of the story, Tang Sheng also becomes a model for emulation, and
consequently there seems to be hardly anything tragic about either the
young boy’s emotional agony or, especially, Irene’s death.
Both this short text and Fu Lin’s first-person narrative rely on the same
historical event as a major narrative turning point. The Boxer rebellion,
as an incomprehensible eruption of external history, botches a budding
romantic love only to reveal a larger meaning and the determinations of
human emotions. The Sea of Regret by Wu Jianren, too, employs the same
narrative device, but the traumatic experience of history is more closely
integrated into the plot,43 and the tragic sense of human passion becomes
more problematic and less translatable into a comic rationality.

From Trauma to Neurosis

In her pioneering study of the plot structure in late Qing fiction, Milena
Doleželová-Velingerová underscores the pivotal contribution that Wu
Jianren makes to the development of the modern novel through The Sea
of Regret, probably the most sophisticated ‘‘unitary plot novel’’ of its
time. ‘‘Its typological peculiarity is already apparent in a purely external
feature: the novel is much shorter than the novels with the string-plot
or the novels with the cyclical plot, and the number of acting charac-
ters is reduced drastically.’’ In addition, its ‘‘concentration on the intimate
theme of love (the main erotic motif being coupled with that of parental
love and filial piety) is a major feature pointing towards the development
of the psychological novel.’’ What further propels an inward turn in the
narrative is the recognized frailty of the individual, now ‘‘placed against
the elemental forces of history.’’ In the end, Doleželová-Velingerová com-
ments, ‘‘the individual suffers a complete defeat from the evil force of

. ‘‘Tang sheng,’’ New Fiction, no.  (): .

. It is therefore for a good reason that A Ying included The Sea of Regret in his
Gengzi shibian wenxue ji (Anthology of literature about the  incident) (Beijing:
Zhonghua shuju, ), :–.
 The Sea of Regret 31

social circumstances, a tragic theme which foreshadows many stories of

modern Chinese literature.’’ 44
The modernity of The Sea of Regret, therefore, derives not merely from
its more unitary plot, or from its attention to the hapless individual vis-
à-vis historical violence, but also from the psychological responses and
processes it probes. As Michael Egan demonstrates, a ‘‘psychological real-
ism’’ in the novel makes it a modern text that parallels similar develop-
ments in the Western novel. Of the two central characters, the focus of
such psychological portrayal rests on Dihua the heroine, ‘‘whose depic-
tion is more modern in that it is oriented toward her state of mind, and
the emotional turmoil she endures in the course of the novel.’’ The spe-
cific techniques for representing her inner life include ‘‘frequent interior
monologues, (and) the weaving into the text of rhetorical addresses and
questions, and subjective semantics which point to Dihua.’’ 45 Her fiancé,
Bohe, by contrast, is presented in a more traditional light because it is
often his action rather than emotion, and his exterior rather than interior,
that define his part in the plot and document the adverse effects of his-
tory.
The plot of The Sea of Regret indeed bears striking resemblances to Fu
Lin’s Stones in the Sea, but it is distinct from its immediate predecessor in
numerous significant, even radical, ways. First of all, Wu Jianren’s story
contains a carefully constructed symmetry that helps the narrator drive
home the feeling of regret as an inescapable condition. As in the first
story, The Sea of Regret also begins with a government official’s family
in Beijing, with its two sons. The older brother, who has no function in
Stones in the Sea, is now the central character in the sense that the tragic
fate befalling him and his fiancée becomes the primary plot; the younger
brother, who is the first-person narrator in the earlier story, now plays a
secondary but complementary role. In a brothel in Shanghai, Zhong’ai
the younger brother, steadfast and morally incorruptible, will eventu-
ally encounter his childhood sweetheart and fiancée Juanjuan, who ap-
parently succumbs to the unspeakable degradation from which Aren in

. Milena Doleželová-Velingerová, ‘‘Typology of Plot Structures in Late Qing

Novels,’’ in The Chinese Novel at the Turn of the Century, ed. Milena Doleželová-Velin-
gerová (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, ), –.
. Michael Egan, ‘‘Characterization in Sea of Woe,’’ in The Chinese Novel at the Turn
of the Century, ed. Doleželová-Velingerová, –. See  and  for the quotations.
32 Chinese Modern

Stones in the Sea escapes by poisoning herself. Zhong’ai’s resolute deci-

sion to become a hermit in the end mirrors the pious devotion of Dihua,
his brother Bohe’s fiancée, who shaves her head and retires into a nun-
nery after Bohe dies an opium addict. Obviously, the first novel is more
than altered or rewritten by Wu Jianren; it is structurally absorbed into
the second narrative, and the grief and disconsolation that sickens the
first-person male narrator in Stones in the Sea now inflicts itself evenly on
Dihua the virtuous widow and Zhong’ai the illustrious husband-to-be.
A second major structural difference between these two novels lies in
their separate narrative voices. While the profile of the first-person narra-
tor in Stones in the Sea befits that of a clever and profusely sentimental, if
ultimately narcissistic, teenager, the omniscient narrator of The Sea of Re-
gret tells the story in a concise, controlled, and descriptive style, greatly
elevating the prose of vernacular fiction. Wu Jianren’s remarkable success
in representing the inner life of the central character, Dihua, was readily
recognized by his contemporaries. The critic Yin Bansheng, who had de-
plored the scandalous new translation of Joan Haste, hailed the author as
having ‘‘a magic hand at description,’’ whose ‘‘literary sensitivity’’ (wen-
qing) could be as fluid and penetrating as glittering mercury poured over
the ground.46 For essentially the same reasons, A Ying dismissed Stones
in the Sea, another narrative set against the  Boxer uprising, as drasti-
cally inferior to Wu Jianren’s The Sea of Regret.47
In fact, more convincingly than Fu Lin’s confessional ‘‘I-novel,’’ The Sea
of Regret establishes the psychic experience of anxiety and fear as a viable
and legitimate subject for literary representation. While both narratives
aim at expounding a redemptive attachment or passion (qing), Wu Jian-
ren’s symmetrical tale of foiled romances links emotional turmoil to an
encounter with danger, shock, and terror. Furthermore, his psychological
realism serves not so much a cognitive function (in the sense of exposing
a certain condition as starkly ‘‘real’’) as a social purpose by exalting human
will and determination at a moment of vast disarray and crisis. This moral
concern determines the paradigmatic significance of The Sea of Regret in
that the representability of the individual psyche is now intimately related
to historical trauma.

. Yin Bansheng, ‘‘Xiaoshuo xianping’’ (Random comments on fiction), originally

in Youxi shijie (Playful world), , collected in Wei Shaochang, Research Materials on
Wu Jianren, –.
. See A Ying, ed., Anthology of Literature About the  Incident, :–.
 The Sea of Regret 33

In this light, two more points of difference between this pair of roman-
tic novels become revealing: the effect of a traumatic event and the sym-
bolism of gender roles. In Fu Lin’s Stones in the Sea, the Boxer movement
erupts and cuts short the blissful intimacy of a teenage couple. This intru-
sion of a fearful and impersonal reality takes place only in the last third of
the narrative, at a moment when the assiduous youth finally succeeds in
securing family acceptance of his amorous longing. Yet, even to the end,
he remains sheltered from any immediate danger. Rather, it is the histori-
cal movement as dislodging that inflicts a devastating loss from which
the boy will never recover. His sentimentalized narrative only magnifies
his utter inability to comprehend reality beyond his secluded world of
adolescent romance. In The Sea of Regret, by contrast, the same eruption
of historical reality occurs in the opening chapter; by the conclusion of
it, Dihua, her mother, and her fiancé, Bohe, are already outside Beijing
and settle for the night as refugees in an inadequate village inn. While the
narrator in Stones in the Sea reads about the fall of Beijing from afar, all
the central characters in The Sea of Regret directly encounter the senseless
violence and horror. Dihua and her mother are traumatized by a frenzied
crowd; Bohe is chased and shot by an Allied soldier; Zhong’ai witnesses
his parents’ decapitated bodies in their Beijing family compound. The
initial escape from the besieged capital perforce brings together Dihua
and Bohe, whose families have carefully kept them apart, for the sake of
propriety, since their betrothal at the age of twelve. Such involuntary dis-
location determines the structure of the narrative as both a fearful journey
into the unknown and a wish to return to normalcy. The central narra-
tive tension therefore rests on the growing disparity between the need
to assert a return (at least its possibility) and the experience of a forced
journey. It rests on the choice of seeking refuge in oneself when external
reality is recognized as overwhelmingly hostile and discontinuous.
Indeed, ‘‘the sea of regret’’ into which Wu Jianren plunges his char-
acters points to a new psychological, as well as neurological, reality of
hyperstimulation that may well be a defining feature of modern life.48
Underlying the central pathos of ‘‘regret’’ is an experience of trauma,

. See Georg Simmel’s essay ‘‘The Metropolis and Mental Life,’’ in Classic Essays
on the Culture of Cities, ed. Richard Sennett (New York: Meredith, ), –; and,
more recently, Ben Singer, ‘‘Modernity, Hyperstimulus, and the Rise of Popular Sen-
sationalism,’’ in Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, ed. Leo Charney and Vanessa
Schwartz (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), –.
34 Chinese Modern

both in the clinical sense of physical injury or neurological hyperstimu-

lation, and as a psychoanalytical concept that explains the formation of
anxiety or neurosis. An actually experienced situation of helplessness, ac-
cording to Freud’s  work on anxiety, may be called a ‘‘traumatic situa-
tion,’’ in relation to which ‘‘external and internal dangers, real dangers
and instinctual demands converge.’’ 49 Faced with such global threat, the
individual subject may collapse into a panic or traumatic state that entails
a temporary functional breakdown. Or, more often, a flight into neuro-
sis occurs. Besides birth and the loss of a love object, a typical traumatic
situation that gives rise to an intense feeling of helplessness and anxiety
is the experience of modern warfare.50 And war is indeed the enveloping
condition under which Bohe, Dihua, and her mother find themselves as
refugees. This traumatic situation therefore determines the rest of the nar-
rative as constituting an anxiety-driven response, which also lends itself
to provoking a larger and more symbolic question of choice and survival.
Before turning to its culturally deliberate choice in the form of neu-
rotic insistence, we need to examine more closely the traumatic situation
re-created in the novel. For it is at this critical moment that historical ex-
perience achieves specificity, and modernity manifests itself ominously as
containing an utter shock when two technologically unequal worlds col-
lide in violent juxtaposition. The larger historical background being the
confrontation between the nativist Boxers, mostly equipped with noth-
ing but fists and spears, and technologically advanced Allied forces, it
soon becomes apparent that the immediate source of widespread panic
and helplessness among the natives lies in the supernatural power of
Western weaponry that introduces an accelerated sense of time and space.
After all, the Boxer movement and its defeat in  most effectively dra-
matized the deadly, disenchanting force that the modern rifle held over
magic, sorcery, spiritual force, and martial arts (figure ). Since the mid-
nineteenth century the rifle had in fact been used by some Qing govern-
ment troops,51 but its symbolic association with modernity as a traumatic

. Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, rev. and ed. by James Stra-
chey (New York: Norton, ), –.
. See Freud’s  essay, ‘‘Introduction to Psycho-analysis and the War Neurosis,’’
Standard Edition, :–. Another important essay on this topic by Freud was writ-
ten in , ‘‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,’’ collected in Freud: On War,
Sex and Neurosis (New York: Arts and Science Press, ), –.
. During the  suppression of the Nian rebellion in northern China, for in-
 The Sea of Regret 35

event was starkest when Allied forces began systematically puncturing

the Boxers’ supposed invulnerability to bullets. In this aspect, The Sea of
Regret may also be read as one of the earlier literary works dealing with
an important psychic suffering of the twentieth century: war trauma and
neurosis.
Within the novel, the trauma of witnessing the destructiveness of an
alien technology most severely afflicts Dihua’s mother, Miss Bai, who for
this purpose functions as an indispensable auxiliary character. Suffering
from a clear case of traumatic neurosis, she serves to demonstrate the cata-
strophic effect of seeking refuge from war. After numerous breakdowns,
she dies an anguished death halfway through their tortuous trip south.
The traumatic moment that sets off her nervous attack occurs when a
panicked mob of refugees appears from nowhere and completely disori-
ents Dihua, her mother and Bohe. ‘‘A crowd of people suddenly came
surging toward them. There was no knowing how many there were, but
they were all running for their lives and screaming at the top of their
lungs: ‘Help! The hairies are coming!’ ’’ (; –). Apparently fleeing
from a hysterical fear of a phantom, the rampaging crowd sweeps Bohe
away in an unknown direction. Dihua and her mother, riding inside a
small, rented carriage, are ‘‘terrified out of their wits’’ at the incompre-
hensible sight, and they find themselves dragged headlong into a state of
helplessness (; ).
This sudden eruption of danger distresses Miss Bai so severely that she
subsequently displays standard symptoms of autonomic dysfunction, and
she continually experiences flashbacks of the terrifying circumstances.
The same evening, she wakes from a nightmare screaming for help. In
her violent dream, she sees the same crowd that surrounded them dur-
ing the day still chasing her, with a man slashing at her with a sword (;
–). On the surface, her traumatic neurosis results directly from being
hyperstimulated by the hysterical crowd, but what launches the crowd
into panic is the rumored horror of being hunted by the invading Allied
troops. Just before the crowd scene, in Bohe’s eager conversation with
other refugees at a roadside inn in which he tries to gauge the danger of
their situation, the power of a Western rifle is vividly relayed with ap-

stance, Li Hongzhang’s armies used rifles and artillery newly purchased from Western-
ers. See Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: Norton, ),
.
 36 Chinese Modern

. Folk painting, Tianjin cheng maifu dilei Dong Junmen dasheng xibing tu (A depiction of
Commander Dong winning a great victory over Western troops by laying mines in the
city of Tianjin) (). From Zhongguo jindaishi cankao tupian ji (Collection of pictorial
references for modern Chinese history) (Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu, ).

prehension (; ). In his desperate search for Dihua after the riotous
run, Bohe finds himself perilously within range of a foreign soldier’s gun,
and he has to run for his life (–; ). (The family servant Li Fu is
subjected to a similar danger-situation earlier, except that he is actually
shot in the shoulder.) Later, during the siege of Tianjin, where Bohe is
stranded by himself, he is chased, again by an Allied soldier, sustains a
gunshot wound to his thigh, and has to stop the gushing blood with a
handful of dirt (–; –).
Miss Bai and Dihua are mercifully spared such a direct confrontation
after the crowd scene. As panicked refugees, they remain at a distance
from any actual violence, although that distance often proves to be pre-
carious and allows them neither to detach themselves completely nor
to make sense of their plight. Because they are in no position to even
imagine the scale of the impending catastrophe, their sense of danger
 The Sea of Regret 37

is all the more incapacitating. One evening during their journey down
the refugee-jammed canal, ‘‘a crescendo of shouts arose outside, scaring
both women.’’ Dihua goes to the bow of their boat and looks up, only
to be shocked by the view. ‘‘In the distance six or seven fires raged so
fiercely that they lit up the whole sky with a ruddy glow, a glow that was
reflected in the faces of the people watching from the boats. Amid the
babble of voices, faint cries and screams were to be heard in the distance,
and Dihua’s heart began pounding violently’’ (; ). Although she is
told that the fire may have been set by Boxers to burn down churches,
Dihua withdraws into the cabin and reassures her mother, who is trem-
bling with fear, that it is a mere accident on shore. A few days later, the
same incomprehensible spectacle of violence erupts nearby. ‘‘Suddenly a
random volley of gun shots rang out on shore, scaring Miss Bai out of
her wits again. Dihua had never heard anything like it before, and she,
too, was so frightened that her heart began to pound. At the sight of
her mother’s panic, however, she rallied and forced herself to offer com-
fort.’’ This time she makes up her own explanation: ‘‘That was only the
government army firing at the Boxer bandits. . . .’’ (; ). Their whole
flight south figuratively moves them ever more deeply into a danger-
situation where their only possible relation to reality is anxiety or the
constant expectation of danger. ‘‘A danger-situation,’’ so describes Freud,
‘‘is a recognized, remembered, and expected situation of helplessness.’’ 52
In this state of anxious expectation, a known, external danger is internal-
ized and often triggers a neurotic danger, which is one still to be discov-
ered and is usually symptomatic of a dissatisfied ‘‘instinctual demand.’’ In
other words, a danger-situation arises where anxiety signals not merely
an external threat, but also an internal crisis, a challenge of the constitu-
tion of the self or ego from within. It exists where anxiety and neurosis,
‘‘a surplus of anxiety,’’ reveal themselves as a symbiotic continuum. The
narrator of The Sea of Regret keeps the female characters in this danger-
situation most of the time and refuses to make their position as sheltered
bystanders any less agonizing or traumatic.
In accordance with Dihua and her mother’s position as passive wit-
nesses to violence, the narrator offers little to make the events more sen-
sible, although the story line of ‘‘escape’’ provides an effective framework,

. Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, .

38 Chinese Modern

as A Ying comments, to ‘‘capture all the fright, rumors, terror, gunfire,

and foreign troops.’’ 53 Critics such as A Ying may complain that the novel
does not cast the Boxers in a positive light, but the narrative shows a pro-
found indifference to various political or ideological justifications of vio-
lence. The absence of a master narrative of collective action or historical
rationality—nationalism or anti-imperialism—determines that the char-
acters be unwilling witnesses to, rather than active participants in, the
spectacle of group violence. The novel’s psychological realism, to which
we now turn, is therefore more than a stylistic achievement; it results
from an overdetermined insulation of the focal characters from any col-
lective alliance or identity. Such insulation leaves the individuals psycho-
logically vulnerable to all violent disruptions of their world, which are
inevitably experienced as trauma. Even the unfamiliar circumstances of
the few village inns where they stay come as a shock to Dihua, who as a
protected upper-class young woman has to overcome timidity and cope
with poverty and what to her appears as an alien social reality—the peas-
ants. The precarious distance from any site of action, in the end, allows
for a new self-consciousness to emerge, for the traumatic hyperstimula-
tion at once breaks down the insulation and forces the individual sub-
jects to react to the crisis with utmost urgency. Such is the condition in
which we find Dihua, a pious young woman whose subjectivity suggests
a problematic convergence of virtue and sexuality.

Virtuous Passion, Virtual Erotics

As I suggested, the distribution of gender roles in the novel is anything

but innocent. To convey the enormity of the loss, the journey is bound to
turn into a painful process of decline and degeneration, which, in the case
of Bohe, reaches a point of no return with his opium addiction and death.
At the same time, the narrative also creates and institutes an interior life
as the defensive mechanism against a chaotic condition over which no
individual has any effective control. Obviously, this reactive interiority is
designated to Dihua, who grows ever more determined to return life to
its normal course and promised fulfillment. The implicit gender symbol-

. A Ying, History of Late Qing Fiction, .

 The Sea of Regret 39

ism is even more striking if we recall the short story ‘‘Tang Sheng,’’ in
which a stubborn young man is chosen to embody the national pride of
China, whereas Irene is the one to sacrifice her life in protest against an
unjust reality. Through Dihua’s transformation, most notably in her final
withdrawal from secular life, her story documents an individual’s defeat
as much as it does a triumph of her will. Feminine chastity is now im-
plicated in safeguarding the inner essence of the native tradition. Here,
we enter a different aspect of the narrative than the danger-situation that
incessantly generates anxiety. In contrast to Miss Bai’s fit and fright, we
see Dihua’s virtuous passion; instead of a nervous breakdown, Dihua,
apparently traumatized by violence and death, develops what may be de-
scribed as a complex obsessional neurosis that functions as her surrogate
self-identity.
Such a pathologizing view of Dihua compels us to return to Freud’s
observation that a neurotic anxiety inevitably indicates an unsatisfied in-
stinctual demand. In the case of obsessional neurosis, according to a
metapsychoanalytical Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents (), ‘‘the
sense of guilt [Schuldgefühl] makes itself noisily heard in consciousness.’’
‘‘Every neurosis,’’ Freud further asserts, ‘‘conceals a quota of [an] uncon-
scious sense of guilt, which in its turn fortifies the symptoms by making
use of them as a punishment.’’ More specifically, neurotic symptoms,
in psychoanalytical terms, are ‘‘substitutive satisfactions for unfulfilled
sexual wishes.’’ 54 From the outset, the plot development in The Sea of
Regret formulates Dihua’s subjectivity or self-conception predominantly
through her feelings of guilt and self-blame; her virtuous devotion and
passion, in the process, offer a refuge from her own desire, but devotion
and passion also gradually acquire the intensity of virtual erotic excite-
ment and pleasure. As unreleased sexual tension and energy constitute
the etiology of Dihua’s obsessional neurosis, the hagiographical account
of her virtuous passion involves—in addition to a new selfhood/saint-
hood formed through denial and repression—a sympathetic description
of her libidinal desire.55

. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. by James Strachey (New
York: Norton, ), –.
. Ever since , when he published ‘‘My Views on the Part Played by Sexuality
in the Aetiology of the Neurosis,’’ Freud never completely gave up his analysis that the
‘‘modern nervousness’’ originates in the conflict between libido and civilization.
40 Chinese Modern

The sense of guilt that Dihua is enticed to feel initially derives from a
‘‘fear of the external authority’’ or a censorious super-ego,56 which in the
given cultural context is conveyed through concrete ‘‘maxims for young
women’’ and ‘‘rules of propriety’’ that the much-protected girl grows up
memorizing. (In the book’s opening chapter we are told that after duti-
fully giving up her studies as she approaches puberty, Dihua forgets the
specific wording of the classics but remains mindful of their general mean-
ing [; ].) The first time that the narrator allows us into her vexed
mind is the second night into the frightful journey, when Bohe comes
down with a cold as a result of sleeping in the poorly insulated ante-
chamber of the village inn. Because of this untimely sickness, the so far
strictly external disarray turns into an exacerbatingly personal problem
for Dihua. Her mother, Miss Bai, has asked a feverish Bohe to come in-
side and share the same and only platform bed (kang), but Dihua is too
shy to sleep there, even though Miss Bai lies in the middle and sets up a
low table as an additional boundary. Noticing that Dihua intends to sit
up all night, Bohe gets up and offers to go out to the front room again,
only to be stopped by Miss Bai, who admonishes her daughter for being
too rigid with formalities when they are in such a desperate situation.
After repeated urging, Dihua finally compromises and lies down with her
clothes on.

If I don’t lie down, she thought, I’ll be preventing Mother from getting
any sleep. But this is such an unseemly situation, it makes me feel highly
uncomfortable. If we’d married before we left, that would be one thing,
but we’re still bound by the rules of propriety, and I can’t even personally
ask him how he’s feeling while he has cause to show concern for me. If I
don’t lie down, what a poor return that would be for all his kindness! But
then again how could an unmarried couple sleep in the same platform bed?
At the very thought she felt a sharp, prickling sensation down her spine.
(; )

. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, –. On p. , Freud writes, ‘‘As to a
sense of guilt, we must admit that it is in existence before the super-ego, and there-
fore before conscience, too. At that time it is the immediate expression of fears of the
external authority. It is the direct derivative of the conflict between the need for the
authority’s love and the urge towards instinctual satisfaction, whose inhibition pro-
duces the inclination to aggression.’’ Two pages earlier, he also states that ‘‘the sense
of guilt is at bottom nothing else but a topographical variety of anxiety; in its later
phases it coincides completely with fear of the super-ego’’ (original italics).
 The Sea of Regret 41

Needless to say, tortured by such conflictual demands and uncertain-

ties, Dihua gets no sleep that night. The ‘‘sharp, prickling sensation’’ she
sustains down her back pointedly reminds her of the closeness of Bohe’s
body, but it also alerts her to the sense of being watched over by some
piercing, though imagined, eye. This acute pain results from a height-
ened sense of conflict. In experiencing this psychosomatic pain, she also
undergoes a self-formation, which can be articulated only as a fear of
acknowledging herself and her own desire. This new self-consciousness
or subjectivity, consequently, will derive its continual reassurance from
ever greater pain or even self-immolation, because by subjecting herself
to pain the subject actively transforms her own body into an object over
which she can claim a victory of will.
Put differently, a masochistic will to self-affirmation necessarily consti-
tutes the subjectivity formed in fear.57 To secure recognition from others,
the new subject will have to make her need for punishment a public event,
through which she presents her pained body as an instance of willed self-
abnegation. The paradox is that only through a demonstrable disavowal
of herself will she be accepted as a self-willed subject. Hence, the onto-
logical exigency embedded in Dihua’s obsessional neurosis, which allows
for a semblance of agency and is lauded as virtuous passion or accept-
able self-sacrifice. ‘‘In conflict between her desires and her sense of duty,’’
Freud comments on the frustrating consequences of monogamy, a mar-
ried woman ‘‘again will seek refuge in neurosis. Nothing protects her
virtue so securely as illness.’’ 58 When, in the end, Bohe dies in a Shang-
hai hospital, for instance, Dihua blames herself for his demise and, with
a pair of scissors, removes her ten fingernails and a lock of hair. ‘‘After
wrapping up both items, she tucked them inside one of Bohe’s sleeves.

. ‘‘The sense of guilt, the harshness of the super-ego, is thus the same thing as the
severity of the conscience. It is the perception which the ego has of being watched over
in this way, the assessment of the tension between its own strivings and the demands
of the super-ego. The fear of this critical agency (a fear which is at the bottom of the
whole relationship), the need for punishment, is an instinctual manifestation on the
part of the ego, which has become masochistic under the influence of a sadistic super-
ego’’ (Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, ). For further discussion of masochism
and the failure of the modern male subject in Ba Jin’s Cold Nights, see chap.  below,
‘‘The Last Tubercular in Modern Chinese Literature.’’
. Freud, ‘‘ ‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness (),’’ collected
in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, ed. with intro. by Philip Rieff (New York: Collier
Books, ), .
42 Chinese Modern

‘Master Chen,’ she said, ‘if you are conscious in that other world, come
back soon and take me away with you!’ ’’ In the wake of such symbolic
self-immolation, she ‘‘began to wail, and all those present wept with her.
Someone who knew her story remarked: ‘And she was only his fiancée,
too!’ at which they were even more favorably impressed’’ (; ).
The evocation of virtue is a crucial ideological operation in The Sea
of Regret, for the narrative is self-consciously hagiographical rather than
pathographical. Through Dihua, virtues such as ‘‘sincerity’’ or ‘‘devotion’’
are mobilized from native cultural resources as a cardinal principle to
cope with a comprehensive danger-situation. The symbolic richness of
Dihua’s hardship is evident if we speculate how the novel would work
differently, should the daughter, rather than her mother, faint first during
the mob scene and therefore become the mother’s responsibility. Dihua
in the narrative occupies a nodal point in the fabric of patriarchally delin-
eated human relations, since she is a daughter as well as a fiancée. When
stranded halfway between Beijing and Shanghai, she finds herself ‘‘worry-
ing about her mother, missing her father, longing for her fiancé’’ (;
). If Dihua’s taking care of her sick mother can be viewed as ‘‘natural’’
in regard to the biological as well as emotional bond between them, her
devotion to Bohe then affirms a conscious and socially meaningful com-
mitment. What the narrative constructs, significantly, is Dihua first as a
good daughter and then as a good wife. To fulfill both roles, she has to
be totally concentrated and selfless. As her mother’s illness gets worse,
Dihua decides to try an age-old method of curing one’s parents with
one’s own flesh. After shearing a piece of flesh off her arm and offering
it to the patient in a medicinal soup, Dihua still fails to save her mother.
While grieving copiously, she begins to wonder:

Perhaps her failure to cure her mother with that morsel of flesh showed that
the ancients were lying, she thought. But how could their lies have been
passed down over so many years without anyone seeing through them? No
doubt the ancients weren’t lying at all; it was her own heart that wasn’t
sincere [cheng] enough. At this thought she began to hate herself for her
insincerity, banging her head against the bed and crying herself into a state
of stupor. (; ) 59

. Dihua’s reaction stands in sharp contrast to that of Lu Xun’s Madman, whose
central question is: ‘‘Is it right because it has always been like that?’’ See chap.  below.
 The Sea of Regret 43

The same belief in ‘‘sincerity’’ motivates Dihua in her caring for Bohe
when he unexpectedly turns up as a depraved opium addict. In persuad-
ing her father to let her marry Bohe, Dihua reasons: ‘‘There’s a saying
of the ancients that springs to mind: ‘Metal and stone will yield before
a sincere [cheng] heart.’ After we’re married, I’ll put my trust in a per-
fectly sincere heart, and perhaps, who knows, I may be able to inspire
him to change’’ (; ). ‘‘Sincerity,’’ or extraordinary devotion, becomes
a source of strength; its evocation expresses the longing for an anchor-
ing stability in a mutable and contingent world. More significantly, in
quoting a cultural maxim about spiritual purity, the young woman effec-
tively calls into place an inner realm of authenticity that, equated with the
indigenous cultural tradition, both shields the vexed individual and re-
quires her active defense. This interiorized zone has the same function as
a set of core values that, ever more pronounced at a moment of crisis and
confusion, serves to constitute a discourse of endangered authenticity,
which, in turn, shares the structure of a neurotic reaction in the wake of
a hyperstimulating trauma. The notion of ‘‘concentrated sincerity,’’ for
instance, also evoked in Stones in the Sea, derives from a fundamental con-
cept in Chinese classics regarding ‘‘genuineness’’ and ‘‘truthfulness’’ in
human interaction and emotion.60 In other words, it belongs to an in-
digenous discourse on authenticity. The narrator’s choice to let Dihua ar-
ticulate her belief in the moving force of sincerity is therefore deliberate.
It fully inscribes her into the established tradition of values and virtues.
It also reveals that the virtuous passion she practices as a compensatory
intensity in the face of a disintegrating world symbolically enacts the sal-
vation of an entire cultural heritage. In this sense, the creation of Dihua in
The Sea of Regret reflects a general anxiety over the continuity as much as

. The earliest and most classic discussion of jingcheng occurs in a fable titled ‘‘The
Old Fisherman’’ in the writings of Zhuangzi. Upon being asked by Confucius what
he means by ‘‘genuineness,’’ which he urges Confucius to cultivate and guard, the old
fisherman answers: ‘‘The genuine is the most quintessential, the most sincere. What
fails to be quintessential and sincere cannot move others.’’ See A. C. Graham’s trans-
lation in Chuang-tzu: The Seven Inner Chapters and Other Writings from the Book of
Chuang-tzu (London: George Allen & Unwin, ), . Graham’s translation of
jingcheng, in my opinion, is an improvement on those by Herbert A. Giles (‘‘the per-
fection of truth unalloyed’’) and Burton Watson (‘‘purity and sincerity in their highest
degree’’), although all these translations shed light on the richness of the concept.
44 Chinese Modern

the purity of a threatened native culture, an anxiety that is best expressed

through an overdetermined female character.61
Yet the origin of Dihua’s virtuousness points to a sense of guilt that she
feels toward Bohe’s fall. Her passionate devotion to her fiancé is largely
based on her own perceived indebtedness and is recharged continually
insofar as she sees herself obligated to what she has personally incurred.
After the first scene of unintelligible violence, when Bohe is swept away
by the swarming crowd, Dihua first worries about his safety and then
starts to blame herself. ‘‘Then again she thought: This is all my fault. So
concerned about proper behavior that I even refused to speak to him. . . .
If only I’d been willing to talk to him, he’d have been happy to join me,
and none of this would have occurred. Oh, Cousin Bohe, I’m the one who
did you in! If anything dreadful does happen to you, what am I going
to do?’’ (; ). This self-blame she will carry even further when in a
nightmare she sees Bohe pass by without speaking to her. Upon waking
up, she wonders whether she has given their carriage driver a motive to
murder Bohe for his money (–; –). Constantly seeking indem-
nity in and through herself allows Dihua a masochistic sense of selfhood,
for her extraordinary willpower gains acceptance and currency when she
is supposedly repaying her debt—psychic or symbolic. Any subsequent
agency or self-determination that she seems to achieve is always already
circulating within an overarching relationship of indebtedness—‘‘the sea
of regret.’’ If we stop here, we may be justified in criticizing a patriar-
chal system that subjects an individual to such an ineluctable net of in-
debtedness. We may even generalize about the victimization of women
through a rhetoric of virtue and about the oppressive nature of traditional
social order: ‘‘If feminine self-sacrifice was the major support of tradi-
tional Chinese culture, it is not surprising that, during a period of mas-
sive social transformations, the collapse of tradition would find its most
moving representations in the figures of those who are traditionally the

. Wu Jianren would express his cultural anxiety more openly in the preamble to
his last novel, where he admonishes his readers to read his story ‘‘with Chinese eyes’’
and listen to the message ‘‘with Chinese ears.’’ See Qing bian (Passion transformed),
collected in Passion Transformed, –. For a discussion of the moral and cultural
choices embodied in female characters in late Qing fiction, see Chen Pingyuan, History
of Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction: Volume One, –, –.
 The Sea of Regret 45

most oppressed, figures that become ‘stand-ins’ for China’s traumatized

self-consciousness in every sense of the phrase.’’ 62
No doubt this is a persuasive instance of theorization, but it may flatten
the unexpected and ambivalent content that goes into a traumatized self-
consciousness, which is often recognized as contiguous with self-sacrifice
or virtue, since it is the constitution and agency of the self that is thrown
into crisis at a given moment of trauma and/or massive social transforma-
tions. In the process, Dihua’s virtuous passion, for instance, is also intri-
cately compounded by her sexual awakening. The intense sense of guilt
makes it possible for Dihua to fantasize, as if to convince herself of what
is lost, about a fully gratifying romantic relationship between herself and
Bohe. Her experience of erotic desire is representable and legitimate, not
only because it is a fantasy about their yet to be consummated marriage,
but also because he is absent. The impossibility of its actual satisfaction,
therefore, is a necessary condition for Dihua to assert her desire and an-
ticipate a genuine happiness. This is the situation in which her thinking
about Bohe develops into an obsession, and neurosis begins to substitute
for sexual satisfaction.

That night, under Bohe’s bedding, Dihua’s feelings uncontrollably grew

into an infatuation [qing ji cheng chi]. She said to herself that although they
were still not married, she was—at her mother’s express command—sleep-
ing in her fiancé’s bedding; perhaps it was a sign of a ‘‘shared quilt’’ in their
future. These fond thoughts clung to her mind and, before she knew it, had
freed her, for the time being at least, from all her sorrows and cares. Instead
she contemplated how much love and respect she would show him after
they were married. . . . At this joyous prospect, she experienced a desire
that could not be satisfied, a desire from which she drifted into a sound
sleep. (–; )

Even after waking up, Dihua is still overwhelmed by what the narra-
tor consistently calls chixiang or chinian, which can mean a wide range
of thoughts and ideas (blind, silly, wishful, infatuated, obsessed, crazy),
but in this context it describes a sexual arousal or obsession. The inten-

. Chow, Woman and Chinese Modernity, chap. , ‘‘Loving Women: Masochism,
Fantasy, and the Idealization of Mother,’’ ; italics in original.
46 Chinese Modern

sity of this longing is itself so pleasurable that Dihua, holding and finger-
ing Bohe’s bedding, experiences an erotic excitement. Such an amorous
fantasy, however, does not disagree with her virtue because it centers on
Bohe, who of necessity must not reciprocate. The object of her sexual
desire is sanctioned by her betrothal and only synecdochically can be re-
called into presence. This condition is further dramatized when Bohe is
so sick and bedridden that Dihua has to bend over and feed him medi-
cine mouth-to-mouth (; ). At this moment, eroticism is finally fused
with a mothering instinct. Bohe’s pale passivity, which may be viewed as
a long-established formulaic position for the male character in traditional
romances,63 negatively reveals what the notion of virtuous passion seeks
to disavow, namely, active satisfaction through sexual pleasure. Dihua’s
virtuous passion, on the other hand, has its precedent in numerous pious
women ( jiefu) canonized by the late imperial tradition. Through a vir-
tual erotics it becomes clear that neurosis not only allows her a form of
agency and self-sufficiency, but it also serves as a substitutive satisfaction
for her nascent sexual desire. Thus a greatly complicated portrayal of a
modern jiefu/saint. In acknowledging Dihua’s sexuality and relating it to
her piety, the narrator of The Sea of Regret interjects pleasurable experi-
ence at a moment of crisis and trauma and thus creates a lasting ambiguity
in the narrative.
Partly because of the intriguing status of sexuality within the narrative,
The Sea of Regret has given rise to continuous rereadings. In , for in-
stance, one enthusiastic commentator recommended the novel as appro-
priate reading material for high school students because of its thematic
proximity to ‘‘modern life.’’ This critic even claimed that Wu Jianren be-
longs in the same rank of classical novelists as Shi Nai’an (Water Mar-
gin) and Cao Xueqin (Dream of the Red Chamber).64 In his  Zhongguo
xiaoshuo shi (History of Chinese fiction), Guo Zhenyi hailed The Sea of
Regret as ‘‘an extremely refreshing problem novel’’ that attacks the tradi-
tional marriage system.65 Yet a less sympathetic critic, years later, would
denounce the novel as advocating a conservative ‘‘feudal understanding

. See Li, Enchantment and Disenchantment, .

. See Wei Bingxin, ‘‘Xu’’ (Preface) to the  edition of The Sea of Regret (Shang-
hai: Shijie shuju), –.
. Guo Zhenyi, Zhongguo xiaoshuo shi (History of Chinese fiction) (Changsha:
Commercial Press, ), :.
 The Sea of Regret 47

of marriage,’’ 66 an assessment that by and large represented the then offi-

cial view of late Qing and early Republican romantic fiction, which based
itself on the May Fourth rejection of traditional forms and values.
These subsequent readings and rereadings of the text, like all inter-
pretive exercises, reveal just as much about the process and condition
of appropriating it as a relevant moment of history. The same observa-
tion applies to this book, for which the intricate relation between trauma
and passion becomes a central issue. More directly, continued interpre-
tations testify to the paradigmatic ambiguity that The Sea of Regret has
at the beginning of twentieth-century Chinese literature. In reclaiming
the writing of a mythical pathos and revitalizing the discourse of pas-
sion, Wu Jianren more than modernized the tradition of romantic fic-
tion and inaugurated a literary genre that would flourish in the following
decades, most notably in the popular romances of the Mandarin Duck
and Butterfly school. It is his concern with the human consequences
of a hyperstimulating world, rather than ‘‘a severe weakness for roman-
tic love stories,’’ 67 that enriched and humanized the new fiction of the
late Qing period. Against the grain of reformist fiction that strove for
a new elevating master narrative, The Sea of Regret began to delve into
a different realm, namely, heroic individual choices in everyday life. Its
psychological realism that wavers, almost deliberately, between hagiog-
raphy and pathography is a necessary rhetorical device to both capture
the impact of a historical trauma and exhort the human efforts at heal-
ing and overcoming adversity. It leads to an anxiety-driven narrative that
is deeply ambivalent, not the least because it focuses on the awaken-
ing of a self-consciousness that is feminine, which in the context is ex-
pressed through a complex discourse of passion that fuses virtue and
sexuality. The ‘‘tragic theme’’ introduced by the novel and, according to
Doleželová-Velingerová, foreshadowing many stories of modern Chinese
literature, celebrates the triumph of human passion that nonetheless re-
sults in no gratifying, comic resolution. More than a story line or theme,

. Ren Fangqiu, Zhongguo jindai wenxue zuojia lun (Essays on modern Chinese
writers) (Zhengzhou: Henan renmin, ), –.
. See Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies, –. Here, Link lists Wu Jian-
ren’s influential romances as one cause for ‘‘the gradual degeneration of the new fic-
tion’’ from  through . This process is described critically as a transition ‘‘from
nation-building to time-killing to profit.’’
48 Chinese Modern

the narrative presents a tragic consciousness that will saturate modern ro-
mances and distinguish them from most late imperial love stories.68 It is
to become a highly symbolic narrative to the extent that it reveals hagiog-
raphy and pathography as two deeply conflictual but mutually dependent
operations in the representation of Chinese reality in the twentieth cen-
tury. For while hagiography may allow a semblance of meaning, pathog-
raphy registers a visceral experience that is only too immediate and over-
whelming. This agonizing divergence between meaning and experience
besets many a seminal text in the body of twentieth-century Chinese lit-
erature. Being one such central narrative, The Sea of Regret also belongs
to the transitional moment of ‘‘beginning’’ insofar as it reworks a seem-
ingly familiar plot and renders it utterly indeterminate, often against the
author’s pronounced determination.

. For a discussion of the ‘‘tragic consciousness’’ in early Republican romances, see
Chen Bohai and Yuan Jin, eds., Shanghai jindai wenxue shi (History of modern Shang-
hai literature) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin, ), –.
2
Lu Xun’s ‘‘Diary of a Madman’’ and
a Chinese Modernism

First published in the self-consciously avant-garde journal Xin qingnian

(New youth) in , ‘‘Kuangren riji’’ (Diary of a madman) almost im-
mediately established its author, Lu Xun (–), as an emblematic
writer of the then burgeoning New Culture movement, and it has since
gained recognition as a prototypical text of social protest and criticism
in modern Chinese literature. It also has been widely regarded as the first
modern story in twentieth-century Chinese literature.1 The short story,
as the title promises, presents the fragmented and often imaginative writ-
ings of a deranged personality—a paranoiac who insists that all those
around him are either disguised or unabashed cannibals, waiting to prey
on him. The setting is a nameless village community that appears to be
sealed off from the outside world, a milieu typical of most of Lu Xun’s
major stories yet to follow. From this suffocating ‘‘iron house,’’ as Lu Xun
would later characterize the oppressive reality of traditional China, the
Madman lets out his cry of anguish and defiance. One of the earliest liter-
ary works to articulate antitraditionalism as a revolutionary ethos, ‘‘Diary
of a Madman’’ provided the New Culture movement of the May Fourth
period (–) not only with a concerted theme but also with a new
image and language.
The New Culture movement, as a far-reaching intellectual revolution,
had unmistakable aspirations for Western modernity—its express ideo-
logical symbols being science and technology, general enlightenment,
revolution, and democracy. ‘‘Diary of a Madman,’’ as my reading in this
chapter demonstrates, is a modernist text that critically underscores that
longing. Such a reading necessarily challenges the conventional under-
standing of Lu Xun and incurs some theoretical difficulties. It seems to
put an old-fashioned and essentially Western label on a key text in the

. See, for example, Wong Yoon Wah, ‘‘The Influence of Western Literature on
China’s First Modern Story,’’ in Wong, Essays on Chinese Literature: A Comparative
Approach (Singapore: Singapore University Press, ), –.
50 Chinese Modern

twentieth-century Chinese literary tradition, thus synecdochically rewrit-

ing that tradition into a dubious story about repetition—a practice that
might even be suspected of subscribing to Western cultural hegemony.
In addition, by throwing a modernist overcoat on Lu Xun, it may appear
to be anachronistically attempting to distort or recast a historical reality.
To suggest a modernist feature in Lu Xun, as a critic commented in ,
would inevitably entail a reconceptualization of the course of modern
Chinese literature in the twentieth century, since much historiography
and interpretation of this tradition depend on reading Lu Xun as a realist
founding father.2 A clarification seems to be in order at the outset.

The Motility of Chinese Modernism

First of all, the term modernism, when applied to a Chinese text, cannot be
taken simply as a periodizing concept. It should not be forced to suggest a
facile repetition, in the historiographical sense, of Western modernism as
either a literary movement or a cultural experience. On the contrary, the
use of a culturally specific concept like modernism in the Chinese context
works not so much to designate an identifiable historical moment as to
highlight the absence of ‘‘high modernism,’’ of any figure akin to, for in-
stance, Proust or Joyce in the European canon. Although its denotation
may vary considerably from context to context, modernism, in a general
history of Western literature, describes the literary movements and pro-
duction that flourished in the second half of the nineteenth century and
the first quarter of the twentieth century. In a concentrated form, it ar-
ticulates as well as interrogates the Western experience of modernity. To
reconstruct a Chinese literary history based on the same pattern or to im-
pose a modernist stage as an indispensable carte d’entrée into the modern
world would result in what Gayatri Spivak theorizes as a ‘‘subaltern cog-
nitive failure.’’ Such a failure would stand as an effect of the ‘‘epistemic
violence’’ that, according to Spivak, not only helps to objectify a different

. Chen Fangjing, ‘‘Lu Xun de xiandai zhuyi tezhi: yige benshiji Zhongguo wen-
xue miaoshu ying yu shenhua de lunti’’ (The modernist feature of Lu Xun: a topic to
be pursued in depicting Chinese literature in this century), Lu Xun yanjiu yuekan (Lu
Xun studies monthly) (November ): –. This brief article no doubt reflects a
new and important development in the enormous Lu Xun scholarship that has been a
virtual state-run enterprise.
 ‘‘Diary of a Madman’’ 51

other but also institutes the hegemony of a given form of knowledge.3

This epistemic violence necessarily accompanies an unequal power rela-
tion and founds its legitimizing ideology.
A case in point is the modern Chinese literary canon that, for most
of the twentieth century, was shaped through a hegemonic imposition,
although here a codified realism rather than modernism served as the
master trope. A systematic valorization of realistic representation helped
streamline the literary production and erect a critical paradigm. The his-
tory of Lu Xun studies up until the s abundantly attests to the force
of such ideological doctrine. Once widely acclaimed as the ‘‘Chinese
Gorky,’’ Lu Xun was revered in the s and the early s alike for
his ‘‘most clearheaded realism.’’ 4 Critical realism is said to have bridged
his early stage of revolutionary romanticism and his later, more mature
period of socialism—a complete course of the Hegelian Aufhebung rerun
in the Chinese field.5 A meaningful repetition of the ‘‘progressive’’ West-
ern experience is thus prescribed in teleological narratives. Even classical
Chinese poets, such as Li Bai (Li Po) and Du Fu (Tu Fu), would be neatly
classified as either romantic or realistic and paired with their European
counterparts.
The point, however, is not to lament the loss of an indigenous lan-
guage. Although it is tempting to imagine that this unspoken language
could have furnished Chinese writers with vindictive authenticity and in-
genuity, nativism or obscurantism offers only an inadequate answer to
the ineluctable interaction with Western modernity. What we as literary

. Gayatri C. Spivak, ‘‘Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,’’ in her

In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, ), , .
. See, for instance, Qu Qiubai, ‘‘Lu Xun zawen xuan xu’’ (Preface to selections of
Lu Xun’s random thoughts essays), collected in Li Zongying and Zhang Mengyang,
eds., Liushi nianlai Lu Xun yanjiu lunwen xuan (Selected essays of Lu Xun studies in
the past sixty years),  vols. (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue, ), :–; Liu
Dajie, ‘‘Lu Xun yu xianshi zhuyi’’ (Lu Xun and realism), in Li Zongying and Zhang
Mengyang, Selected Essays, :–; Wang Yao, ‘‘Lu Xun sixiang de yige zhongyao
tese: qingxing de xianshi zhuyi’’ (An important feature of Lu Xun’s thinking: clear-
headed realism), in Beijing daxue Lu Xun danchen yibai zhounian jinian wenji (Com-
memorative essays from Peking University on the centenary of Lu Xun’s birth), ed.
Wang Yao (Beijing: Peking University Press, ), –.
. See Li Zehou, ‘‘Jianlun Lu Xun sixiang de fazhan’’ (A brief essay on the develop-
ment of Lu Xun’s thought), in his Zhongguo jindai sixiangshi lun (Essays on modern
Chinese intellectual history) (Taipei: Fengyun shidai, ), –.
52 Chinese Modern

scholars should do instead is to historicize the language that frames our

understanding and knowledge. The horizon of intelligibility, which is not
static to begin with, should itself be open to interpretation and histor-
ical investigation. For all the literary or nonliterary terms we use and find
convenient to use (realism, romanticism, symbolism, modernism, and even
postmodernism) are as much a disobedient machine that twists and mis-
stamps our experience as a functioning theoretical apparatus through
which actual political, ideological confrontations on local and global
scales are staged and played out.
Therefore, evoking modernism in our reading of Lu Xun’s story serves
at least a dual purpose: it calls into question a dogmatic realist appro-
priation of Lu Xun that in fact presupposes a Eurocentric historical para-
digm (although in the guise of a revolutionary ideology); and, in causing
the dominant critical paradigm to shift, it may reveal aspects of the text
that will address our present concerns more directly. This paradigmatic
shift must take place on two related levels: our understanding of West-
ern modernism itself and our reconstruction of modern Chinese literary
history.
Given that literary (or cultural) modernism is most likely to emerge
at a moment of massive and rapid modernization, it best expresses what
in Hegelian terms can be characterized as the ‘‘unhappy consciousness’’
of modernity. Modernity, observes Jürgen Habermas, bases itself on the
idealist ‘‘principle of subjectivity’’ that, as a legitimizing ideology of the
rising bourgeoisie, is historically institutionalized through the Reforma-
tion, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution. All of these vio-
lent experiences of concentrated social change and discontinuity call forth
a modernist ‘‘time-consciousness,’’ 6 whereby the ‘‘future’’ or historical
progress turns into a central value and aspiration. With such intensified
experience of evolutionary time, a fundamental philosophical problem
for a post-Enlightenment secular society is then the securing of self-
reassurance for the emancipated modern individual. Challenged by a
bifurcation of experience such as public versus private, or work versus
pleasure (which Habermas terms the ‘‘crisis of the diremption of life’’),7
modern subjectivity constantly has to assert its coherence, and in seek-

. Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans.

Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, ), .
. Ibid., .
 ‘‘Diary of a Madman’’ 53

ing self-affirmation it posits an other that is to be regarded and mastered

as an object. An aggressive impulse is therefore built into modern self-
consciousness. Hence, the colonial voyage to the ‘‘heart of darkness,’’ as
part of the Western experience of modernity, is inevitably also a journey
of self-discovery.
Only a depoliticized representation of modernity will efface this con-
stitutive presence of the other. Matei Calinescu, for instance, depicts one
aspect of modernity as a self-referential experience of the self-centered
subject. The foundation of modernist culture is therefore allegedly forged
by an identity of time and self.8 Not surprisingly, to propose a modern-
ism in a culture that has not gone through the Western style of moder-
nity and has in fact functioned as the other of this experience (modern
Chinese history being a rich document of painful confrontations with a
formidable West), we must come to terms with a subject that is neither
the radically different other of the Western subject nor a simple replica of
the Western consciousness. What produces and marks off this subaltern
subject is, and can only be, its specific history—not simply the history
of its pre-European experience preserved in a collective unconscious and
inscribed on all levels of its present existence, but also a history of re-
ceiving the imperialist gaze, admiring the supernatural power of indus-
trial civilization, and finally of looking back at and interacting with an
imposing other. A modernism of the subaltern subject, therefore, is a his-
torical necessity grown out of this interactive coexistence that is marked
by a ‘‘nonsynchronous synchronicity’’; the insurgence of such a subject
has to be recognized by a remapping and reimagining of the imaginary
world space.
In this context it is interesting to recall Fredric Jameson’s  essay
‘‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.’’ Al-
though his reading of Third World literature as a national allegory ‘‘of
the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society’’
has provoked widespread critical interest and responses,9 Jameson seems

. Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence,

Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, ), . For a more
general discussion of this modern condition, see Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other:
How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, ).
. See Fredric Jameson, ‘‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capi-
talism,’’ Social Text  (): –. Aijaz Ahmad’s critical response to Jameson’s essay
54 Chinese Modern

to me justified in attempting to broach the West’s drained discourse of

subjectivity by inserting a literary production that incorporates the ex-
plosively, rather than implosively, political dimension of social life. The
‘‘essential operation’’ here, according to Jameson, is a historicizing ‘‘dif-
ferentiation’’ that creates a tension between a complacent American pub-
lic and a politically and culturally potent Third World text, not per-
mitting the one to consume or subordinate the other.10 His allegorical
reading unsettles rather than gratifies a readership accustomed to a rapid
recycling of fashions, not the least of which is politics. In this essay, as we
will see shortly, Jameson also offers fresh insights into Lu Xun’s ‘‘Diary
of a Madman.’’
Similarly, constructing a Chinese modernism has a more local, though
an equally far-reaching, function; it helps to bring about an epistemologi-
cal break and to introduce challenge and crisis to a literary canon formed
through a rigid official realism. Modernism appears to be a historically
determined choice against an ossified and manipulative realist ideology.
For a quick overview of the Chinese situation, where the bankruptcy of
official realism was reflected in its stringency, we can turn to Robert Kiely,
who visited many Chinese colleges and universities in the early s to
lecture on contemporary American writers. Reflecting on his rather reve-
latory experience, he wrote:

Because of the censorship of Western literature since the s and the vir-
tual black-out during the Cultural Revolution (–), the greatest curi-
osity I encountered was about literary trends and movements in the twenti-
eth century. I soon learned that terminology, including literary jargon, has
a distinctive flavor and political coloration in China. Terms like ‘‘streams
of consciousness’’ or ‘‘romantic irony’’—loosely bandied about in Ameri-
can classrooms—had an effect comparable to ‘‘abortion-on-demand’’ or
‘‘school prayer’’ in certain parts of the United States.11

can be read as a systematic expression of the dissatisfaction with Jameson’s allegedly

totalizing narrative. Aijaz Ahmad, ‘‘Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National
Allegory,’ ’’ Social Text  (): –. An abridged Chinese translation of Jameson’s
essay appeared in Lu Xun Studies Monthly in April .
. Jameson, ‘‘Third World Literature,’’ .
. Robert Kiely, ‘‘ ‘Pernicious,’ ‘Pessimistic,’ and ‘Foreign’: The Controversy Over
Literary Modernism in the People’s Republic of China,’’ in Notebooks in Cultural
Analysis, ed. Norman F. Cantor et al. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, ),
.
 ‘‘Diary of a Madman’’ 55

One of the many terms that consistently aroused interest was of course
modernism, which, for Kiely’s audience, meant ‘‘most twentieth-century
literary and artistic innovations, including those now commonly referred
to by Western critics as ‘postmodern.’ ’’ 12
The situation that Kiely describes prevailed in the early s, but the
general interest in understanding modernism persisted and was mirrored
in academic and intellectual circles. In December , for instance, an
international conference on modernism and contemporary Chinese lit-
erature was held in Hong Kong to give recognition as well as publicity to
modernism in China and to Chinese modernist poets and writers. Papers
presented at the conference corroborate Kiely’s observation. Ranging
from symbolism, expressionism, and streams of consciousness to the the-
ater of the absurd, black humor, le nouveau roman, and even Latin Ameri-
ca’s magic realism, all the Western (or, rather, nonnative) literary move-
ments that do not claim to be traditional (socialist) realism fall into
the category of modernism.13 This seemingly indiscriminate classification
forms a discursive strategy that was characteristic of the intellectual eman-
cipation during the mid-s. Modernism in the wake of the Cultural
Revolution signified that which had been eliminated and excluded as
a dangerous and subversive heterogeneity, and its appropriation neces-
sarily signaled a departure from, if not a rebellion against, the strait-
jacket of realism. In the Chinese context, in other words, modernism as
a general label, no matter how vague and unspecified, was called upon
to play the revolutionary role of producing new energies and imagin-
ings.14 Furthermore, modernism as an abstraction could serve contradic-

. Ibid., .

. For instance, in ‘‘Belated Modernism and Today’s Chinese Literature,’’ the inno-
vative writer and playwright Gao Xingjian detailed a historical controversy over mod-
ernism that involved himself. Xie Mian, a prominent critic of contemporary Chinese
poetry, used the term modernism to denote a period in which new content and new
forms were introduced into Chinese poetry. In a statistically supported essay, ‘‘–
: The Introduction of Western Modernism into China,’’ Chen Sihe provided em-
pirical data on the modernism debate. He, too, maintained no distinction between
modernism and other literary schools, such as the avant-garde.
. For a critical reassessment of the literary and cultural interest in modernism in
the wake of the Cultural Revolution, see Xudong Zhang, Chinese Modernism in the Era
of Reforms: Cultural Fever, Avant-Garde Fiction, and the New Chinese Cinema (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, ), –. The ‘‘negative supplement’’ of modern-
ism that Xudong Zhang describes is distinguished from a better-appreciated ‘‘avant-
56 Chinese Modern

tory political needs and interests; while it was promoted as the opposite
of dogmatic traditionalism, the ideological state apparatus would also
vigilantly resist it for its Western connotation.15 The institutionalized
denunciation of modernism—a simplified Lukácsian dismissal of mod-
ernist Western literature as a symptom of ‘‘morbid eccentricity’’ and of
the bourgeois subject’s inability to grasp the whole—functioned in the
end to maintain an almost cynical instrumentalization of literary prac-
tice. From the late s to the s, every organized attack on modern-
ism followed a paranoid rejection of so-called bourgeois liberalization,
which, incidentally, could refer arbitrarily to anything from illegal por-
nography to Western Marxism. By laboriously deleting the notion of sub-
jectivity from literary production, official realism helped to repress any
desire either to cross a given epistemic boundary or to represent a hetero-
geneous reality. In short, it set up a self-consolidating other (the wretched
West) as both evil and scapegoat. As Marshall Berman observes on the
political significance of modernism in non-Western countries: what most
Third World governments and propagandists ‘‘are projecting onto aliens,
and prohibiting as ‘Western decadence,’ is in fact their own people’s ener-
gies and desires and critical spirit.’’ 16
Against this background, it becomes clear that the motif of modern-
ism, whether expressed through theoretical or literary practices, is one
of many cultural strategies for radically reimagining, even transforming,
social organization and control in an agrarian and authoritarian tradition
(the two features may be logically linked). As part of the ongoing cul-
tural revolution, reinvoked modernism must introduce a new language,

garde intervention,’’ both of which, nonetheless, seem to belong to the same category
of ‘‘Chinese modernism in the era of reforms.’’
. During the s both xiandai zhuyi and xiandai pai would stand for modern-
ism, but xiandai pai often had a stronger connotation of a school or a self-conscious
movement. The opposition between xiandai pai and chuantong pai was maintained
mainly at the initial stage of general interest in modernism, when chuantong pai stigma-
tized those who were conservative and resistant to change. For an interesting attempt
to compromise modernism with the established order, see Xu Chi’s  prediction
that a Chinese modernism would be the natural offshoot of a modernized country
and would incorporate both revolutionary romanticism and revolutionary realism.
Xu Chi, ‘‘Xiandai hua yu xiandai zhuyi’’ (Modernization and modernism), Wenyi bao
(Literary gazette) (November ): –.
. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity
(New York: Penguin, ), .
 ‘‘Diary of a Madman’’ 57

a new mode of textual production and reproduction. Its political impact

is still to be derived from an ‘‘aesthetics of perceptual revolution.’’ 17 With
this understanding of modernism, not as a transhistorical trope but as
a metaphor for historicizing a cultural transformation, we will approach
Lu Xun’s ‘‘Diary of a Madman’’ as a modernist text, a disruptive presence
that challenges the given language of meaning. It is modernist not merely
in its ‘‘literary effect,’’ which is comparable to that of Western modernist
literature, but also in the peculiar modernist time-consciousness that it
introduces. The whole story can indeed be read as a manifesto of the birth
of modern subjectivity as well as of a modernist politics in twentieth-
century China.

The Madness of the Madman

The paranoid subject in ‘‘Diary of a Madman,’’ the first-person narrator of

the main text, suffers from a major mental derangement and stays virtu-
ally imprisoned in the house where his traditional extended family lives.
His diagnosis, as well as the diary itself, is made known to the reader
by another narrator, presumably a writer, who claims to have obtained
the material from the Madman’s brother. As a result, the diary entries
are prefaced with explanatory remarks by this writer-narrator, who at the
beginning informs the reader about the Madman’s illness and eventual
recovery.
In an early article about Lu Xun’s indebtedness to modern foreign
literature,18 Lu Xun’s brother Zhou Zuoren translates Nikolay Gogol’s
‘‘Diary of a Madman’’ as ‘‘Fengren riji’’ instead of as ‘‘Kuangren riji,’’
which later became the standard translation. Although both fengren and

. This is how Fredric Jameson describes the modernist politics. See his ‘‘Reflec-
tions in Conclusion,’’ in Aesthetics and Politics: Debates Between Ernst Bloch, Georg Lu-
kács, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, ed. Ronald Taylor (London:
NLB, ), .
. Zhou Zuoren, ‘‘Lun ‘A Q zhengzhuan’ ’’ (About ‘‘The true story of Ah Q’’), in
Li Zongying and Zhang Mengyang, Selected Essays, :–. For more comprehensive
analyses, see Wen Rumin, ‘‘Waiguo wenxue dui Lu Xun ‘Kuangren riji’ de yingxiang’’
(The influence of foreign literature on Lu Xun’s ‘‘Diary of a madman’’), Lu Xun yanjiu
(Lu Xun studies) (): :–, and Wong Yoon Wah, ‘‘The Influence of Western
Literature on China’s First Modern Story.’’
58 Chinese Modern

kuangren basically mean ‘‘madman,’’ Zhou Zuoren was obviously making

a point of underscoring the difference between fengren and the kuangren
of Lu Xun’s ‘‘Kuangren riji.’’ Lu Xun himself was no less aware of the
semantic difference between kuang and feng. In his youthful essay ‘‘Mo-
luo shili shuo’’ (On the power of Mara poets) (), he postulated kuang
as a Nietzschean self-affirmation that provides an essential regenerative
energy for any thriving civilization. The word also characterizes talented
individuals who contemptuously oppose themselves to a stagnant society
and whose actions exceed the public’s comprehension.19
Etymologically, kuang describes a hound gone wild that assaults, with-
out distinguishing them, its master and its master’s guests. On the basis
of this signification, kuang has acquired over time a rich texture of mean-
ings, including ‘‘madness,’’ ‘‘the ecstatic,’’ and ‘‘a wildly unrestrained per-
son.’’ 20 As an adjective—a usage that dates back to the Shi jing (The
book of songs, eleventh to sixth centuries ..)—kuang is equivalent to
‘‘unrestrainedly outgoing, wildly defiant.’’ In Confucius’s Analects, it also
occurs as a verb meaning to progress or aggress. Feng, an ideogramic
word of much more recent origin, was initially a pathological term de-
noting the mad, the neurotic, the insensible, or the sheerly stupid; its two
compounding parts tell of a severe migraine attacking a person rapidly
and mysteriously like a gusting wind. Kuang is the archetypal metaphor
for an explosive ecstasy (ex-stasis), a jumping off the right track, a trans-
gressive crossing of the boundary—in short, a return to the primal or
instinctual drive. It captures, to a certain extent, the inner experience of
the alterity of reason, of what has to be repressed and marginalized as
irrational; it acknowledges the deep discontents that a civilization neces-
sarily breeds. In contrast, feng registers both an externalized, distancing
knowledge of madness and a simultaneous containment of the eruptive
forces through classification and categorization, if not, indeed, dismissal.
In the text of Lu Xun’s ‘‘Diary of a Madman,’’ this semantic difference
is fully explored. The Madman is acutely aware that he is marked by the
word feng, and in titling his diary ‘‘Kuangren riji’’ (so the writer-narrator

. See Lu Xun, ‘‘Moluo shili shuo,’’ in Lu Xun quanji (The complete works of Lu
Xun) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue, ), :; also see a discussion in William A. Lyell,
Lu Hsün’s Vision of Reality (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), –.
. See Zhongzheng xingyi zonghe da zidian (Zhongzheng comprehensive lexicogra-
phical dictionary), th ed. (Taipei: Zhongzheng, ), , , for detailed etymo-
logical and semantic interpretations for kuang and feng.
 ‘‘Diary of a Madman’’ 59

tells us in the preface), he may well be taking a final stand against the
suffocatingly normative reality in which his brother and the villagers call
him otherwise:21 ‘‘ ‘Get out of here, all of you!’ he roared. ‘What’s the
point of looking at a madman [ fengzi ]?’ Then I realized part of their cun-
ning . . . they had labelled me a madman [ fengzi ]. In the future when I
was eaten, not only would there be no trouble but people would prob-
ably be grateful to them’’ ().
The ecstatic kuang of the Madman belongs, if we refuse to regard it
as clinical insanity, to what Michel Foucault describes as the fascinating
yet ‘‘tragic experience of madness in a critical consciousness.’’ 22 Kuang,
unlike feng, is not an aphasic absence of signification but, on the con-
trary, a discursive energy that erupts and interrupts the normal and nor-
malizing system of meaning. This eruption must necessarily dissolve ‘‘the
first social censorship—the bar between signifier and signified’’—to break
down the socially instituted symbolic order and keep the signifying pro-
cess a motile one.23 By definition, then, kuang stands as a radical shift in
the production of meaning from the chain of the signified to the mobile
chain of the signifier. In other words, kuang switches the whole question
from what reality is to how reality is constructed and represented through
various sociosymbolic practices, not the least of which are our linguistic
conventions. This epistemological break is precisely what takes place in
the mind of Lu Xun’s Madman. His kuang indicates a return of that which
has been suppressed or erased from the horizon of allowed or conceiv-
able experience. It represents a transgressive discourse not only because
it goads the self-conscious subject to challenge the given boundaries but
also because it drives the subject himself to all the limits, all the frontiers,
of experience.
Predictably, in the mainstream literary discourse that absolutizes realis-

. The English translation I use here is that by Gladys Yang, Silent China: Selected
Writings of Lu Xun (London: Oxford University Press, ), –. Nonetheless, I
occasionally take the liberty of altering her translation to make it more literal and high-
light aspects of the text that I am more interested in. I also have consulted William A.
Lyell’s translation in Lu Xun: ‘‘Diary of a Madman’’ and Other Stories, trans.William A.
Lyell (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, ), –.
. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of
Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage, ), .
. Julia Kristeva, ‘‘Revolution in Poetic Language,’’ in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril
Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, ), .
60 Chinese Modern

tic representation for its presumed social efficacy, pedagogical value, and
mass appeal, much hand-wringing and headache are caused because of
its inherent inability to take into full account the transgressive force of
kuang. A brief examination of state-sponsored Lu Xun studies until the
early s (epitomized in Li Zongying and Zhang Mengyang, eds., Selec-
tions of Lu Xun Studies Essays from the Past Sixty Years) reveals a continuous
attempt to trim the writer, posthumously, into a model realist.24 Since the
early s, scholars have puzzled over ontotheological questions about
the identity and class alliance of Lu Xun’s Madman. Is he a clearheaded,
intelligent, but understandably persecuted revolutionary against feudal-
ism, or is he merely a madman who happens to be Lu Xun’s mouthpiece?
Opinions differ greatly—sometimes they even seem irreconcilable—but
the consensus holds that the Madman is depicted realistically to expose
feudalism as barbaric cannibalism in nature. After briefly reviewing the
raging debate over the Madman’s identity, one critic conclusively formu-
lated the central issues: ‘‘Two questions are in effect raised: () Is the
figure of Madman created in ‘Diary of a Madman’ a reflection of real life?
() How does it reflect real life?’’ 25 Obviously, these two questions are
ultimately the same one and presuppose only one positive answer. The
whole interpretive enterprise fails to escape a deeply entrenched herme-
neutic tradition underlying the rhetoric of realism, which—harboring in
itself a rigid dichotomy between reality and reflection or, rather, between
reason and madness—denies madness any access to truth or signification.
Following this logic, the Madman is able to reveal the truth only when
he takes a recess from his madness, and his experience makes sense only
when it is transcended and elevated onto an allegorical level.
What is really at stake goes back to the basic ideological assumption

. For a more recent review of this scholarly tradition, see Wang Furen, Zhongguo
Lu Xun yanjiu de lishi yu xianzhuang (The history and present condition of Lu Xun
studies in China), serialized in Lu Xun Studies Monthly, nos. – ().
. Deng Yiqun, ‘‘ ‘Kuangren riji’ zhong kuangren xingxiang chuangzao de yishu
tezheng’’ (Some artistic features in the creation of the figure of the madman in ‘‘Diary
of a madman’’), collected in Lu Xun yanjiu ziliao (Research materials in Lu Xun
studies),  vols., ed. Lu Xun Studies Program at the Beijing Lu Xun Museum (Tian-
jin: Tianjin renmin, ), : . For a review of the discussion from the early s
to the s of the class identity of the Madman, see Liu Fuyou, ‘‘ ‘Kuangren riji’ yan-
jiu gaishu’’ (General survey of the research on ‘‘Diary of a madman’’), Lu Xun Studies
(): :–.
 ‘‘Diary of a Madman’’ 61

that ‘‘Lu Xun pictures, in a highly realistic manner, the essence of a feu-
dalist social system and reveals feudal moral rituals and teachings to be
cannibalistic.’’ 26 This definitive evaluation of Lu Xun as a revolutionary
realist came in the late s as the summit of a twenty-year campaign
to make him serviceable to the new Communist regime. The general
sociological paradigm for Lu Xun studies that was then set up eventu-
ally spread to dominate not only this particular subject but also the entire
field of modern Chinese literature studies in China. Indeed, until the mid-
s, literary criticism and history, at least in their public and publish-
able versions, were mostly constrained by the sociologically reductive and
epistemologically crippling principle of unreflective and unmediated real-
ism. The logic of transparency implied by this castrated realism demands
that all social practices be subjugated to one center, or to the ‘‘cardinal
contradiction’’ of class struggle, and all representations faithfully mirror
a known reality. Indeed, we see here an almost classic case of abusing
the realist principle of commitment to legitimize a ‘‘vulgar Marxist prac-
tice of reducing characters to mere allegories of social forces, of turning
‘typical’ characters into mere symbols of class.’’ 27 It is at this point that
we confront the conceptual inadequacy of an uncritical realism in dealing
with a text like ‘‘Diary of a Madman.’’ By shifting the critical focus from
a supposedly extractable content to the multilayered texture of language
and form, we confront once again the same question that haunts Lu Xun’s
Madman in a more intense way, namely, how a representation necessarily
constructs a reality that it refers to and at the same time belies. With this
perspectival change, the historicity of the literary text itself may emerge
as a legitimate object of investigation, and the relationship between lit-
erary articulation and its historical embeddedness demands much more
intimate and careful reconstruction. In Jameson’s words, the ‘‘a priori his-
torical or ideological subtext,’’ instead of a mastertext, ‘‘is not immediately
present as such, not some common-sense external reality, nor even the
conventional narrative of history manuals, but rather must itself always

. Wang Shiqing, Lu Xun zhuan (Biography of Lu Xun) (Beijing: Zhongguo qing-
nian, ), . An English translation of this severely dated biography of Lu Xun
came out, belatedly, in  as Lu Xun: A Biography, trans. Zhang Peiji (Beijing: For-
eign Languages Press).
. Fredric R. Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories
of Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ), .
62 Chinese Modern

be (re)constructed after the fact.’’ 28 Of such a subtext the literary text

stands as ‘‘the rewriting or restructuration,’’ and it is often through such
rewriting that a writer may arrive at an imaginary resolution of a real
contradiction.
Reductive literary criticism as an institution, however, has been on the
decline since the s, thanks to a persistent, although constantly inter-
rupted, movement toward more creative thinking. A new generation of
critics and writers contended that a direct subjugation of literature to
political instrumentalization leads inevitably to a failure to respect litera-
ture as a distinct social discursive praxis with its own logic and historical
determinations. Together with this awareness surfaced widespread inter-
est in the rhetoric of the autonomy of literature, in formalism, and in the
textual analysis of New Criticism. This apparent depoliticization of liter-
ary studies paradoxically subverted the entrenched political tradition of
reducing the individual to a faceless functionary in a revolutionary cause.
It was an extension of what Václav Havel once called ‘‘antipolitical poli-
tics’’ in a totalitarian system. The critical urge to read a poem first as a
poem, therefore, had the same implication and force as did the demand
to treat a human being first as a human being. The political pertinence of
such literary phenomena as the ‘‘misty poetry’’ of the early s and the
debate about ‘‘subjectivity in literature’’ a few years later can be partially
measured by the furious response it provoked from the obese ideologi-
cal state apparatus. The often vague, unnamable, and yet enduring desire
to go beyond the imaginary projection of a different time and space is
deeply disruptive to a highly hierarchized control over society. It is not
surprising, therefore, to see Lu Xun’s ‘‘Diary of a Madman’’ continually
revisited by scholars, and the evolving approaches to the story themselves
form a mini-history of paradigm shifts and negotiations.29 Intense atten-

. Fredric R. Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ), .
. The following is an incomplete list of published essays on various aspects of
‘‘Diary of a Madman’’ between  and . Even a cursory reading of these essays
will show the different critical methods at work. Yan Jiayan, ‘‘ ‘Kuangren riji’ de sixiang
yu yishu’’ (The thought and art in ‘‘Diary of a madman’’) (), collected in Li Zong-
ying and Zhang Mengyang, Selected Essays, :–; Gong Langu, ‘‘Lun ‘Kuangren
riji’ ’’ (On ‘‘Diary of a madman’’), Wenxue pinglun (Literary review) (): :–;
Zhang Huiren, ‘‘Yu lijie ‘Kuangren’ xingxiang youguan de liangge wenti’’ (Two issues
related to understanding the figure of the madman), Wenxue pinglun congkan (Col-
 ‘‘Diary of a Madman’’ 63

tion to ‘‘Diary of a Madman’’ suggests that at the beginning of modern

Chinese literature stands an enigmatic text that dramatizes the conflicts
between conformity and individuality, between doctrine and interpreta-
tion. To return to this text and confront the Madman’s kuang means to
undertake the difficult task of reclaiming a radical tradition of transgres-
sive politics.

lected publications of literary review) (), :–; Yan Huandong, ‘‘Kuang-

ren yu ‘Kuangren riji’ xinlun’’ (The madman and a new essay on ‘‘Diary of a mad-
man’’), Wenxue lunji (Collected essays on literature) (), :–; Gao Songnian,
‘‘Guanyu kuangren de xingxiang ji qi chuangzao’’ (About the figure of the madman
and its creation), collected in Lu Xun yanjiu lunwen xuan (Selected essays from Lu Xun
studies), ed. Zhejiang Lu Xun Studies Society (Hangzhou: Zhejiang wenyi, ),
–; Li Danchu, ‘‘Lun ‘Kuangren riji’ de xinli miaoxie’’ (On the psychological de-
scription in ‘‘Diary of a madman’’), Lu Xun Studies (): :–; Sun Hao, ‘‘Cong
kuangren xingxiang shuoqi’’ (Beginning with the figure of the madman), Wenxue lun-
cong (Journal of literary essays) (): :–; Wang Delin, ‘‘Kuangren xingxiang
xintan’’ (New approach to the figure of the madman), Lu Xun Studies (): :–
; Peng Dingan, ‘‘ ‘Kuangren jiazu’ chansheng de zhuguan suzhi yu wenxue, meixue
yiyi’’ (The subjective elements of the creation of a ‘‘family of madmen’’ and its liter-
ary and aesthetic significance), Lu Xun Studies (): :–; Lu Ge, ‘‘ ‘Kuangren
riji’ chuangzuo fangfa xinlun’’ (New essay on the creative method of ‘‘Diary of a mad-
man’’), Lu Xun Studies (): :–; Wang Chaohua and Xu Xiaocun, ‘‘Lun
‘Kuangren riji’ de yishu tese’’ (On the artistic innovation of ‘‘Diary of a madman’’), Lu
Xun Studies (): :–; Wang Furen, ‘‘ ‘Kuangren riji’ xidu’’ (A close reading
of ‘‘Diary of a madman’’), Lu Xun yanjiu niankan (Lu Xun studies annual) (–
): –; Ling Yu, ‘‘ ‘Kuangren riji’ renwu xingxiang yu zhuti de shengcheng jizhi’’
(The generative mechanism of the character and theme of ‘‘Diary of a madman’’), Lu
Xun Studies Monthly (November ): –; Shi Chengfang, ‘‘ ‘Jingguan wanxiang,
tihui yiqie’: ‘Kuangren riji’ de shijian bianma’’ (‘‘Observe the universe quietly and
understand everything’’: The coding of time in ‘‘Diary of a madman’’), Lu Xun Studies
Monthly (March ): –; Xue Yi and Qian Liqun, ‘‘ ‘Kuangren riji’ xidu’’ (A close
reading of ‘‘Diary of a madman’’), Lu Xun Studies Monthly (November ): –;
Qian Zhen’gang, ‘‘Lun ‘Kuangren riji’ zhong kuangren gousi de yishu gongneng’’ (On
the artistic function of the creation of the madman in ‘‘Diary of a madman’’), Lu Xun
Studies Monthly (December ): –.
64 Chinese Modern

Reading Between the Lines

The central as well as the canonical passage in ‘‘Diary of a Madman’’ is no

less than a scene of reading; it is about a search for meaning, a reorgani-
zation of social space, and, indeed, a rewriting of history:30

Everything requires careful consideration if one is to understand it. In an-

cient times, as I recollect, people often ate human beings, but I am rather
hazy about it. I tried to look this up in history, but my history has no
chronology and scrawled all over each page are the words: ‘‘Virtue and
Morality.’’ Since I could not sleep anyway, I read intently half the night
until I began to see words between the lines. The whole book was filled
with two words—‘‘Eat humans.’’ ()

In characterizing the end of linear writing accompanied by the emergence

of a pluridimensionality and a delinearized temporality, Jacques Derrida
writes that ‘‘it is less a question of confiding new writings to the envel-
ope of a book than of finally reading what wrote itself between the lines
in the volumes.’’ 31 A Derridean textual ‘‘grafting,’’ or a Nietzschean gene-
alogical tracing through etymology, opens a text to difference and unre-
lentingly undermines the plenitude that a sacred book supposedly enjoys.
The Madman’s reading is precisely such a transformation of a given text
to bring forth another text within it, already inscribed, yet obliterated.
The two words that surface here in a surrealistic fashion are the outcome
of a violent movement of différance, only a repression or subordination of
which could secure in the first place ‘‘the presence of a value or a meaning
supposedly antecedent to différance, more original than it, exceeding and
governing it in the last analysis.’’ 32

. In the passage that follows, the Chinese character that I translate as ‘‘humans’’
in place of the ‘‘people’’ in Gladys Yang’s translation is ren, which usually means the
human species in general. By replacing ‘‘Eat people’’ with ‘‘Eat humans’’—that is, by
using a plural form that suggests persons rather than a mass—I want to emphasize not
only that the Madman is contrasting humankind with other creatures, but that he is
already aware of the modern subject as an autonomous individual. Lyell also translates
the phrase in question as ‘‘Eat people.’’ See Lyell, Lu Xun, .
. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, ), .
. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, ), .
 ‘‘Diary of a Madman’’ 65

In the Madman’s intense reading, a history without chronology—that

is, the self-evident book of totality—is carefully perused, decoded, dis-
mantled, and thereby forced to undergo an irreversible process of textu-
alization. An entire textual tradition, as one critic puts it, is rejected.33
From this almost violent reading, a new text emerges, one both histori-
cal and historicizing. The Madman sets out to consult history with the
hope of obtaining an answer to his present concern. He wants to reach
out and grasp some certainty about the meaning and purpose—in short,
the rationality—of the present moment. But he ends up reading intently
the pages that bear nothing but scrawled words or, rather, signifiers, for
it is at the moment when he starts searching for historical reality that his-
tory ceases to be an external object. History for him becomes no more
than the verbal traces of a previous attempt to represent and preserve a
particular moment or structure. Now the question is no longer whether
or not reality is truthfully represented but how a representation of the
real is achieved and instituted. Those scrawled words, namely, no longer
function as signs faithfully pointing to preexisting referents but turn into
signifiers with their own force and energy. Set loose from that whole
dimension of the signified that assumes various names, such as ‘‘truth,’’
‘‘meaning,’’ or ‘‘reality,’’ the signifier acquires its own materiality and re-
turns to a disorienting and explosive play.
The play of the signifier following its disconnection from the signi-
fied stirs up the heterogeneous elements contained and repressed in the
constitution of the sacred text. In the tradition of Western modernism,
different attitudes toward this disconnection give rise to varied aesthetics
and politics (from Rimbaud’s to, say, T. S. Eliot’s), but the final ques-
tion invariably returns to history. With history now projected back from
the present onto the past, its presumed reality promises to be dissolved
into words. All of a sudden, the meaning of history, as the Madman dis-
covers, is put into motion, and meaning itself becomes an open-ended
process that goes on in the present and consists of a constant rereading
and reinterpreting of pages of words from the past. Every such reread-
ing, as Nietzsche argues in On the Genealogy of Morals (a work Lu Xun
admired), must first disclose the violence and barbarism that went into

. See Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker, ‘‘Text, Intertext, and the Representation of the Writ-
ing Self in Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, and Wang Meng,’’ in Ellen Widmer and David Der-wei
Wang, eds., From May Fourth to June Fourth: Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century
China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), –, esp. –.
66 Chinese Modern

establishing a previous representation of the real as either true or natu-

ral. The Madman’s insertion of the two words ‘‘Eat humans,’’ therefore,
signals a revolutionary return of the repressed to the discursive field. It is
not merely a contention over possession of the past but a struggle to own
the present, which for the Madman is a matter of life and death.
The Madman, in and through his reading, carries out with one stroke
the twofold task of transforming the text and liberating the signifiers. He
thereby initiates a new technique of interpretation that has been asso-
ciated with Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud in the modern Western intellec-
tual tradition. The new interpretive strategy—as exemplified in Marx’s
analysis of the term commodity, Nietzsche’s genealogical approach to all
cultural values, and Freud’s mapping of the unconscious—both modifies
the space of signifier distribution and rearranges the signifiers to expose
the ‘‘other thing’’ that a text is saying at the same time. The interpreter
gains access to this hidden inscription when a new economy of signs dis-
mantles the existing process of ideological reproduction, which, for the
Madman, is the dominant value system that legitimizes repression and
barbarism in the name of ‘‘virtue and morality.’’ A similar radical reassess-
ment of all values led Nietzsche to conclude that it was in ‘‘the sphere of
legal obligations, that the moral conceptual world of ‘guilt,’ ‘conscience,’
‘duty,’ and ‘sacredness of duty’ had its origin: its beginnings were, like
the beginnings of everything great on earth, soaked in blood thoroughly
and for a long time.’’ 34 The critical radicalism of Lu Xun’s story, or its
‘‘totalistic iconoclasm,’’ 35 at the turn of the century, therefore, rests not
so much on the revelatory force of the statement that the traditional
gemeinschaft is soaked in violence and injustice as it does on the intro-
duction of desire into language, engendering a new form of discourse.
It unleashes an imaginative energy that always unsettles the dominant
discursive order.
At this point, it becomes necessary to situate Lu Xun’s ‘‘Diary of a
Madman’’ in the general discussion of the possibility of a popular ver-

. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J.
Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, ), . See also Min Kangsheng, ‘‘ ‘Kuangren riji’
zhong Nicai de shengyin’’ (The voice of Nietzsche in ‘‘Diary of a madman’’), Lu Xun
Studies (): :–.
. This term comes from Lin Yü-sheng, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radi-
cal Antitraditionalism in the May Fourth Era (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
), –.
 ‘‘Diary of a Madman’’ 67

nacular literature in the late s. Initiating the notion of ‘‘literary

reform’’ in , Hu Shi, another leading figure among New Culture in-
tellectuals of the May Fourth period, called with a resounding determi-
nation for a new modern literature: ‘‘We ought to use the living language
of the twentieth century instead of the dead words from three thousand
years ago.’’ 36 The ‘‘living language’’ is the spoken vernacular (baihua), and
Lu Xun’s ‘‘Diary of a Madman’’ was one of the first literary works writ-
ten in modern vernacular Chinese. To a large extent, Hu Shi’s modern-
istic skepticism toward the past and his critical awareness of the formative
force of language directly begot Lu Xun’s Madman.
At the forefront of the New Culture movement, therefore, ‘‘Diary of a
Madman’’ embodies this emerging critical attitude toward language, and
it offers itself as an archetypal text of deconstructive reading. In this sense,
it is a key text that unambiguously articulates a potent discursive strategy
in modern Chinese culture. Throughout the diary, various practices that
constitute and participate in everyday life are subjected to a powerful es-
trangement, so that their naturalness or legitimacy is called into question.
At one point, the Madman’s brother ushers in a physician to examine the
patient. By reading the doctor’s movements and prescriptions as a mean-
ingful text, the Madman demonstrates his bracketing of what is part of
the accepted and practiced sociosymbolic order. When Doctor He feels
his pulse, the Madman decides that the physician is a butcher in disguise,
trying to find out how fat the prey is. By repeating Doctor He’s promise,
‘‘You’ll be fine in a few days,’’ he brings forward and explores the double,
even conflicting, meaning of ‘‘being fine/profitable’’ (hao). ‘‘By fattening
me of course they’ll have more to eat. But what good will it do me? How
can it be ‘fine’?’’ (). When the Madman takes ‘‘fine’’ to mean ‘‘profitable,’’
the basic question becomes who will profit from his being fine. Thus
questioned, ‘‘to be fine’’ means either to fit in better with the instituted
cannibalistic machinery or to be able to take part in cannibalism. Also,
in Chinese the word for ‘‘fine’’ can mean ‘‘good,’’ the opposite of ‘‘evil.’’
In bracketing ‘‘good,’’ the Madman comes to realize that by challenging
the concept of what makes a ‘‘good man’’ (haoren is translated as ‘‘a good

. Hu Shi, ‘‘Wenxue gailiang chuyi’’ (Some modest proposals for the reform of lit-
erature), in Hu Shi wencun (Selected works of Hu Shi) (Taipei: Yuandong, ), :.
For an English translation, see Kirk A. Denton, ed., Modern Chinese Literary Thought:
Writings on Literature, – (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, ),
–.
68 Chinese Modern

son’’ []), he is to be labeled an ‘‘evil man’’ (e’ren is loosely rendered as

‘‘a bad character’’) and imprisoned, punished, and eventually murdered
by communal ‘‘justice.’’ ‘‘When our tenant spoke of the villagers eating an
evil man, it was exactly the same device. This is their old trick’’ (). It is
a ‘‘trick’’ as old as history itself, the trick of justifying violence against the
rebel, who is first marginalized and then condemned as either abnormal
or eccentric.
In a gesture of projection that necessarily implicates his anxiety and
desire, the Madman produces his own new text. The desire to name tra-
verses language and makes it at once the space for engagement and the
site of possible fulfillment. The Madman’s playful manipulation of lan-
guage both to distort and to displace existing texts (e.g., his mixing up
Catalog of Flora and Fauna and Supplements to the Catalog, his anachronis-
tic juxtaposing of Yiya and Jie Zhou, two historical and legendary figures
belonging to different times), apparently a symptom of his madness, ful-
fills his urge to express himself—to break down the existing chain of signs
and make his own voice heard. In speaking a language different from
that of the encasing context—namely, the preface provided by the writer-
narrator—the Madman shows the disruptive force of language itself.37
The Madman writes in his own language, employing a syntax that is
itself both colloquial and logical. The passage preceding his diary frames
the text and, through the medium of language, forms an ironic play with
notions of the present and the past. Fredric Jameson notices that the story
in effect offers ‘‘two distinct and incompatible endings. . . . One ending,
that of the deluded subject himself, is very much a call to the future, in the
impossible situation of a well-nigh universal cannibalism. . . . But the tale
has a second ending as well, which is disclosed on the opening pages.’’ 38
The prefacelike passage that introduces the story reassures the reader that
the Madman ‘‘has recovered some time ago and has gone elsewhere to
take up an official post.’’ In other words, he has returned to the system
against which he once desperately revolted with all his strength. Between
these two incompatible endings, Jameson sees a tension surfacing and
concludes that ‘‘by way of a complex play of simultaneous and antithetical
messages . . . the narrative text is able to open up a concrete perspective

. Wang Furen suggests in his insightful ‘‘A Close Reading of ‘Diary of a Mad-
man’ ’’ (see n.  above) that what the Madman achieves is a Brechtian Verfremdungs-
effekt.
. Jameson, ‘‘Third-World Literature,’’ .
 ‘‘Diary of a Madman’’ 69

on the real future.’’ 39 This tension in fact exists on the level not merely
of temporality but also of linguistic experience. The introductory pas-
sage, composed in a semi-esoteric, classical style, functionally establishes
a present moment or reality with which a contemporary reader is invited
to identify. The reader is assured of a safe distance from the stormy events
to follow, which have by now been historified and put into proper per-
spective. Though the preface narrator assumes an aesthetic tranquillity
and an equally detached scientism, he nevertheless judgmentally excludes
the Madman’s diary from the order of reality. He expresses the common
view of paranoia as a mental disorder that, one hopes, can be cured. ‘‘The
writing was most confused and incoherent, and he had made many wild
statements’’ (). Yet this present moment of the preface is saliently marked
as past because the language that constructs it was widely pronounced
‘‘dead’’ and ‘‘archaic’’ at the time when the story was composed. During
the first quarter of the century the classical Chinese language was asso-
ciated with a decaying and impotent tradition that had to be discarded
and replaced by a new language born of a culture of new youth. The new
living language is what the Madman speaks and writes.
In other words, the preface, composed in a narrative past (similar to
the French preterit),40 constitutes a hierarchized and sensible ‘‘reality,’’
whereas the diary entries, without dates or a coherent linear narrative,
seem to be written in and about a perpetual and motile present. The pres-
entness of the preface is a hollow and ornate construction, and the new
writing, which in the story is fictively anterior to the preface’s present but
historically posterior to it, not only subverts the solidity of the tradition
of old writing but also suggests the irrevocability of the new writing—
that of the Madman. Furthermore, this tension between the two modes
of writing points to a more fundamental complexity in modern Chinese
literature. What Lu Xun demonstrates in ‘‘Diary of a Madman’’ is a criti-
cal recognition of an impossible promise of realist fiction. As Marston
Anderson observes, Lu Xun realizes, through his self-conscious play with
his own storytelling, that realism ‘‘risks making authors accomplices to
the social cruelty they intend to decry. The realist narrative, by imitat-
ing at a formal level the relation of oppressor to oppressed, is captive

. Ibid.
. See Roland Barthes’s discussion of the use of the preterit in the novel as an ideo-
logical construction securing a given social order in his Writing Degree Zero, trans.
Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Noonday-Farrar, ), –.
70 Chinese Modern

to the logic of that oppression and ends by merely reproducing it.’’ 41

‘‘The very first story that sets the new literature movement in motion,’’
concurs Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker, ‘‘is also filled with self-doubts about the
nature and effectiveness of its own literary enterprise.’’ 42 At the origin of
modern Chinese literature, the limits of realism are already grasped and
underlined. To those limits a modernist reconceptualization of language
is offered as a preferable alternative. The realist writer-narrator of the
preface, although sympathetic, belongs in the final analysis to the existing
social order and shares no common language with the Madman.
The Madman’s deconstructive reading and the emergence of a new lan-
guage, however, take place not in an original nowhere but, rather, ‘‘be-
tween the lines.’’ In September , against the grain of a general enthu-
siastic rhetoric of ‘‘awakening’’—‘‘enlightening,’’ or ‘‘reviving’’ the nation
from a blind complacency—Lu Xun wrote, not without bitter sarcasm,
that ‘‘the first awakened has always been, by either a malicious person or
a mindless crowd, oppressed, persecuted, conspired against, exiled, and
eventually murdered.’’ 43 In fact, the awakening metaphor, which contains
the light/darkness opposition and easily gives way to another hierarchical
power structure, is also part of what the Madman stubbornly questions.
The initial moment of his transgressive kuang can be located in the night
when he perceives a bright moon that he has not seen ‘‘for over thirty
years.’’ Thus, the first entry in the diary reads: ‘‘Tonight the moon is very
bright. I have not seen it for over thirty years, so today when I saw it I
felt in unusually high spirits. I begin to realize that during the past thirty-
odd years I have been in the dark’’ (). But the fact is that he is still in
the dark when he sees the bright moon. Leo Ou-fan Lee rightly points
out that the ‘‘recurring image of the moon gives rise symbolically to a
double meaning of both lunacy (in its Western connotation) and enlight-

. Marston Anderson, The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary
Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), .
. Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker, ‘‘Text, Intertext, and the Representation of the Writing
Self,’’ . See also David Der-wei Wang’s discussion of ‘‘Diary of a Madman’’ in his
Fictional Realism in Twentieth-Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen (New
York: Columbia University Press, ), –, where he argues that the text through
its narrative strategy ‘‘leads us to the ideological and epistemological conditions of a
realist discourse’’ ().
. This Lu Xun text was discovered in the s. See Research Materials on Lu Xun
Studies, :.
 ‘‘Diary of a Madman’’ 71

enment (in its Chinese etymological implication).’’ 44 But there is also a

twist in the enlightenment rhetoric. For if the moon is a metaphor for
the Madman’s inner illumination, it is at the same time metonymic of
the vast surrounding darkness that stands for what both threatens and
calls for enlightenment. The visibility of the moon, unlike that of the sun,
has a parasitically interdependent and no less antagonistic relation with
that which tends to obscure or obliterate it. What is in or of the moon
depends on what is around or even against it. The awakening, in other
words, is not itself an unqualified blessing. It is much less like awakening
from a nightmare than becoming critically conscious of the darkness of
the night. Metaphorically, the moon is a differentiated presence, a soli-
tary site that both accepts and resists what defines its boundaries. Fol-
lowing the same line of skeptical thinking, Lu Xun would pose the well-
known rhetorical question in the preface to Nahan (Call to arms) (),
his first collection of short stories: ‘‘Imagine an iron house without win-
dows, absolutely indestructible, with many people fast asleep inside who
will shortly die of suffocation. But you know that since they will die in
their sleep, they will not feel the pain of death. Now if you cry aloud to
wake a few of the lighter sleepers, making those unfortunate few suffer
the agony of irrevocable death, do you think you are doing them a good
turn?’’ 45
In opposition to the moon, the sun, whose radiant light is expected
to prevail, never becomes bright for the Madman. ‘‘The sun is never out
and the door is forever closed. Just two meals every day’’ (). The three
actual confrontations between the Madman and others—most notably,
between him and his brother—all take place in the early morning, a tran-
sient moment that links the night and the day and yet ineluctably gives
in to daylight. Daylight, whose presence presupposes the absence of the
moon, is always depressing to the Madman. ‘‘Today there is no moon, I
know that this is a bad omen. This morning when I went out cautiously,
Mr. Zhao had a strange look’’ (). Enlightenment for the Madman, then,
is not so much a spreading of light to banish obscurity or murkiness as it
is an individual perception of the encroaching dark, of which the enlight-

. Leo Ou-fan Lee, Voices from the Iron House: A Study of Lu Xun (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, ), .
. Lu Xun, ‘‘Preface’’ to Call to Arms, in Selected Stories of Lu Xun, trans. Yang
Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, ), .
72 Chinese Modern

ened remains a part, often in an oppositional margin. ‘‘Diary of a Mad-

man’’ can never be a rationalized ‘‘program of political struggle’’ for the
revolutionary masses, nor does it ‘‘reflect,’’ as dogmatic realism hastens
to argue, ‘‘the awakening process people undergo to realize the unbear-
ability of feudal oppression, their strong will to struggle and their de-
termination to fight feudalism to the end.’’ 46 On the contrary, the Mad-
man, almost painfully following his own epistemology of suspicion, will
in the end come to see himself as part of the darkness. His last horror is
the realization that he has all the time been engulfed in the tradition of
cannibalism and may well have eaten pieces of his beloved sister. Even
his self-identity, which he has clung to as the last site of resistance, is
thrown into uncertainty because the past irrepressibly returns. The only
way out that he can see, therefore, lies not in the present but in a remote
future that has yet to begin with the now, with ‘‘saving the children.’’ The
Madman, a modern ‘‘bearer of a full critical consciousness,’’ as Anderson
names him,47 heroically tears down the illusive opposition between light
and dark and refuses to be overshadowed by either. He is the solitary war-
rior that Lu Xun later celebrates in Yecao (Wild grass), the rebel who will
always raise his javelin of skepticism and toss it forward, not to confirm
or probe but to challenge and displace.48
The concluding line of ‘‘Diary of a Madman’’ strikes me as explosively
elliptic. ‘‘Save the children . . .’’ (). Who will save them from what?
From becoming cannibals? So that they, as the ‘‘real human beings,’’ will
be spared, start a new era, and consequently own a present time to be
neither ashamed of nor proud of, with no history to escape from or iden-
tify with? Or save them from being devoured by ourselves? So that when
they grow up and become acquainted with a ,-year history of canni-
balism, they will only be shocked to find that they have all the time been
eating their own kind? Or, in yet another possibility, must the children
be saved from being eaten and from becoming eaters of others? Who, in
that case, is to accomplish this redemptive task, and from what vantage
point can such a salvation defy both history and the present?
Just as intriguing is the ultimate absence of the Madman in the story.
We are told, indirectly by his older brother, that he has recovered from
his mental lapses and is away from the village waiting for an official post.

. Wang, Biography of Lu Xun, .

. Anderson, The Limits of Realism, .
. See Yecao (Wild grass), collected in The Complete Works of Lu Xun, :–.
 ‘‘Diary of a Madman’’ 73

His diary is the only trace we have of his madness as well as of his exis-
tence. He may have returned to being normal, but he may also have been
devoured, both figuratively and literally, by the villagers. It is through his
absence that the Madman keeps us from studying him as a realistic object,
from regarding him as an identifiable other. With his physical presence
removed, we are compelled to directly encounter the Madman’s inner
world and subjectivity. We find ourselves reading between the lines and
trying to imagine the condition under which he wrote down his intimate
fears and visions. Our reading of the Madman’s diary, therefore, is largely
driven and determined by a desire, incited by the narrative framework,
to overcome his absence, to make present a past moment as it was actu-
ally lived. Such also is the Madman’s obsession when faced with a history
book without chronology.
The ambiguity of the Madman’s last words, therefore, derives from the
structure of the story as a whole, in which the reading of the text is pre-
scribed as a continuous and open-ended process. From a comparative
study of Lu Xun’s thought, some may argue that this last sentence ex-
presses his principle of hope and belief in evolution.49 Others may con-
clude from a reductive understanding of social practices that Lu Xun is
calling for action to overthrow the entire cannibalistic system. It seems
to me, however, that this sentence poses not so much the hope or pos-
sibility of a better future as it does the modernist problem of history.
History is that which can never be undone. The children must be saved
from being severed from the past, however nightmarish it may be, and
also from being preyed upon by the historically determined present. One
keeps history alive and dead, present and removed, at the same time by
continuously rereading and rewriting it. By reading and rereading the
past—as a text, as a space filled up with tension and forces—one can dis-
tance it so that it both intervenes in and yet submits itself to the present.
At this juncture the modernist obsession with language and with the con-
dition of meaning comes in and asserts itself as deeply political. A mod-
ernist politics, in the end, invariably begins with examining how a given
representation of reality is always already outmoded.

. For a discussion of Lu Xun’s belief in evolution, see Susanne Weigelin-

Schwiedrzik, ‘‘Lu Xun und das ‘Prinzip Hoffnung’: Eine Untersuchung seiner Rezep-
tion der Theorin von Huxley und Nietzsche,’’ Bochumer Jahrbuch zur Ostasienforschung
(Bochum: Brochmeyer, ), –, esp. .
Excursion I
Beyond Homesickness: An Intimate Reading
of Lu Xun’s ‘‘My Native Land’’

The initial and hermeneutically challenging difficulty of reading Lu Xun’s

 short story ‘‘Guxiang’’ (My native land) lies in its very title. A stock
phrase in Chinese language and cultural semantics, the two-character
compound commands a rich cluster of variations such as guli, guyuan,
gutu, and guguo. One of the earliest and most memorable usages of the
phrase guxiang occurs in Sima Qian’s (ca. – ..) Shi ji (Records
of the historian), in which the triumphant return of Liu Bang (ca. –
 ..), founding Emperor Gaozu of the Western Han dynasty, to his
hometown at the end of his life is described in great detail. During a feast
to which he summons all his old friends, neighbors, and relatives, the
aging Gaozu is stricken with deep sorrow, lets tears stream down his face,
and explains to those present: ‘‘The traveler always pines for his native
land [youzi bei guxiang].’’ 1 This candid revelation by a legendary hero of
his private feelings contains such mythopoetic power as to have shaped
an emotive pattern and permeated a collective pathos. Ever since the high
Tang period of the eighth century, when poetic giants excelled in ele-
vating homesickness to an archetypal human longing, guxiang as subject
matter has been fully developed into a fertile field for cultivating com-

. See Burton Watson, trans., Records of the Historian: Chapters from the Shih chi of
Ssu-ma Ch’ien (New York: Columbia University Press, ), , where the sentence
is translated as ‘‘The traveler sighs for his old home.’’ Before this moment, Gaozu sings
a song that he composes at the banquet: ‘‘A great wind came forth; / The clouds rose
on high. / Now that my might rules all within the seas, / I have returned to my old
village. Where shall I find brave men / To guard the four corners of my land?’’ For
the original text, see Shi ji jin zhu (Records of the historian with contemporary anno-
tations), annotated by Ma Chiying (Taipei: Commercial Press, ), :. Inciden-
tally, the French translation of Gaozu’s saying by Édouard Chavannes sheds a different
light on the notion of guxiang than Watson’s rendition of it as ‘‘old village’’: ‘‘Le voya-
geur s’afflige en pensant à sa terre natale.’’ Chavannes, trans. and annot., Les mémoires
historiques de Se-ma Ts’ien (Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient, ), :. This
difference will become relevant in the discussion below.
 Beyond Homesickness 75

munal sentiment as well as artistic and literary sensibilities. The image

and concept of guxiang best indicates a primary structure of feeling and
frequently provokes a melancholic nostalgia that reaches metaphysical
heights while also suggesting allegorical dimensions. Literally meaning
‘‘old country,’’ the phrase pits an existential temporality against an exter-
nal and emphatically rural, often even pastoral, landscape. Like all such
key words in a signifying language, guxiang describes as well as prescribes
a mode of human relationship and experience. In articulating a vital at-
tachment and sense of belonging that is predicated on a spatio-temporal
displacement and the subsequent possibility of nostalgia, the phrase, with
its layered associations, encodes and transmits a complex conception of
home, communal life, and the private self.
The richness and invocatory power of such an overcharged expression
may be illustrated by the range of choices available for rendering it into
another language. The accepted and widely used English translation of
Lu Xun’s ‘‘Guxiang,’’ by Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang, is titled ‘‘My Old
Home,’’ whereas a French version, put out by Peking Foreign Languages
Press in , reads ‘‘Mon village natal.’’ 2 If these two titles may already
activate starkly distinct images and memories, an earlier German transla-
tion, ‘‘Die Heimat’’ (),3 evokes yet another and much more intense
feeling of homesickness and devotion. The implication of the German
word is evidently different from the English ‘‘hometown,’’ which is the
title that William Lyell gave to his recent translation of the same story.4
The inevitable mismatch in capturing the associative content of the title
‘‘Guxiang’’ was duly noted by Chi-chen Wang, who, as one of the earli-
est English translators of Lu Xun’s work, published Ah Q and Others:
Selected Stories of Lusin in . In a footnote,Wang explained that guxiang
can be town or country and it ‘‘indicates an indefinite region or district

. The Yang and Yang English translation was initially also sponsored by Peking
Foreign Languages Press (st ed. ), but it has since been republished by Norton
(New York, ). The Yang and Yang version was collected in the anthology Modern
Chinese Short Stories and Novellas, –, ed. Joseph Lau, C. T. Hsia and Leo Ou-fan
Lee (New York: Columbia University Press, ), –.
. O. Benl, trans. ‘‘Die Heimat,’’ in Story/Erzahler des Auslands  (August ), re-
ferred to by Irene Eber, ‘‘Selective Bibliography,’’ in Lu Xun and His Legacy, ed. Leo
Ou-fan Lee (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), .
. William A. Lyell, trans., Lu Xun: ‘‘Diary of a Madman’’ and Other Stories (Hono-
lulu: University of Hawaii Press, ), –.
76 Chinese Modern

rather than any specific place.’’ For him, ‘‘there is no better equivalent for
the Chinese term’’ than ‘‘My Native Heath,’’ although ‘‘heath’’ admittedly
sounds more Scottish than English.5
This studied use of ‘‘heath’’ in translating Lu Xun’s story, however,
turned out to be too idiosyncratic to gain sustained currency. Nonethe-
less, Chi-chen Wang’s deliberation brings to the fore a crucial component
of what stands as a paradigmatic narrative in modern Chinese literature,
namely, the recognition of landscape. This recognition has to overcome
an initial estrangement or misrecognition, and it is then achieved through
a withdrawal or a journey that increasingly turns inward. At the end
of the journey an imaginary land appears where the narrating, autobio-
graphical subject is able to reconcile the ineluctable lapse of time with
an altered human geography. The sense of recognition arrives as a thera-
peutic relief and leads to a miraculous discovery of an inner home, an
imaginary landscape that derives from and yet transcends the old coun-
try. This transformed landscape symbolically gives a new life to the nar-
rator because it now turns into a source of spiritual resilience. The native
land, in short, engenders another birth, a self-conscious regeneration. On
this account and for reasons that will become apparent later, I propose to
translate the title of Lu Xun’s story as ‘‘My Native Land,’’ intending for
each word to designate an indispensable aspect of the encounter between
the subject and its inescapable other, between historical time and altered
space.
Aside from the need for recognition, the motif of journey, and the
epiphany in coming upon an imaginary homeland, Lu Xun’s story as a
paradigmatic narrative also voices the anguish and despair of the first gen-
eration of modern, educated Chinese. The encounter with an unrecog-
nizable landscape quickly translates into an examination of the historical
conflict between different realities and knowledge systems. The narrating
subject’s impulse to distinguish a familiar landscape from the unfamil-
iar one compels him to adopt a mode of realist representation, through
which the distance between reality and anticipation acquires a social and
moral valence. This moralized perception of difference enables a strik-
ingly detailed human portraiture in the story to appear as metonymic of
a disappointing reality. On a metafictional level, therefore, the narrative

. Chi-chen Wang, trans., ‘‘My Native Heath,’’ Ah Q and Others: Selected Stories of
Lusin (New York: Columbia University Press, ),  n..
 Beyond Homesickness 77

of ‘‘My Native Land’’ can even be read as a fable of the condition of pos-
sibility for realist fiction in modern Chinese literature.
The goal of this reading exercise is to closely follow the imagery, logic,
and reasoning that underlie the story, and to unpack the dense and com-
plex narrative. Our intimate reading will be digressional and sympathetic,
because we will try to experience the narrative as if from within. An inti-
mate relationship with the text demands that we be transformed by the
experience of reading, decoding, and reassembling the text. It also im-
plies that the text is produced anew and brought to bear on matters and
conditions that are of our own concern. Entering the text is no doubt the
first step toward placing both the text and ourselves in the ongoing inter-
pretive process. In our reading, we will be concerned with what may be
called a ‘‘homesickness complex’’ and its sublimation within the story. We
will also encounter questions of subjectivity, language, sexuality, mem-
ory, and fantasy. What we will be exploring intimately is indeed the con-
densed psychobiography of a modern Chinese male consciousness.

Approaching the Homeland

The following are two renditions of the well-known first sentence of ‘‘My
Native Land.’’

Braving the bitter cold, I travelled more than seven hundred miles back to
the old home I had left over twenty years before. (Yang and Yang, )

Braving the bone-cold weather, I was headed back to my hometown, a

hometown from which I was separated by over six hundred miles and more
than twenty years. (Lyell, ) 6

. Both translations have their strengths, although William Lyell’s rendition uses
more idiomatic American English and offers a better read. In the following discussion,
I indicate which translation I quote with the translators’ names and a page number. I
put ‘‘cf.’’ in front of the reference to indicate where I modify the translation to make
it closer to the original. The page numbers given for the Yangs’ translation are to the
Norton edition, , –; for Lyell’s translation, page numbers refer to the 
University of Hawaii edition. I also replace the Wade-Giles system for transliteration
in the Yang and Yang translation with the now standard pinyin. For the Chinese ver-
sion, see Lu Xun quanji (The complete works of Lu Xun) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue,
), :–.
78 Chinese Modern

Readers with some knowledge of Lu Xun would know that this story has
a definitely autobiographical framework. It is largely based on Lu Xun’s
trip to Shaoxing in December  to bring his mother, wife, and sec-
ond younger brother to Beijing, where he had been working as a minor
government clerk. The ‘‘over twenty years’’ of separation refers to his
first leaving home at age seventeen. According to his  narration, in
 the teenage Lu Xun (then Zhou Shuren) had left his hometown for
Nanjing in the hope of ‘‘taking on a new path, fleeing to a fresh place,
and searching for different people.’’ 7 That initial leave-taking was a de-
termined flight toward something new and different; it was also the ori-
gin of the narrating subject’s fated relationship to an old home, a distant
native land. For the formation of a native land necessarily presupposes a
departure from, even an active rejection of, the land and the symbolic uni-
verse of which the returning visitor was until that moment of separation
an involuntary part.
In recounting his current return, the narrator begins with the first-
person pronoun, much in the same way that Lu Xun called attention
to the autobiographical subject through its opening sentence in the self-
preface to his first collection of short stories Nahan (Call to arms, ).
Appropriately, the original first sentence in ‘‘My Native Land’’ is so struc-
tured that, between the subject wo and its destination guxiang, it places
the description of a spatio-temporal separation and the effort to over-
come it. Between ‘‘myself ’’ and ‘‘my native land’’ now lies a large narra-
tive space that bespeaks the impossibility of the narrating subject achiev-
ing a complete return. Once separated, the narrator and his native land
cannot but maintain the relationship between a subject and an object,
although the subject, as we will witness, is not always the active or agen-
tial one as might be expected. To some extent, his native land necessarily
participates in the formation of the narrator’s selfhood or subjectivity.
An absent presence, the native land has become the other that is always
within the narrating subject and in terms of which he needs to tell his
story and narrate his origin. It thus stakes a permanent claim on his exis-
tence and self-consciousness. No matter how far he may drift away from
this landscape, he cannot escape it, just as he is not equipped to step out-
side his own body.
. This is a literal translation of part of Lu Xun’s own preface to his Nahan (Call to
arms). See The Complete Works of Lu Xun, :–; for an English translation of the
text, see Yang and Yang, Lu Xun: Selected Stories (New York: Norton, ), –.
 Beyond Homesickness 79

Even more strikingly, the original first sentence ends with a directional
co-verb qu (to go) that puts the narrator in an intriguing position. For
this verb suggests that the present narration about this trip home in the
past is conducted away from the hometown. (The implied perspective
would be radically altered should the co-verb be lai [to come], which is
syntactically possible and would place the narrator in contiguity with,
not away from, his hometown.) The word choice conveys a detachment
with which the narrator, in anticipating the end of his travel, views his
homecoming as a transitory return or even a business trip. The centrifu-
gal mobility that the verb institutes betrays a condition of rootlessness
with which the narrating subject will have to come to terms during and
through his journey. The happy conventional plot of the prodigal son is
therefore instantly canceled; neither is much sense of relief or pride con-
veyed at returning to one’s roots.
Still further removed is the likelihood of the kind of royal treatment
that the Emperor Gaozu must have received. On the contrary, the de-
tachment embedded in the first sentence already points to the structure
of a hard and unsentimental adult world that the narrator now inhab-
its. For he will soon divulge the less-than-inspiring purpose of his trip as
to ‘‘move away from this familiar countryside to the strange and faraway
place where I now earned my keep’’ (Lyell, ). He comes home to take
a final leave, because the old family compound—the concrete site and
symbol of reassuring propinquity and closeness—has been sold, and the
transaction is to be completed before the end of the year. This commer-
cial change of hands is to render the native land even more abstract and
to make the narrator an indifferent outsider to it as much as he is to the
‘‘strange and faraway place’’ where he makes a living. His coming home
is indeed to witness yet another loss, but this time it bears the weight of
a more comprehensive and thorough disenchantment.
The disenchantment, stemming from the exposed fragility of sentiment
in the face of commercial exchange, is compounded by the growing gap
between reality and memory as the narrator approaches his destination.

As we drew near my former home the day became overcast and a cold wind
blew into the cabin of our boat, while all one could see through the chinks
in our bamboo awning were a few desolate villages, devoid of any sign of
life, scattered far and near under the sombre yellow sky. I could not help
feeling depressed.
80 Chinese Modern

Ah! Surely this was not the old home I had remembered for the past
twenty years? (cf. Yang and Yang, )

‘‘Approaching my hometown’’ is always an intense moment that incites

the remembering subject to anticipate; it is also an emotional occasion
for overdetermined interpretation and self-explanation. ‘‘Drawing near’’
in space helps to activate distant and buried memories about the land-
scape and one’s past existence. The moment of approaching is therefore a
liminal one in that it sets into motion all static categories and compels the
subject to become aware of his own transformation and difference. It ac-
celerates the precarious procedure of investigating depths—inside as well
as outside. Whatever the homeland scenery appears to be in its present
condition, its concrete reality, when subjected to a comparison with the
remembered and internalized native land, cannot but embody externality
and strangeness. The inner homeland, as the narrator goes on to acknowl-
edge, is always abstract and unrepresentable. ‘‘The land that I remem-
bered was not in the least like this. My native land was far more lovely.
But if you asked me to recall its peculiar charm or describe its beauties, I
had no concrete images, no words to describe it’’ (cf. Yang and Yang, ).
A sense of facing an impassive reality arises when the abstract native
land reveals itself to be other than and in excess of the scenery before
one’s eyes. Reality sets in to signal an inadequacy, a failure to live up to or
reproduce an imaginary intensity and plenitude. Critical realism, in turn,
ultimately amounts to a representational effort to underscore reality as
apathetic failure and to throw into relief the disparity between the ob-
served and the anticipated. The realistic portrayal is an implicit decoding
in terms of a utopian and different other—or a preexisting empty frame,
as Roland Barthes once called it. ‘‘To describe is thus to place the empty
frame which the realistic author always carries with him (more important
than his easel) before a collection or continuum of objects which can-
not be put into words without this obsessive operation.’’ 8 This process
of framing and matching, initiated at the moment of approaching the
scene of unimaginative reality, will reach a dramatic point when the nar-
rator reads the physiognomy of his childhood friend Runtu. Thus, more
than an emotional excitement, ‘‘approaching my hometown’’ awakens a
cognitive impulse that drives realist discourse.

. Roland Barthes, ‘‘Painting as a Model,’’ S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York:
Hill and Wang, ), .
 Beyond Homesickness 81

This cognitive operation of realism will help the narrating subject es-
tablish a critical relationship to the impoverished scene of reality that he
enters. It gives rise to a hermeneutic exercise through which the first-
person narrator constantly seeks signs and offers explanations. ‘‘At dawn
the next day I reached the gateway of my family compound’’ (cf. Yang and
Yang, ). From the broken stems of withered grass up on the tile roof to
the disquieting silence and deserted rooms—all yield a sign of disrepair
and decline. When the mother comes out, the narrator sees what is not
shown or obvious but what may be expected. It is this sensation of seeing
the unseen and hearing the unsaid that accords the narrator a sobering
sense of confronting the truth of reality. ‘‘Though mother was delighted,
she was also trying to hide a certain feeling of sadness’’ (Yang and Yang,
).9 Even the manner in which she asks him to rest and have some tea
makes him suspect a pointed avoidance of the topic of relocating. With
his mother is his eight-year-old nephew, Hong’er, who meets the narra-
tor for the first time and observes the guest with curiosity from a timid
distance.
A multiple network of inquiring gazes thus quietly connects family
members of three separate generations. The most notable absence at the
moment appears to be the father—the narrator’s as well as Hong’er’s
father. The narrator will later recall his own father as a benevolent but dis-
tant figure, while Hong’er seems to be searching for a surrogate father in
examining his uncle, who is apparently a stranger. In some fundamental
modern Chinese narratives, such as Lu Xun’s ‘‘Diary of a Madman’’ and
Ba Jin’s Family, the absent or enfeebled father often embodies an inexpli-
cable failure that has both collective and personal pathogens. It is a symp-
tomatic absence that reflects the bankruptcy of patriarchal authority, or
the impossible condition of locating a father figure in one’s biological
father.10 Lu Xun’s own writing about the illness and death of his father
effectively turned the pained paternal body into a symbol of national
suffering. In the present situation between the narrator and Hong’er, a
new bond will be formed that differs from and appears more modern
and more hopeful than the traditional father-son lineage that Runtu con-
tinues to practice.

. The less literal translation of this sentence by Lyell reads: ‘‘Though she was obvi-
ously happy to see me, I also read hints of melancholy in her face’’ ().
. See chaps.  and  for further discussion of the symbolism surrounding the father
figure.
82 Chinese Modern

At last, the conversation between mother and son comes to the details
of moving. ‘‘I said that rooms had already been rented up north, and I
had bought a little furniture; in addition it would be necessary to sell all
the furniture in the house here in order to buy more things’’ (cf. Yang
and Yang, ). Almost imperceptibly, the emotionally charged return visit
winds down to become as plain as buying and selling used furniture.
There is an increasing weariness about describing business transactions
in an adult world. On this practical level of livelihood, the narrator has
no more attachment to the old house or his native land than to the sal-
able household goods. Again, the logic of commercial exchange serves to
wipe out the depth and emotional investment that goes into the notion
of ‘‘native land.’’ Mundane worries and calculations momentarily keep the
final farewell from reaching its global proportion and make the prospect
more manageable.

Remembering the Homeland

Yet the dull concreteness of the adult world is interrupted as soon as the
mother speaks of Runtu, almost as an afterthought, when she enumer-
ates relatives and friends they should visit before departing. The mere
mention of Runtu’s name triggers, ‘‘as if through a flash of lightning,’’
spectacular childhood memories and releases the anamnestic image of a
‘‘young hero.’’ ‘‘At this point a strange picture suddenly flashed into my
mind: a golden moon suspended in a deep blue sky and beneath it the
seashore, planted as far as the eye could see with jade-green watermelons,
while in their midst a boy of eleven or twelve, wearing a silver necklet and
grasping a steel pitchfork in his hand, was thrusting with all his might at
a zha which dodged the blow and escaped between his legs’’ (Yang and
Yang, ). In contrast to the gray and desolate landscape of reality, this
magic vision conjures up a fantasy land where the primary colors are in-
tense and vibrant, the space is infinite, and the action of a young boy is
playful and yet heroic. This is also an imaginary scene recalled because, as
it becomes clear later, the narrator as a young boy never had the chance
to visit Runtu by the ocean. Nor did he ever witness the escape of a crafty
creature called the zha. Yet this childhood fantasy is now remembered as
anamnestic of a different and removed existence that is ever more vivid
and meaningful than the present gloominess. It participates in a truly uto-
 Beyond Homesickness 83

pian vision, if only because such a gorgeously fulfilling life was never to
be achieved but merely anticipated. Still, the remembered fantasy releases
a romantic longing for infinity that abnegates the mundaneness and frag-
mentation of the adult world. More importantly, essential to this vista—
at least from the perspective of the nostalgic subject—is a child’s purpose-
ful but disinterested play.
Once awakened, childhood memories usher in a stream of objects,
scenes, occasions, wishes, and narratives, through which the mind’s eye is
refocused and ‘‘I seemed to see my beautiful native land’’ again (cf. Yang
and Yang, ).11 A forgotten language, or indeed a different sign system,
has to be excavated and set up as the frame before the narrator can bring
his native land into focus. Or, to extend Jacques Lacan’s metaphor, the
‘‘archival documents’’ of childhood memories, in which the unconscious
as hidden truth ‘‘has already been written down,’’ are now released and
made readable.12 In recounting his acquaintance with Runtu more than
thirty years ago, the narrator assumes the position of a cultural anthro-
pologist and describes a bygone world with its rigorous customs and ritu-
als. He explains the prayer and analogical thinking that go into Runtu’s
name, which amounts to an ingenuous overcoming of a feared deficiency.
Even before his first appearance, Runtu already excites anticipation be-
cause all the young narrator cares about is that Runtu knows how to ‘‘set
up traps and catch small birds’’ (Yang and Yang, ). To the narrator, the
name ‘‘Runtu’’ from the beginning signifies a mode of free and creative
play that is lacking from his own day-to-day schooling.
When he finally arrives from the countryside, the boy Runtu brings
not only a new friendship, a rare opportunity to play, but also a fresh
and figurative speech. He introduces an adventurous outside world to
the teenage narrator, who with his everyday schoolmates would nor-
mally have ‘‘nothing to look out on but the square patch of sky that was
visible above the high walls of a family courtyard’’ (Lyell, ). The names
and nouns that Runtu utters, because they possess no specific referents
but only exotic associations for the listener, turn into a colorful chain of
signifiers: husks, pheasants, hornchicks, paddychicks, bluebacks, ghost-

. Again, compare with the more elaborate Lyell translation: ‘‘For a fraction of a
second, I even seemed to recapture that beautiful homeland I thought I had lost’’ (–
).
. Jacques Lacan, ‘‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psycho-
analysis,’’ in his Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, ), .
84 Chinese Modern

scarers, Guanyin hands, badgers, porcupines, jumperfish, and the zha. To

recapture the impact of this new experience, the narrator coins a linguistic
sign zha and uses it to refer metonymically to an imaginative reality and
playfulness unknown to him. ‘‘I had no idea then what this thing called
zha was—and I am not much clearer now for that matter—but some-
how I felt it was something like a small dog, and very fierce’’ (Yang and
Yang, ). The concocted word and image of zha, intimately associated
with young Runtu and his magic world, becomes the sign par excellence
of a different realm of reality from what the narrator finds familiar and
uninteresting.
Together with his string of new nouns, Runtu also supplies a series of
ministories, without which the exotic birds and fish would hardly come
to life. What the young narrator misses, as a boy from the small town,
are such narratable experiences and adventures. ‘‘I had never known that
all these strange things existed: at the seashore there were shells all colors
of the rainbow; watermelons were exposed to such danger, yet all I had
known of them before was that they were sold in the greengrocer’s’’ (Yang
and Yang, ). The fruit at the greengrocer’s is already an abstraction, be-
cause it is removed from the environment in which it grows, and also
because it is a commodity to be purchased through monetary exchange.
It shrinks into the flattened, uniform residue of an organic life cycle that
involves human time and labor. The heaps of fruit in a store may con-
vey the idea of abundance, but they also display a splendid poverty of
experience. This deceptive appearance of a marketplace seems to stimu-
late young Runtu during his trip to town, but there is no story to tell,
nor much depth to look into. ‘‘I don’t know what we talked of then, but
I remember that Runtu was in high spirits, saying that since he had come
to town he had seen many new things’’ (Yang and Yang, ). Not sur-
prisingly, the exciting ‘‘new things’’ that first strike Runtu never become
concrete enough or even get named by the narrator as a young child. In-
trigued by the rich experience of the visitor from another realm of reality,
he only has time to feel embarrassed by his eventless and restrained life.
In light of Runtu’s enticing tales, his world appears unbearably narrow
and abstract. After his visit is over, Runtu still asks his father to bring ‘‘a
packet of shells and a few beautiful bird feathers,’’ but all the young narra-
tor can do in return, again, is to send him ‘‘some things a few times’’ (cf.
Lyell, )—abstract objects that remain unnamed or simply unspecifiable.
Runtu’s visit to town, incidentally, also reminds us that the generic
 Beyond Homesickness 85

notion of guxiang may refer to an area larger than the countryside. For
the narrator, his native land obviously includes the small town where he
grows up. His nostalgia for ‘‘guxiang,’’ or what may be called a proto-
typical ‘‘homesickness complex,’’ therefore describes a primordial attach-
ment to a certain life form or stage that is not necessarily bound to a rural
setting. Since the formation of a native land is one of the first signs of
coming of age that signals irreversible entrance into adulthood, the nos-
talgia for one’s native land is often more concretely expressed as a long-
ing for one’s lost childhood. Their similar psychotropic impact brings
together one’s native land and childhood, because both may be made into
depositories of a mythical contentment free of anxiety, or into metonyms
of an imaginary plenitude prior to the strictures of the symbolic order.
More generally, a visit to one’s native land may turn into a sentimen-
tal journey and yield a lyrical literary topic only when the prospect of
achieving reconciliation with oneself becomes problematic and is put on
trial. The ensuing pathos of lament or regret underscores a fundamental
misrecognition and brings to the fore the incoherence or discontinuity
in one’s life experience, now magnified and given a physical contour in
the external landscape.13 The journey deep into past territories as inscrip-
tions of the unconscious also prompts intense self-review and a global
reflection on one’s condition of existence. Often, as the narrating subject
fondly recalls, in vivid detail, an innocent and playful childhood, we de-
tect a disillusionment with and questioning of the cold, harsh reality of
the adult world.
As a narrative genre, which Lu Xun was first to name and characterize
in , modern Chinese native-land literature (xiangtu wenxue, or lit-
erary nativism) often sublimates anxiety about entering the adult world
into a critical thrust against modern urban culture; it has the basic struc-
ture of transforming a private reminiscence into an expression of utopian
longing. In straightforward terms, Lu Xun describes the necessary con-
dition of displacement for native-land literature to be written. ‘‘Before
a writer sets out to write native-land literature, he finds himself already
exiled from his home, driven by life to a strange place. What can he
do but recall his father’s garden, a garden which does not exist any-

. For a discussion of the ethos of nostalgia in modern Chinese literature, see David
Der-wei Wang, ‘‘Towards a Poetics of Imaginary Nostalgia,’’ in his Fictional Realism
in Twentieth-Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen (New York: Columbia
University Press, ), –.
86 Chinese Modern

more?’’ 14 The motivation and rhetorical operation of such narratives is

therefore the seeking, in childhood memories, of an imaginary compen-
sation for present dissatisfaction. As a literary form devoted to reliving
absent scenes and private moments, native-land literature cannot fail to
be a hypersubjective form of writing. It is a kind of writing that draws
on the ‘‘archival documents’’ of the unconscious and helps the narrating
subject recognize, as Lacan would suggest, his unconscious not merely as
his history, but also as ‘‘the discourse of the other.’’ 15 Herein lies the sym-
bolic function of native-land literature. As a literary form that explores
the incidental and remembered fragments of experience, native-land lit-
erature compels as well as accomplishes an inquiry into the realm of the
unconscious. In engaging in the discourse of alterity, nostalgic writings
antithetically outline large and external forces that drive memories and
desires inward and into the unconscious. Native-land literature, in other
words, may be both the symptom of civilizational discontent and its cure.
It is a therapeutic writing because it allows for a contemplative subjec-
tivity and opens up access to other visions of social life and the future.
Sustained literary interest in the subject matter of homeland or home-
sickness only testifies to the great need for such a therapeutic relief in
twentieth-century China.16
According to one representative analysis, Lu Xun’s own native-land
narratives (including other stories such as ‘‘New Year’s Sacrifice’’ and ‘‘In
the Wineshop’’) depict a second loss: one returns home to lose it again
and perhaps even for good. In these stories the alienation of the male
visitor from his homeland is often taken as an allegory of ‘‘the antago-
nism between a modern intellectual, cultivated in Western civilization
and ideas, and the stagnant communal society that is still locked in tra-
ditional Chinese culture and thought patterns.’’ 17 Indeed, native-land lit-

. Lu Xun, Preface to Xiandai Zhongguo wenxue daxi (Compendium of modern

Chinese literature),  vols., ed. Zhao Jiabi (Shanghai: Liangyou tushu gongsi, –
), :.
. Lacan, ‘‘The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,’’
–.
. For a comprehensive anthology, see Tiandong cao: yi guxiang (Chinese aspara-
gus: remembrances of the native land), ed. Deng Jiuping and Yu Haiying (Beijing:
Zhongguo duiwai fanyi, ). To some extent, even the xiangtu literary movement in
Taiwan during the early s expressed the same psychological need.
. Yang Jianlong, ‘‘Lun Lu Xun de xiangtu qingjie yu xiangtu xiaoshuo’’ (‘‘On Lu
 Beyond Homesickness 87

erature is also bound to be a self-consciously allegorical mode of writing,

upon which depends the salient and substituting translatability between
private sentiments and social commentary. Finally, native-land literature
must rely on realist techniques to satisfy its descriptive impulse, while its
ethos is recognizably lyrical, and its ultimate vision deeply utopian.

(Mis)Recognizing the Homeland

If the journey through one’s native land leads to the innermost child-
hood memories being discovered as the unconscious, either incidentally
or through concentrated efforts, the contemporary reality of one’s home-
town does not emerge fully until one as a visitor is looked at and rec-
ognized (or rather misrecognized) as a stranger. A failure to recognize,
which Lacan points out as essential to self-recognition and knowledge,18
occurs to redefine the subject’s position and his relationship to others.
When the narrating subject arrives at his family compound, he is greeted
by his mother and nephew as a family member. Hong’er examines his
uncle with curiosity, but since no other identification is possible, nor is
there the need for mutual recognition, no description follows. During
the conversation between Hong’er and the narrator, the young boy learns
that he will soon be taking a train ride and a boat trip and will leave
this place. The narrator makes a point of asking whether Hong’er likes
traveling, but is the young boy fully aware of and prepared for the conse-
quences of this expected departure?

‘‘Oh! Like this? With such a long moustache!’’ A strange shrill voice sud-
denly rang out.
I looked up with a start, and saw a woman of about fifty with promi-
nent cheekbones and thin lips. With her hands on her hips, not wearing a
skirt but with her trousered legs apart, she stood in front of me just like a
compass in a box of geometrical instruments. (cf. Yang and Yang, )

Xun’s native-land complex and native-land fiction’’), Lu Xun yanjiu yuekang (Lu Xun
studies monthly), no.  (June ): –, esp. .
. For one version of Lacan’s theorization, see ‘‘Subversion of the Subject and Dia-
lectic of Desire,’’ in Écrits: A Selection, – where the original French description is
given as ‘‘un méconnaître essentiel au me connaître.’’
88 Chinese Modern

The first jolting description of the narrating subject as a stranger thus

results from an instance of mutual misrecognition. The pronouncement
of the loud woman abruptly makes the narrator realize, as if looking in an
unflattering mirror, how other people in town may and will (mis)recog-
nize him—with shock and disbelief. Moreover, with her comment about
his ‘‘long moustache,’’ the woman forces him to see himself first as a body
fragment and then as an adult male, images grotesquely irreconcilable
with the longing and private child whom he has just recalled as his own
self. In reaction to such fragmentary identifications, the narrator grows
defensive and engages in a similar misrecognition; the less than pleasing
features that he notices first are therefore her ‘‘prominent cheekbones and
thin lips.’’ 19 This misrecognition, which consists in reducing the object
of observation to a fragmented body, follows a synecdochic procedure
and institutes a realistic recognition—the revelatory astonishment at see-
ing reality as less than the imagined fullness or plenitude. Even though
the narrator already experiences such a painful encounter with reality on
approaching an unrecognizable landscape, the moment of mutual mis-
recognition still shakes him profoundly, because he now perforce sees
himself being seen and undergoes the primal ‘‘deflection of the specular
I into the social I.’’ 20 The human body grows to be a more bitter record
of ruinous reality than does landscape.
Seeing how flabbergasted the narrator is, the unexpected stranger goes
further and stakes her claim to familiarity and even physical intimacy:
‘‘Don’t you recognize me? Why, I held you in my arms before!’’ (cf.
Yang and Yang, ). At this turn of intimate misrecognition, childhood
or infancy turns into a liability, and the narrator’s identity or selfhood
is psychologically arrested in and held hostage to a helpless infant body.
Only with his mother’s helpful hints does the narrator recall that the
woman before him is Second Sister Yang, who, as the Beancurd Beauty,
used to attract many customers to her bean curd shop. However, ‘‘prob-
ably because of my tender age, I must have been immune to the alchemy
of her charms, for I had forgotten her completely’’ (cf. Lyell, –).
Once again, the present situation delivers a blunt reminder of the re-
moteness of his childhood. As if in a psychoanalytical minidrama, Sec-

. For Lacan’s classic discussion of the impact of a ‘‘fragmented body’’ vis-à-vis
the Gestalt of a subject’s total body, see his ‘‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the
Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,’’ in Écrits: A Selection, –.
. Ibid., .
 Beyond Homesickness 89

ond Sister Yang plays the part of a ‘‘bad mother,’’ who is cold, seduc-
tive, and domineering. The most insidious aspect of her character is her
close symbolic association, as well as semiotic association, with the nar-
rator’s natural mother. She held him as a baby; she is introduced by the
mother; and, while exiting the scene, she steals the mother’s gloves. The
shrewd, compasslike woman makes it clear that the narrator no longer
can claim innocence from adult sexuality, even when he is at home with
his mother; yet she also derives pleasure from subjecting him to an in-
fantile position. Assaulted by her flirtatious teases and mockery (calling
him, inappropriately, ‘‘Elder Brother Xun,’’ and alleging that he now pos-
sesses three concubines), the narrator falls speechless, apparently as the
result of an incapacitating confusion over which language to speak and
which identity to assume. ‘‘Knowing there was nothing I could say, I re-
mained silent and simply stood there’’ (cf. Yang and Yang, ; Lyell, ).
Her outrageous behavior is so disconcerting that the narrator’s wit and
knowledge (including his learned references to Napoleon and Washing-
ton) appear helplessly pale and pointless.
The unscrupulous Second Sister Yang threatens the integrity of the nar-
rator’s self-conception by imposing on him two incompatible roles: an
amiable baby boy vis-à-vis a lascivious adult man. Her entrance into the
scene, preceded by her ‘‘shrill voice,’’ puts the narrator in a defenseless
position from the start. In that initial moment, she easily dominates the
situation by first voicing her surprise at how drastically the narrator’s ap-
pearance has changed. The narrator, surprised by her piercing gaze, never
manages to set himself entirely free.
Yet a similar scene of (mis)recognition soon repeats itself, with differ-
ent intersubjective dynamics at work. ‘‘One very cold afternoon just after
lunch I was sitting and drinking tea when I heard someone come in from
the outside. When I turned around to look I couldn’t help but start with
surprise. I scrambled to my feet and rushed over to welcome him’’ (Lyell,
). This time the narrator takes the initiative, although the sense of being
approached and the element of surprise are still present. In actively direct-
ing his look and recognizing the other person, the narrator assumes con-
trol over the unfolding scene. However, the same crisis of language and
communication erupts, because the problematic relationship between a
gazing subject and his object of observation persists. Besides, in this in-
stance it also becomes abundantly clear to the narrator that recognition
involves no less than perceiving reality as a painful failure.
90 Chinese Modern

It was Runtu. Although I recognized him right off, he was not at all the
Runtu who lived in my memory. He seemed twice as tall now. The round
and ruddy face of yesteryear had already turned pale and grey, and it was
etched with deep wrinkles. The rims of his eyes were swollen and red just
like his father’s. I knew that most farmers who worked close to the sea
got that way because of the wind. He was wearing a battered old felt hat,
and his cotton clothes were so thin that he was shivering. His hands held a
paper package along with his pipe. They were not the smooth and nimble
hands that I remembered. Now they were rough, clumsy, and as cracked as
pine bark. (Lyell, )

This description presents arguably one of the earliest and most memo-
rable realist portraitures in modern Chinese literature. Its success has to
do with the shock in recognition, for with striking strokes it makes visible
a familiar stranger. The description of Runtu and of other details about
him is motivated by a systematic comparison with the idealized image
that the narrator cherishes in his memory. Through this filtering lens,
Runtu’s visage emerges as a vivid picture of the toll of a stark reality,
the truth of which is its radical difference from our subjective wish or
anticipation. The critical thrust of the portraiture originates in a sense
of loss, a lament over the contrast between the adult Runtu in reality
and the young boy in memory. At the same time, it relies on a sympa-
thetic identification with the object of observation, because the stranger
is vaguely recognizable. The humanist concern in realist representation
has first to come from regarding the other as sharing the same human
condition and vulnerabilities as the observing subject. It is this active and
participatory sympathy that distinguishes the narrator’s relationship with
Runtu as separate from his reaction to Second Sister Yang, who forecloses
a humane identification by disallowing the other to emerge as a full and
self-sufficient person.
The shock of recognition, however, causes the narrator to feel excited
as much as confused. ‘‘Delighted as I was, I did not know how to ex-
press myself, and could only say: ‘Oh! Brother Runtu—so, it’s you’ . . .’’
(cf. Yang and Yang, ). In his excitement, the narrator comes to real-
ize the irrelevance, or unreality, of the mythical world that he associates
with the young Runtu. The mental blockage he experiences results from
the external reality that he cannot reconcile with his memory or imagi-
 Beyond Homesickness 91

nation. His perception of reality as ruinous to human life leads him to

see the inadequacy of language. ‘‘There was so much I wanted to say.
There were so many words waiting to gush out one after the other like
pearls on a string: hornchicks, jumperfish, Guanyin hands, zha—but at
the same time I was aware of something damming them up inside me, so
that they simply swirled around in my brain without a single one coming
out’’ (Lyell, ). No doubt the inside/outside tension, or the forced insu-
lation of the inner world from outer reality, indicates a classical despair
with the impossibility of action. In this case, however, the narrator is so
fully conscious of what he wishes to say that his inability or unwilling-
ness to utter the ‘‘pearls’’ of words may point to a deliberate refusal. His
mythical world may be inadequate or unreal, and the zha may be sheer
fantasy, but when they are endangered as such, only the narrator is in a
position to defend them against the elemental forces of reality. The fear
of witnessing his memory and language of fantasy invalidated by histori-
cal reality is sufficient to prevent the narrator from speaking. His silence
protects an interiority that is sentimentally real and true.
Not until after the narrator reaches an emotional high point do we
see Runtu react to the moment of reunion, which he humbly expects all
along.

He stood there, mixed joy and sadness showing on his face. His lips moved,
but not a sound did he utter. Finally, assuming a respectful attitude, he said
clearly:
‘‘Master! . . .’’
I felt a shiver run through me; for I knew then what a lamentably thick
wall had grown up between us. Yet I could not say anything. (Yang and
Yang, )

What we still do not know, from this account, is Runtu’s observation of

the narrator, whom he now deferentially addresses as ‘‘Master.’’ In this
scene of recognition, Runtu is the object of the narrator’s close examina-
tion and is consequently read as the symptomatic sign of a general bank-
ruptcy. Here is a situation that could lead to what Marston Anderson
terms ‘‘the violence of observation’’ that Lu Xun desires to avoid in his
fiction. According to Anderson, Lu Xun was acutely aware that ‘‘repre-
sentational art risks making the victim into a mere object of the reader’s
curiosity or pity; in the process of reading, these emotions, which sig-
92 Chinese Modern

nificantly are those of the observer, are satisfied, thereby camouflaging

the true nature of the reader’s involvement with the victim.’’ 21 To pre-
vent such facile recognition and, worse, moral complacency, Lu Xun em-
ploys various literary techniques in his fiction and institutes an ‘‘inter-
pretive procedure’’ through which a narrated content is also evaluated
self-consciously or even deconstructively.22
In the narrator’s observation of Runtu, the limits of realist description
are at once present and quickly overcome through the internal crisis that
confronts the narrator. A shiver runs through him because of the shock
of being (mis)recognized, a deliberate act by the other at that. The nar-
rator/observer is again jolted by the object of his observation when he
realizes that he is seen as different from what he takes himself to be. His
shock and sadness is that of not being recognized and being kept outside.
The honorific title that Runtu gives him confirms that the narrator inhab-
its a separate realm of reality, and that his very existence and status may
be part of the ‘‘lamentably thick wall’’ separating two boyhood friends.
Both the wooden Runtu and the brazen Second Sister Yang misrecognize
the narrator, although he seems more self-assured and occupies a more
active subject-position in one encounter than the other. Together, these
two situations drive home his realization that he is a stranger in his native
land. As a stranger, he cannot but be irrelevant to Runtu’s hard life. Also
as an irrelevant stranger, he will find nothing to talk about with Runtu,
even if he tries to understand. ‘‘We chatted a bit more that night, but
none of it amounted to anything. Early next morning he took Shuisheng
and headed back home’’ (Lyell, ). What contributes to Runtu’s plight
(‘‘too many children, famine, harsh taxes, soldiers, bandits, officials, and
gentryfolk’’ [Lyell, ]) acknowledges too real and too overwhelming a
referent to generate the same fantasy as did the interjection of mobile
signifiers such as jumperfish or the zha.
As if to combat the sense of repetition that suggests itself through
these two sobering scenes of (mis)recognition, the narrator believes that
between Shuisheng, Runtu’s fifth child, and Hong’er, a transformative
bond and friendship develops as once occurred among the generation
before them. Shuisheng appears to be a replica of the young Runtu of
more than twenty years ago, whereas Hong’er is now the responsibility
. Marston Anderson, The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary
Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), .
. Ibid., .
 Beyond Homesickness 93

as well as the hope of his uncle—the narrator. When the two boys are
together, Shuisheng is not at all the shy and timid child he seems to be in
front of the adults. Just as a generation ago, Shuisheng’s visit is brief and
he does not come back, but he also promises Hong’er a playful trip to
the countryside, which Hong’er begins to anticipate eagerly. Obviously,
there is the concern that Shuisheng will grow up to be another adult
Runtu, just as Runtu turns out to be no different from his own father.
Yet there also is a chance that this younger generation will live its life dif-
ferently. This is then the only tangible hope with which the otherwise
disenchanted narrator will leave his native land a few days later.

Reconfiguring the Homeland

As we set off, in the dusk, the green mountains on either side of the river
became deep blue, receding towards the stern of the boat. (Yang and Yang,
)

As we proceeded upriver, the twilight-green mountains on either bank

took on deeper hues and joined together in a single blue-green mass as they
fled away into the distance behind the stern. (Lyell, )

Leaving at this juncture comes, once again, as a timely relief. More than
disengaging the narrator from the emotional and intellectual agonies and
self-doubt occasioned by his native land, the new departure frees him
from the hectic final days of ridding the old family house of ‘‘old and used
things of every imaginable size and description’’ (Lyell, ). Besides, he
is relieved to escape the pettiness and harassment of Second Sister Yang,
who, in her effort to acquire a piece of furniture for free, does not hesi-
tate to spoil the narrator’s regard for Runtu. Now the steady movement
away from the forlorn site of chaos introduces a fresh perspective, and
a new scenery seems to set in. The depressing wintry landscape that he
witnessed upon coming home, no more than two weeks ago, is miracu-
lously transformed into a pleasing vista of spring. There is no sadness or
regret; sentimentality gives way to a resolute serenity. Hong’er, however,
seems to be more attached to the land than the narrator, because Hong’er
still remembers Shuisheng’s invitation to the countryside. Engrossed in
thoughts about his new friend, Hong’er is allowed to put together a beau-
tiful myth about his native land that he is leaving behind. ‘‘Hong’er and I
94 Chinese Modern

leaned against the window and watched the dimming landscape’’ (Lyell,
). In the passing scenery, two separate visions of the native land must
be rising for these two quiet passengers.
‘‘I was leaving the old house farther and farther behind, while the hills
and rivers of my native land were also receding gradually ever farther in
the distance. But I felt no attachment’’ (cf. Yang and Yang, ). The old
house and what it stands for are too real to leave any room for imagi-
nation. More accurately, the old house disillusions the narrator and de-
prives him of his fond memories. The ‘‘gentle slapping of water against
the hull’’ (Lyell, ), on the other hand, reassures the narrator that he and
his mother and nephew are moving away. The flowing river nurtures an
anticipatory excitement about departure, motion, change, and regenera-
tion. It offers itself as an apt symbol for life, for unstoppable energy and
hope. In soothingly moving the narrator into an open space, the river
allows him to contemplate and put in perspective the landscape of his
native land. It embodies a viable resolution that brings therapeutic peace,
freshness, and completion.
The hope for a new life lies with the next generation, as Lu Xun’s Mad-
man famously voices, if mainly for the reason that the present genera-
tion and life are so inextricably injured and complicitous. Youth itself
is reason for hope and change for the better. ‘‘They should have a new
life, a life we have never experienced’’ (Yang and Yang, ). Hong’er and
Shuisheng should not be stymied by the same barrier that separates their
forefathers. They should extend their friendship and nurture their close-
ness, but this commitment should not mean their living a miserable life
together, either. Their life should be different to the extent that it is un-
imaginable, because the narrator cannot yet picture an ideal life. None
of the three ways of living that he witnesses seems satisfactory. His own
life is rootless, Runtu’s benumbed, and Second Sister Yang’s scurrilous:
they are all burdened by the same hard and unfulfilled reality.23 The new
life should be a negation of adult life as it is known. It must consist of a

. Chi-Chen Wang’s translation of these dense and difficult sentences, in my opin-
ion, is the most successful: ‘‘However, I did not want them to live, as a price for their
continued companionship, the bitter and rootless life that I lived; I did not want them
to live the bitter and wretched life that Yun-t’u lived; I did not want them to live the
bitter and shameless life that others lived. They must have a new kind of life, a life
that we of the other generation had not known.’’ See Chi-chen Wang, ‘‘My Native
Heath,’’ .
 Beyond Homesickness 95

communal, communicable existence, and yet it does not lack generative

diversity. In essence, this visionary new life calls forth a utopian society
where, with its guiding principle romantically modeled after a playful and
carefree childhood, each and every individual will be different but equal.
Yet such a utopian reverie suddenly fills the pensive narrator with an-
xiety. His hope for a better future makes him question his own convic-
tion, for his vision appears at once vivid and blurred, as may be true of all
global fantasies. The prospect of a new life, because of its radical differ-
ence from the lived present, strikes him as ‘‘far off in the murky distance’’
and may demand the same devotion as an article of faith. More immedi-
ately, concentration on such a grandiose hope risks ossifying the ‘‘new
life’’ into an immovable creed that blocks concrete, transformative action
or discoveries in one’s own life. For bad faith, as the narrator is keenly
aware, may be a negative consequence of the gravity of faith. Nonethe-
less, the compelling utopian imagination causes him to ponder the next
logical question: where lies the path that will lead us there? ‘‘In the dim
moonlight, an emerald green plot of land by the sea appeared before my
eyes. In the deep blue sky above it hung a moon, full and golden. ‘Hope
isn’t the kind of thing that you can say either exists or doesn’t exist,’ I
thought to myself. ‘It’s like a path across the land—it’s not there to begin
with, but when lots of people go the same way, it comes into being.’ ’’ (cf.
Lyell, ). The final landscape of fantasy is conjured up in the concluding
paragraph to relieve a series of anxieties, immediate or global. Against the
growing darkness, the brilliant vista of infinite space and depth serves as a
possible site for the desired good life. As in a mirage, the sharply defined
vision displays a timeless terrain in which no human subjects seem to be
present, not even the ‘‘young hero’’ who so far is closely associated with
the scenery. If the emptiness of the scene seems to suggest that no human
life can yet do justice to the sublime truth of nature, the primary vigor
and simplicity of the environment are also called upon, as it were, to pro-
vide irrefutable physical evidence of a bright future for humanity. For,
after all, this fantastic landscape is the redemptive projection of an em-
battled human subject. And it offers a definite site to bury all ontological
doubts.
For this reason, the scenery is necessarily specific and recognizable. A
familiar landscape is sublimated into an imaginary homeland that co-
incides with the final horizon for hope and utopian anticipation. The de-
parting narrator may always be haunted adversely by his native land, but,
96 Chinese Modern

in the final analysis, he refuses to be totally disenchanted and insists on

reconfiguring its symbolic elements into a reliable source for spiritual re-
silience and inner certainty. This symbolic reconfiguration culminates the
narrative of ‘‘My Native Land’’ and determines its lyrical and uplifting
conclusion. With this final upward turn, the sentimental journey under-
taken by the narrator in ‘‘My Native Land’’ acquires a paradigmatic sig-
nificance, because it illustrates the arduous but ultimately gratifying pro-
cess of reclaiming an imaginary homeland. The necessity and origin of
such an imaginary homeland is what Lu Xun persuasively conveys in this
short story, which as a dense psychobiographical narrative offers an effec-
tive antidote for the homesickness prevalent among displaced modern
Chinese intellectuals. The intense nostalgia that propels popular native-
land literature is both acknowledged and redirected in this fundamentally
sublimational narrative, in which therapeutic discourse directs a shocking
recognition of the real homeland to its symbolic reconfiguration. This re-
configuration enables an open-endedness in the narrative insofar as it not
only extends the native landscape to an ontological dimension, but it also
shifts the promise of an imaginary homeland to the reader, however bur-
dened with his or her own history. The relivable native land lies not in
the past, but in the future, and it is to be reached collectively; it signifies
nostalgia overcome. Such is the narrator’s belief when he reminds us how
a new path may be created on the surface of the earth.
3
Shanghai, Spring :
Engendering the Revolutionary Body

In her novella Yijiu sanling nian chun Shanghai (Shanghai, spring ),
Ding Ling (–) tells two separate and yet related stories, the central
idea of which, according to Tsi-an Hsia, is simple and straightforward:
‘‘how intellectuals discover the meaning of their lives in a mass move-
ment.’’ 1 Indeed, both stories, written and published in the second half
of , offer a less than refined sample of the then-popular ‘‘revolution
and love’’ fiction churned out by the nascent literary Left. Many such
narratives center on an often melodramatic conflict between collective
cause and individual preferences, between a rising proletarian movement
and private sentiment. In view of Ding Ling’s entire writing career, critic
Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker suggests that the Shanghai, Spring  stories,
together with another  novella on the same topic, show Ding Ling
the author ‘‘negotiating a passage from love to revolution, from the focus
on internal experience to the outer world of political reality.’’ 2 More
than a personal expansion of intellectual horizons, this seemingly inevi-
table passage reflects the historical experience of a generation of educated
young men and women in the s. It was also part of an international
political culture that gathered much momentum during the decade of
capitalism in crisis. In accord with the contemporary Old Left’s effort to
internationalize a worldwide revolutionary literature, Ding Ling, as well
as Lu Xun, was translated as a representative Chinese progressive writer
in journals such as The Liberator and New Masses in the United States.3

. Tsi-an Hsia, ‘‘Enigma of the Five Martyrs,’’ in his Gate of Darkness: Studies on the
Leftist Literary Movement in China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, ),
. Although Hsia is generally dismissive, sometimes even sardonic, toward this lit-
erary tradition, his study is meticulous and groundbreaking.
. Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker, Ding Ling’s Fiction: Ideology and Narrative in Modern
Chinese Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ),  (original
emphasis).
. Among the inspired readers of these radical publications was Tillie Olsen, a
98 Chinese Modern

It would be interesting to determine which Ding Ling was being so

promptly promoted as a revolutionary writer in the United States in the
early s. For until , which was actually fewer than three years after
the publication of her first and fame-establishing short story ‘‘Mengke,’’
Ding Ling in her writings had created a gallery of alienated, depressed,
often tubercular and suicidal young women living on the fringes of the
modern city. Her most memorable creation from this period is Miss
Sophia (), whose anguished diary reveals a hypersensitive soul relent-
lessly tormented by self-doubt and questions, abstract and fundamental,
about the meaning of life, love, sexuality, and death. Consumed by both
ennui and passion, Miss Sophia embodies the existential angst acutely ex-
perienced by an entire generation of Chinese youth caught between the
disintegration of traditional social structures and the emerging modern
metropolis. For this reason, a contemporary critic perceptively attributed
the importance and modernity of Ding Ling’s writings to her sensitive
portrayal of a representative ‘‘modern girl’’ in urban and Westernized
China (the English-language term ‘‘modern girl’’ is used in the original
text).4 Another reason for Ding Ling’s instant success as a young woman
writer and spokesperson of her generation is the confessional mode of
narration that she employed in most of her stories. Some prominent male
writers of the late s, such as Mao Dun, had also explored the ‘‘woman
question’’ and had even demonstrated a ‘‘feminist consciousness,’’ 5 but
Ding Ling’s bold and penetrating exploration of female psychology—in
particular, sexuality—was groundbreaking. Her refusal to allegorize her

young woman and budding writer from Omaha, Nebraska. See Deborah Rosenfelt,
‘‘From the Thirties: Tillie Olsen and the Radical Tradition,’’ in Feminist Criticism and
Social Change: Sex, Class and Race in Literature and Culture, ed. Judith Newton and
Deborah Rosenfelt (New York: Methuen, ), .
. Fang Ying, ‘‘Ding Ling lun’’ (On Ding Ling), in Ding Ling yanjiu ziliao (Re-
search materials on Ding Ling), ed. Yuan Liangjun (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin, ),
–. Originally published in Wenyi xinwen (Literary news), nos. , ,  (, ,
 August ). The thesis of Fang Ying’s article, i.e., the conflict between traditional
society and modern capitalism being the cause of anomie for most of Ding Ling’s char-
acters, is influential and still present as an analytical paradigm in Meng Yue and Dai
Jinhua, Fuchu lishi dibiao: xiandai funü wenxue yanjiu (Emerging from history: studies
in modern women’s literature) (Zhengzhou: Henan renmin, ).
. See, for instance, David Der-wei Wang, ‘‘Feminist Consciousness in Modern Chi-
nese Male Fiction,’’ in Modern Chinese Women Writers: Critical Appraisals, ed. Michael
S. Duke (New York: M. E. Sharpe, ), –.
 Shanghai, Spring  99

characters’ experience only added to the poignancy of her expositional

writing. Through a discourse of discontent, Ding Ling at once intro-
duced a new literary sensibility and established the problematic female
experience as a personalized form of social protest.6
From the beginning, the inescapable backdrop to Ding Ling’s explora-
tions into the inner depths of the dislocated ‘‘modern girl’’ was the city of
Shanghai. Yet within three short years, the glamorous but ‘‘purely carnal
society’’ that Mengke, the humiliated—albeit successful—movie actress,
detected and detested in Shanghai would turn into a site of political
action for the young revolutionaries described in Shanghai, Spring .
This change of the literary landscape also brought forth in Ding Ling’s
writings a different group of characters who began to demonstrate a new
politics of the body and a new relationship to the modern city.

A Desire Named Shanghai

If in its popular image in the early s, no doubt promoted by the

multinational colonialist establishment, Shanghai was the decadent ‘‘Paris
of the Orient’’ and a ‘‘paradise for the adventurers,’’ at the same time it
was revered by China’s radicalized and city-bound youth as the bestirring
‘‘Moscow of the Orient.’’ For the contemporary Chinese culture and con-
sciousness, Shanghai was both a gigantic embodiment of Western-style
modernity, probably in its most aggressive and grotesque form, and the
site that brought forth its inseparable nemesis—a concentration of indus-
trial power and political agency. Its modern dynamism derived from
the raw capitalist transformation of a port city, cosmopolitan Shanghai
also bred various ideological persuasions (such as anarchism, liberalism,
nationalism, traditionalism, anti-imperialism, guild socialism, commu-
nism) that fiercely competed to impart intelligibility and symbolism to
the sprawling cityscape and beyond.
One classic literary expression of the desire to comprehend the symbol-
ism of Shanghai is Mao Dun’s  novel Ziye (Midnight). In the opening

. For this reason, Tani Barlow observes that ‘‘Ding Ling wrote Chinese feminist
fiction as a young writer, but over the course of her life she abandoned most of femi-
nism’s component elements.’’ See Barlow, ‘‘Introduction’’ to I Myself Am a Woman:
Selected Writings of Ding Ling, ed. Tani E. Barlow and Gary J. Bjorge (Boston: Beacon
Press, ), .
100 Chinese Modern

paragraph, the realist-narrator, apparently strolling along the exotic Bund

in a ‘‘heavenly May evening’’ of , surveys the dynamic city from a
distance.

Under a sunset-mottled sky, the towering framework of Garden Bridge was

mantled in a gathering mist. Whenever a tram passed over the bridge, the
overhead cable suspended below the top of the steel frame threw off bright,
greenish sparks. Looking east, one could see the warehouses on the water-
front of Pootung [Pudong] like huge monsters crouching in the gloom,
their lights twinkling like countless tiny eyes. To the west, one saw with a
shock of wonder on the roof of a building a gigantic neon sign in flaming
red and phosphorescent green: , , . 7

If an initial detached view of Shanghai would expose, even for an omni-

scient narrator, a monstrous field of ominous interrogation and intrigue,
the same unsettling experience of visual incongruity was marketed as a
fascinating instance of modernity, conceivable only through the most
contemporary cinematic technique of montage. The – edition of
an annual English guidebook, catering to an emerging international class
of tourists, thus peddled ‘‘Shanghai the bizarre, cinematographic presen-
tation of humanity’’:

Cosmopolitan Shanghai, city of amazing paradoxes and fantastic contrasts;

Shanghai the beautiful, bawdy, and gaudy; contradiction of manners and
morals; a vast brilliantly-hued cycloramic, panoramic mural of the best and
the worst of Orient and Occident. . . .
Behold! ‘‘The longest bar in the world!’’ The shortest street in the world
with a blatant cacophony of carnality from a score of dance-halls; scarlet
women laughing without mirth; virgins in search of life; suicides; mar-
riages; births; carols of vested choirs; cathedral chimes; Communists plot-
ting; Nationalism in the saddle; war in Manchuria!; it’s a great old town,
and how we hate it and love it.8

This intriguing ‘‘cinematographic presentation of humanity’’ is the

theme as well as the technique of one of Ding Ling’s best short stories.
Written in , ‘‘Daylight’’ (Ri) achieves a sweeping panoramic view of

. Mao Dun, Ziye (Beijing: Renmin wenxue, ), . English translation by Hsu
Meng-hsiung and A. C. Barnes, Midnight (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, ), .
. All About Shanghai and Environs: A Standard Guide Book (Edition –) (Shang-
hai: University Press, ), –.
 Shanghai, Spring  101

this ‘‘boisterous metropolis, a colony that is semi-foreign, a place gov-

erned by numerous countries and inhabited by numerous races.’’ 9 Fol-
lowing the omnipresent narrator, we look over the city at daybreak and
move swiftly, all within one long paragraph, from the industrial sweat-
shops to the financial district, from modern high-rises to putrid slums,
from a decadent life of leisure to degrading hardship and despair. Day-
light exposes the uneven urban landscape and gradually brings into focus
a sickly young woman, named Yisai, who lives all by herself in one of
the overcrowded apartment buildings in the International Settlement.
She desperately needs some sleep, but the cacophony of the city makes
sleep an impossibility. The rest of the story describes an uneventful and
pointless day in Yisai’s life. At the sound and stench of the night-soil
truck, she grows sympathetic to the misery of the multitudes, but, mo-
ments later, she is assaulted once again by boredom. She becomes aware
of her weak body and grows restless. The sulking face of the intrusive
maid completely ruins her day, which also makes her realize that only
fantasy can give her some solace. ‘‘As a result, she would often start day-
dreaming while she was cursing and start cursing while daydreaming’’
(). Her foul mood continues and helps drive away two ghostly visi-
tors who barely can manage to engage the dejected hostess in a coherent
conversation.
Without much of a plot, ‘‘Daylight’’ is instead the prelude to a possible
story about the city. It depicts the wearied life of a Weltschmerz-stricken
young woman against the uncontrollable expanse of the city, in which
even political passion quickly becomes the object of mockery. Youth, as
much as the imposed interiority, becomes pathologized and demands
therapeutic release. A cinematic juxtaposition highlights the disjuncture
between two perspectives: a painfully self-conscious but apathetic indi-
vidual against the vibrant, repetitive, and unreflective city life around her.
Thanks to the visual structure of the narrative, these two extreme forms
of life in the city are brought together, if only to problematize each other.
Yet there is no explicit message or judgment in the story. On the con-
trary, this sketchlike description of different dimensions of city life seems
to be in search of a story, of a logical or even causal connection between
the urban landscape and the interior of Yisai’s dreary world. The story

. Ding Ling, Ding Ling wenji (Collected works of Ding Ling) (Shanghai: Yiwen
shudian, ), . Page references in the text are to this edition.
102 Chinese Modern

conveys a vague longing for action, a desire to break free of the impris-
oning subjectivity and participate in urban narrativity. The narrative ends
as the heroine languidly drifts into sleep at dusk. With a final comment—
‘‘Tomorrow everything would come and go one more time just as be-
fore’’ (), the absence of either action or purpose in her life becomes
an obvious theme and suggests the need to interrupt this incapacitating
pattern of repetition.
The search for a purposeful life and narratability becomes the motive
in Ding Ling’s subsequent writings. In Shanghai, Spring  (I), we see
a paradigmatic choice being set up and made. Through the action of
Meilin, who is an educated woman of the post-May Fourth era now con-
fined to her comfortable bourgeois home, a transfer of political alliance
is carried out. Her final decision to leave her house without first telling
her husband (who is a self-obsessed writer with considerable fame) and to
join another man in a street demonstration is reached as both the climax
of the story and the resolution to her boredom. Meilin participates in col-
lective action so as to free herself of submission to a ‘‘so gentle and yet so
tyrannical’’ love. When at home, she increasingly feels like a prisoner of
her impervious husband, Zibin. Out of desperation,

Meilin would wear a new outfit every day, green ones, red ones. She went
out regularly with Zibin, but got neither pleasure nor gratification from it.
She imagined that each person she saw on the crowded streets had a more
meaningful life than she. Meilin did not want to die. Quite the contrary,
she wanted to really live and she wanted to be happy. It was just that she
could not find the right direction and she needed guidance from someone.
(–; ) 10

In this description, the statement that ‘‘Meilin did not want to die’’ may
sound abrupt, but it constitutes an intertextual response to the series of
suicidal female characters that peopled Ding Ling’s earlier fiction. There,
the young women always felt excluded from a presumably happy life that
everyone else was living, and their only connection to the bustling crowd
was their death as a voiceless protest.11 ‘‘No one would give me a dollar

. The page reference following the semicolon refers to ‘‘Shanghai, Spring ,’’
translated by Shu-ying Ts’ao and Donald Holoch, in I Myself Am a Woman. In most
instances, I have modified the Ts’ao/Holoch translation.
. Following Durkheim’s classical study of suicides in modern society, the suicide
 Shanghai, Spring  103

for free,’’ so laments Yisa, a young woman stranded in Shanghai, in her

diary (‘‘The Diary of a Suicide’’), ‘‘just as no one would show me any at-
tachment for free. I am not jealous of anyone, because everyone else is a
better person than me’’ (). For Meilin the new heroine, however, this
moment of observing others in the street leads to a different resolution:
she wants to partake of this happiness and needs to find someone to take
her there.
This mentor figure that Meilin awaits is a young man named Ruo-
quan, who used to be a writer as well. At the beginning of the narrative,
however, his conception of society has undergone some radical changes,
and consequently he renounces literature as useless and even harmful to
those young people ‘‘who have just reached adolescence and are most
subject to melancholy.’’ Sentimentalist and individualist writings, accord-
ing to Ruoquan, would only serve to ‘‘drag the young people into their
own gloom’’ and make it impossible for them to see ‘‘the connection be-
tween society and their sufferings’’ (–; ). His new mission con-
sists in debating political issues in study groups, holding meetings to
bring together workers and college students, and orchestrating rallies in
the street. In contrast to the pale and solitary Zibin, Ruoquan is a com-
mitted young man, full of energy and hope.12
On one level, Shanghai, Spring  (I) has the structure of metafiction,
for it is decidedly a narrative about the writing of fiction, and, with the
help of a moral discourse, it reflects on its own condition of possibility.
Irony or ambiguity is no longer an intended effect for this mode of writ-
ing. On the contrary, the clarity that Ding Ling now strives for in her
fiction allows her repositioning as a political writer and brings about a
new sense of authority. The act of writing, to which some of her earlier
diarists resorted as the sole means of self-affirmation, is now contextual-

they contemplated can be seen as either an ‘‘anomic’’ or ‘‘egoistic’’ type, because both
types indicate a lack of social bonds and integration. Critics have traced this dejection
at the sight of unattainable happiness to the influence of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame
Bovary, a novel that Ding Ling had read repeatedly at a young age. See, for example,
Feuerwerker, Ding Ling’s Fiction, –.
. According to Jaroslav Průšek, Ruoquan’s comments in Ding Ling’s story sum
up the basic character of a new literature that puts much emphasis on subjectivism
and individualism. See his influential essay ‘‘Subjectivism and Individualism in Mod-
ern Chinese Literature,’’ in Průšek, The Lyrical and the Epic: Studies of Modern Chinese
Literature, ed. Leo Ou-fan Lee (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), –.
104 Chinese Modern

ized. Reconfigured, too, is the scene of literary creation. As Tani Barlow

comments, ‘‘speaking as a revolutionary writer, rather than as a woman,
Ding Ling felt empowered to criticize the masculine world of ‘bourgeois’
literature.’’ 13 This masculine world of bourgeois values and aesthetics, in-
habited by Zibin, who, incidentally, suffers from a major writer’s block, is
challenged and revealed to be faulty by a revolutionary discourse, which
is what informs Ruoquan. Meilin’s experience of boredom and fulfill-
ment, therefore, becomes interpretable largely in terms of her association
with the two men in her life. She is, as Laura Mulvey would argue, the
‘‘bearer,’’ ‘‘not maker, of meaning’’ in either of the symbolic orders de-
fined by male fantasies and obsessions. She embodies and demonstrates a
positive value, but she is never allowed to generate or determine it.14
By the end of the story, Meilin succeeds, with the guidance from Ruo-
quan, in achieving a sense of being socially useful. She does not yet show
much understanding of the objective of her assignment, but she has suf-
ficient reason to commit herself and follow instructions. By identifying
with a political community, she now has a different relationship to the
city from which, until recently, she felt distant, even excluded. We are not
given a direct description of her new excitement and gratification in the
city. Instead, we read, with her astonished husband, a note from Meilin.
‘‘Zibin, I simply can’t hide the truth from you anymore. When you read
this letter, I will probably already be on avenue, as assigned by the
collective to carry out a movement’’ (; ). The political parade
as a demonstration of solidarity gives Meilin access to public space and
provides her with a new cognitive structure by means of which she is
able to map, experience, and eventually narrate her surroundings. As a re-
sult, she speaks a new and more assertive language. In her note to Zibin,
Meilin asks to have ‘‘a rational discussion’’ with her husband when she re-
turns from the demonstration. ‘‘We should both criticize each other very
sincerely and thoroughly. I have a lot of things to tell you, some about
myself and some about you’’ (; ).
Shanghai, Spring  (I) thus ends with a moment of impending con-
frontation, with Meilin marching down the street and Zibin heaving furi-
ous sighs at home. The political demonstration is not described, but the

. Barlow, ‘‘Introduction’’ to I Myself Am a Woman, .

. See Laura Mulvey, ‘‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’’ in her Visual and
Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ), –.
 Shanghai, Spring  105

private home is irrevocably reorganized. Resolved in this format, the con-

flict between ‘‘revolution and love’’ in much of the left-wing literature
at the time reflected the competition between two ways of appropriat-
ing the city. Both terms of the antinomy—‘‘revolution’’ as experience
of collective power, and ‘‘love’’ as successful socialization through per-
sonal freedom—are central ideological constructs in the legitimizing dis-
course of modernity. More specifically, these are two symbiotic aspira-
tions generated by the modern industrial-commercial metropolis, which,
in its daily self-reproduction, necessarily relies on the large congregated
population. The modern city, before its postindustrial suburbanization,
is therefore a centripetal field of narrativity that germinates variations on
the two prototypical plots: collective destiny and romantic encounters.
Apart from its universal features as a modern metropolis, Shanghai, the
‘‘crucible of modern China,’’ was in the second half of the s and early
s in a transitional stage, during which a growing proletariat rapidly
developed a political consciousness and became mobilized. ‘‘It was dur-
ing this era in Shanghai, amidst all the glamour and suffering, that Chi-
nese nationalism and modernization took on a new meaning.’’ 15 Nation-
alism, as the hegemonic unifying political discourse in post-May Fourth
China, was evoked to mobilize students, factory workers, merchants, and
ordinary city-dwellers in anti-imperialist demonstrations such as the May
Thirtieth movement in  and at subsequent annual rallies commemo-
rating that historical event. At the same time, nationalist ideology fueled
the drive to regiment and modernize the city. With the establishment of
a Nationalist government in Nanjing in , administering and polic-
ing Shanghai became part of the renewed effort to institute a new civic
order and experiment with the nationalization project. ‘‘Much the same
impulse to ‘police’ social behavior on the one hand, and to ‘train’ people’s
habits on the other,’’ characterized both the mission of the Public Secu-
rity Bureau (established on  July ) and the New Life Movement
(launched in February ).16

. Betty Peh-T’i Wei, Shanghai: Crucible of Modern China (Hong Kong: Oxford
University Press, ), .
. See Frederic Wakeman Jr., Policing Shanghai, – (Berkeley: University of
California Press, ), . The Public Security Bureau was established in Shanghai as
a police force administered by the Special Municipal Government. ‘‘As a force repre-
senting the Chinese people and the new national government, it would also strive to
recover long-lost sovereign rights by establishing the authority of the Chinese state
106 Chinese Modern

Yet the perilously discontinuous political landscape of Shanghai, re-

flected in its three different municipal jurisdictional bodies (the Inter-
national Settlement, the French Concession, and the City Government
of Greater Shanghai), continually derailed an urban everyday life that
the new civic order intended to establish. Anti-imperialist nationalism,
too, turned out to be a historical blind alley in the metropolis because
a normalized urban life, in promoting and regulating consumer behav-
ior, would spell a dead end to the insurgent nationalist movement. For
nationalism to continue to be a viable political ideology, in other words,
the modern city would have to be resisted as such, and everyday life
would have to be nationalized and reclaimed by a national public and
form. If the nationalist program of policing Shanghai was a doomed
effort at creating an exemplary modern disciplinary society, with the New
Life Movement as its most systematic ideological expression, then the
revolutionary insurrection was no less a modernizing project whose ulti-
mate task was to give order to the same postdynastic and urbanizing
society. The choice of revolution over love, therefore, pointed to both
a collective and a personal redemption. It suggested a deeply utopian
vision of overcoming the experiential fragmentation fostered by the city
on the one hand, and of participating in a national life and identity on
the other. It also expressed a newly reinforced cultural anxiety to mobi-
lize and keep tractable the human body that was now subjected to the
monstrously disjunctive modern city. In short, commitment to revolu-
tion mandated a corporeal reorientation.

The Question of the Romantic Body

The force and anxiety of such a historically determined politics become

much more evident in Shanghai, Spring  (II), where the tension be-
tween collective identity and individual freedom is no longer a simplified
intellectual choice or discussion, as is faced by Meilin, but manifests itself
more as a bodily adjustment. Although Meilin also has to undergo some
training in order to better participate in the collective work, by the sec-

over those parts of the city it ruled. Its efforts to bring law and order to Republican
Shanghai were thereby viewed as a crucial test of the overall effectiveness of the new
régime’’ (–).
 Shanghai, Spring  107

ond installment of the novella, the individuated human body becomes

further problematized in the negotiation between love and revolution,
and a new body has to be engendered for the individual to overcome the
apparent impasse. Central to the new technology of the body is its disci-
plining, which the narrative represents without ambiguity as a masculine
attribute and practice. The female body, by contrast, is now shown to be
incapable of such retraining and becomes identifiable only through its as-
sociation with sensuous details. An emerging political struggle over the
body, paradoxically, is not able to articulate itself unless it subscribes to a
hierarchical language and imagery of gender roles and divisions.
The story about Mary and Wangwei in Shanghai, Spring  (II), there-
fore, is both subtler and more complex than the first part of the novella.
Instead of tantalizing the reader with a conceivable triangular affair, the
narrative decidedly revolves around the life of two lovers and their even-
tual parting. Nor is there prolonged didactic commentary on the func-
tion of literature or the social responsibility of a writer. By closely nar-
rating Mary’s arrival in Shanghai to live with Wangwei, her growing
frustration with a hardly attentive lover, his doomed efforts at molding
her into a revolutionary companion, Mary’s final decision to move out,
and Wangwei’s arrest during an anti-imperialist rally at the end, Ding
Ling presents a much more nuanced psychological portrait of the young
couple. In the process, the narrator follows Mary and Wangwei through
a series of urban settings—streets, restaurants, theaters, makeshift offices,
department stores—foregrounding the cityscape as a key participant in
the story’s unfolding. Just as the liberating city space has initially fostered
their uninhibited love, so the same vast and multidimensional environ-
ment lends validity to their divergent senses of reality and relations to
their own bodies. The body in the city becomes a major and concrete
theme of the narrative.
It is tempting to try to gauge the degree to which the writing of the
story was affected by the author’s own situation at the time. For the
greater part of , Ding Ling was pregnant with serious health prob-
lems, whereas her husband, Hu Yepin, a young and enthusiastic poet and
would-be Communist, was frenetically involved in a mass of politically
subversive, hence dangerous, literary and extraliterary activities.17 Just as

. In Tsi-an Hsia’s rather disapproving account, Hu Yepin, upon returning to

Shanghai in the early summer of , ‘‘plunged into his new life with zest and aban-
108 Chinese Modern

with Mary in the novella, Ding Ling during this period was largely kept
out of her husband’s exciting and secretive world. She also had her con-
fusion and misgivings about a writer’s total devotion to the public realm,
and she managed not to join, as did Hu Yepin, the League of Left-wing
Writers, a Communist organization promoting revolutionary literature
and radical young writers, in May of the same year. As a result of her
forced domestic confinement, historian Jonathan Spence suggests, Ding
Ling was perforce to encounter two separate realities.18 It was her ex-
perience as a woman, or more directly, the experience of her reproduc-
tive female body, that for a while remained undisciplinable and turned
Ding Ling into a detached observer. Her pregnancy became a constant
reminder of a reality in excess of political enthusiasm or sublimation.19
Such corporeality apparently was too messy a matter for Hu Yepin, the
young husband and expectant father. Shortly before he was executed,
together with twenty-two others, by the Nationalist government police
in February , Hu Yepin finished a short story in which a young revo-
lutionary recommended abortion as a necessary personal sacrifice so that
a young couple could continue devoting their lives to the collective cause.
The woman, in Hu Yepin’s romantic imagination, is readily persuaded
and ends up consoling her husband: ‘‘Once there is a baby, our work will
be hindered. We cannot have the baby.’’ 20
In his meticulous study of this group of writers-cum-martyrs, Tsi-an
Hsia concludes that Hu Yepin’s high-flying absorption in political action
stood in contrast to Ding Ling’s momentary hesitation, which allowed
her to ‘‘see at least the charms, problems, and meanings of a nonrevolu-
tionary life.’’ 21 This nonrevolutionary life to which Ding Ling was con-

don. . . . He taught at a summer school, presumably for workers, and was elected a
member of the Executive Committee of the League [of Left-wing Writers], chairman
of its Board of Correspondence with Workers, Peasants, and Soldiers, and a member
of the delegation to the Soviet Congress to be convened in Kiangsi [Jiangxi]’’ (The
Gate of Darkness, ).
. Jonathan D. Spence, The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolu-
tion, – (New York: Penguin, ), .
. For an interesting discussion of related issues, see Wolfgang Kubin, ‘‘The Stag-
ing of the Interior: Ding Ling’s Short Story ‘A Man and a Woman,’ ’’ in Woman and
Literature in China, ed. Anna Gerstlacher et al. (Bochum: Brockmeyer, ), –.
. ‘‘Xisheng’’ (Sacrifice, ), quoted and translated in Hsia, The Gate of Darkness,
.
. Hsia, The Gate of Darkness, . Hsia continues, ‘‘The occasional psychological
 Shanghai, Spring  109

fined is now represented in her narrative, not without its concrete plea-
sures, as the opposite of a socially meaningful life. It defines the life that
Mary in Shanghai, Spring  (II) lives. It is a life that, instead of making
the human body transcend its immediate surroundings, firmly consigns
it as such to the urban spectacle. In short, it is an idle life, most suscep-
tible to the consumerist exploitation of the body, a life that lacks grand
spiritual sublimation. By ascribing this nonrevolutionary life to a female
body, Ding Ling both acknowledged the corporeality of her own gender
and, more importantly, created a trope through which to imagine and
prescribe her self-transformation. For this reason, her portrayal of Mary
in the story is wrought with ambiguity. The narrator is at once sympa-
thetic and denunciatory, intimate and penetratingly critical.
At the same time, this nonrevolutionary life that seems to consume the
female body brings up the question of the body and its incorporation into
the revolutionary cause. Since a revolutionary life cannot be disembod-
ied, what significance should be accorded to the revolutionary’s body?
Onto the figure of Wangwei, to which we now turn, Ding Ling would
inscribe as an answer the political regimentation of a liberated body, a
body that must first learn how to resist the seductive cityscape through
self-discipline and ascetic practices.
It is therefore not surprising that the revolutionary romance should
open with a description of the pleasurable physical sensation that Wang-
wei, ‘‘a likable, bronze-complexioned young man,’’ dreamily experiences
one early spring morning in Shanghai of . We see the hero of the
story, apparently exhausted from working late the night before, lie in bed
and languidly fall asleep again. His apartment’s interior is hardly notice-
able, except as the extension of an embracing spring scenery. ‘‘At dawn
on an early spring day, a moist breeze swept in softly through the broken
window, brushed everything gently, and left quietly. The pale light of the
sky reached into every corner and coated the room with a dreamy hue.
The bustling noises of the city had not yet arisen. It was a good time for
some peaceful sleep . . .’’ (; ).
This, then, is a moment before the noisy cycle of urban life, a fleeting

subtleties, the little tremors of a sensitive mind that enliven her writings are absent in
his. His eagerness for revolution made it impossible for him to dwell on such triviali-
ties or on anything or any person that was doomed to be swept away by the surging
tides of history’’ (–).
110 Chinese Modern

but emphatic moment of nature’s revival and harmony that precedes the
symbolic space of the dynamic city. This is also a private moment before
Wangwei assumes his political identity and activity. His contented body,
obviously susceptible to pleasure, both affirms his sensitivity and serves
as a metaphor for his self-consciousness. For he can allow himself this
momentary aesthetic relaxation because he knows that he is all by him-
self, and that he does not yet have to reenter the city. A similar instance
of positive pleasure occurs in the first part of the novella when Ruoquan,
the mentor figure who guides Meilin into collective action, ventures to
a public park on the outskirts of Shanghai to meet secretly with the ap-
parently distraught woman. Once inside the park, the same spring breeze
caresses Ruoquan with a tenderness completely absent in the swarming
city. Attracted by the surrounding lush green, he ‘‘walked aimlessly across
the undulating grass for quite a way, almost forgetting why he had come’’
(; ).22 For both dedicated young men, however, such pleasurable
indulgence of their bodies cannot be a purpose in itself. Leisure must
function as a productive respite in that it better prepares them for their
subsequent total devotion to work.
The initial intimate account of Wangwei’s apartment and his relaxed
body, while establishing as the central figure a romantic young man in the
city, also forebodes the end to what Leo Ou-fan Lee has described as ‘‘a
romantic decade,’’ to which the image of a sensitized, libidinal body was
central and during which ‘‘the vogue of self-exposé—laying bare the au-
thor’s innermost secrets, emotional and sexual—all but carried the day.’’ 23
The romantic outburst of private emotions and desires in the turbu-

. A more pointed description of Ruoquan in the park is worth quoting at length
here: ‘‘Ruoquan stood up straight, unbuttoned his suit jacket, inhaled deeply, and felt
refreshed right away. The tension and exhaustion he usually felt left him without a
trace. Anyone arriving at this verdant carpet of grass, leaving behind the noise of the
world, bathing in the spring breeze, embraced by the morning sun, would invariably
relax, forget everything and unshoulder all cares. They would casually lay their bodies
in nature, extend their limbs, and allow the serene environment to give them such
pleasure until they could not remember who they were’’ (; ). In Ding Ling’s
– novel Wei Hu (Wei Hu), description of physical pleasure constitutes a basic
motif of romantic love. The heroine Lijia is mostly defined by her beauty and unin-
hibited sexuality.
. Leo Ou-fan Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, ), .
 Shanghai, Spring  111

lent s was very much predicated on an intensified awareness of the

individual body and its determined separation from society and society’s
ritualized practices. It was the cultural expression of the body in revolt
against traditional discipline mechanisms. The newly ontologized body
not only became a rich source for self-definition, but it also provided a
personalized site for generating and manifesting political and national,
even cosmic, significations. Yu Dafu’s relentless allegorization of hypo-
chondriac melancholy, for instance, highlighted the impossibility of an
individual even beginning to relate his frustration, physical as well as
psychic, in a shared language. Such was the fate of the series of young
women that Ding Ling painted with great sympathy in her early fiction.
A convalescent Miss Sophia’s resolve to leave again and go ‘‘somewhere
where no one knows me, where I can squander the remaining days of
my life’’ amounts to a desperate protest against the displacement of a
young generation ().24 As Mao Dun observed in , Miss Sophia,
at once an ‘‘emblem of the conflicting attitude toward sexual love ex-
perienced by young women emancipated since May Fourth,’’ was also a
deeply wounded lone rebel denouncing her own times.25
In many of the literary expressions from this romantic period, the lib-
erated body, after a brief outburst of passion, would often grow into a
focal symptom of a disarrayed society’s failure to productively integrate
its youth, together with youth’s newly released energy and enthusiasm.
The inescapable urban setting, where new practices of the self as a sign
of being modern were experimented with and encouraged, offered a spa-
tial parallel to the disjuncture that besieged the individual. Just as the city
was positively modern only to the extent that it embodied a radical dif-
ference from the vast rural hinterland, so bold proclamations of the de-
siring subject often served to reveal its limitedness or even its irrelevance
to society at large. Indeed, the romantic celebration of the self in the im-
mediate post-May Fourth era, or what Yu Dafu lauded as ‘‘the discovery
of individual personality,’’ 26 was largely an urban event, deriving much of

. ‘‘Shafei nüshi de riji.’’ See its English translation, ‘‘Miss Sophia’s Diary,’’ in I My-
self Am a Woman, .
. Mao Dun, ‘‘Nüzuojia Ding Ling’’ (Woman writer Ding Ling), Wenyi yuebao
(Literature and arts monthly), no.  ( July ); collected in Research Materials on
Ding Ling, .
. Quoted in Lee, The Romantic Generation, .
112 Chinese Modern

its modernity from an implicit valorization of the cosmopolitan city as a

civilizational vanguard against the countryside as intransigent tradition.
As a result, the romantic imagination was ultimately defined less by the
possession of poetic inspiration or talent than by the frequent onslaught
of a Weltschmerz that a sensitive soul and body suffered. From its very
start, in other words, the romantic journey of sentiment was to seek an
imaginary compensation for the individuated body that now became sus-
ceptible to defeat and despair. Even Guo Moruo, the most ebullient poet
of May Fourth romanticism who would imagine himself to be a wild
celestial hound and declare ‘‘I am I! My ego is about to burst,’’ had to first
endure a dark period in his life when the only solution to his existential
crisis appeared to be death.27
By the time that Ding Ling began a story by describing the hero waking
up in a Shanghai apartment in the spring of , however, the tempest
of the romantic age had been overtaken by a much more violent storm of
political upheaval. The romanticized body had proved to be too fragile
when faced with bloody revolutions and counterrevolutions. It had died
a pathological death in Mao Dun’s  short story ‘‘Zisha’’ (Suicide),
where a Miss Huan, pregnant from her brief but passionate love affair
with a young revolutionary, decides to hang herself when she realizes that
she is all alone and unable to cope with that grim reality. Tormented by
anguish, she utters a bitter verdict on romantic rhetoric for having ill-
prepared her for society. ‘‘Lies, lies—liberation, freedom, brightness—
everything is a lie! . . . I shall announce to the world the crimes of those
fraudulent ideas of liberation, freedom, and brightness. I shall announce
it with my own death!’’ 28 She does die, but not without suggesting, at
the last moment, that personal redemption may come from joining the
‘‘tide of history.’’
Indeed, the swirling tide of history had brought about revolution, its
miserable failure notwithstanding, as an even grander, more global pas-
sion. To dialectically negate its romantic pathos and sentimentality, the

. See David T. Roy, Kuo Mo-jo: The Early Years (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, ), .
. Mao Dun, ‘‘Suicide,’’ in his Yexiangwei (The wild roses) (Shanghai: Dajiang
shupu, ), –. For a contextual reading of this story, see Yu-shih Chen, Realism
and Allegory in The Early Fiction of Mao Tun (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
), –.
 Shanghai, Spring  113

‘‘literary revolution’’ of the early s would necessarily transform it-

self into a ‘‘revolutionary literature.’’ 29 Along with this much-trumpeted
Aufhebung (a theoretical catchphrase at the time, with its Chinese translit-
eration) of literary practice, a Hegelian sublimation of details became an
integral part of the new aesthetic of representing collective action.30 The
role and function of the writer had also undergone significant changes;
the idea of an expressive, if also lonely, romantic poet was now replaced
by that of a proud advocate of the recently discovered faith in the col-
lective. The revolutionary mass as an emergent subject of history quickly
supplied a cause for, and reignited the imagination of, young urban intel-
lectuals who had witnessed their own impotence or superfluousness only
too well in war-torn China. For this post- Revolution generation of
Chinese, the political enterprise of a proletariat-led national revolution
offered direct social integration on the one hand, while it made available
a powerfully explanatory language, because of its global implications, for
their own anxiety and discontent on the other.
Against this background, Ding Ling’s maturation into a revolutionary
writer by , as Meng Yue and Dai Jinhua pointedly comment, was
almost a historical necessity. It answered her epistemological as well as
existential need to release herself and her female characters from the dark
vacuum left behind by a spate of bankrupt ideologies, not the least of
them being romantic individualism.31 Trapped in this vacuum, early Ding
Ling had had to turn inward and repeatedly explore, as Tani Barlow put
it, the depths of the ‘‘generally ‘dark’ quality of female consciousness.’’ 32

. Cheng Fangwu, ‘‘Cong wenxue geming dao geming wenxue’’ (From a literary
revolution to a revolutionary literature), dated  November , collected in Zhang
Ruoying, Zhongguo xin wenxueshi ziliao (Documents from the history of Chinese new
literature) (Shanghai: Guangmin shuju, ), –. For an English translation, see
Kirk A. Denton, ed., Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, –
 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, ), –.
. For a highly relevant discussion of the implication of the Hegelian philosophiz-
ing of the detail, see Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New
York: Methuen, ).
. See Meng and Dai, Emerging from History, . For a contextual study of the
discourse of individualism during the May Fourth period, see Lydia H. Liu, Translin-
gual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity, China, –
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, ), –.
. Barlow, ‘‘Introduction’’ to I Myself Am a Woman, . Ding Ling’s exploration
114 Chinese Modern

Thus, the potent symbolism of the title of her first collection published
in : In Darkness.

The Training of the Male Body

When Wangwei appears at the beginning of Shanghai, Spring  (II), he

and his body have undergone a radicalization similar to what Ruoquan
experienced in the first part. In Wangwei’s words, he has consciously
‘‘plebeianized’’ (pingmin) himself (; ). Motivated by a ‘‘change
in his outlook on life,’’ he finds less and less time to worry about his
clothing or physical appearance. To him, plebeianization means frequent-
ing dingy and unsanitary restaurants of the working class, exhausting
himself in working for an underground society that promotes proletar-
ian literature, and diligently studying the newspapers ‘‘in order to sort
through the information on world economy, to seek reports on the de-
velopment of revolution in China and collect evidence of the daily weak-
ening of the ruling class’’ (; ). Sometimes he gets a headache from
having to compose work reports or outlines of a plan, for ‘‘only three
months before he had still been a student prone to melancholy, who
could easily and very quickly produce moving, clever, and sentimental
lines in a poem of equal length’’ (; ). His extensive involvement
in ‘‘practical struggles,’’ incidentally, also enables him to better deal with
a private frustration caused by his lover Mary’s absence. No longer an
artistic young man, Wangwei is now a dedicated intellectual.33

of ‘‘female subjectivity,’’ according to Barlow, led her to the ‘‘extraordinarily sensi-

tive issues of sexual repression and expression, homoeroticism, female Don Juanism,
sexual politics, and the generally ‘dark’ quality of female consciousness.’’
. In his  essay on ‘‘ ‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervousness’’
(Sexuality and the Psychology of Love [New York: Collier Books, ]), Freud makes
the following observations: ‘‘An abstinent artist is scarcely conceivable; an abstinent
young intellectual is by no means a rarity. The young intellectual can by abstinence
enhance his powers of concentration, whereas the production of the artist is probably
powerfully stimulated by his sexual experience. On the whole I have not gained the
impression that sexual abstinence helps to shape energetic, self-reliant men of action,
nor original thinkers, bold pioneers and reformers; for more often it produces ‘good’
weaklings who later become lost in the crowd that tends to follow painfully the ini-
tiative of strong characters’’ (). What happens to Wangwei at the end of his story
seems to make this paragraph even more relevant.
 Shanghai, Spring  115

The love story between Wangwei and Mary, now briefly narrated as
prehistory from his perspective, is a typical episode from the bygone
romantic age.34 It was unconstrained modern love between a young boy
in his aimless Wanderjahre and a capricious young girl equally unclear
about what she was looking for in life. After an initial encounter, the ex-
change of a few letters was sufficient to arouse a ‘‘much stronger desire’’
in him, which expressed itself as an unbearable ‘‘physical pain’’ and drove
him from Shanghai to Beijing.35 There, following the example of many
contemporary young men and women boldly tasting personal freedom
in the city, they swiftly moved in together and consummated their pas-
sionate, if doomed, romance. Shortly after, Mary went home to visit her
parents and never came back, and Wangwei, duly panicked, turned to a
‘‘new hope’’ that much excited him. Gradually, he would even forget her,
for now he had no time to be idle or fantasize. The libidinal drive that
had once overpowered him was now both regulated and transferred onto
other, more global pursuits. If the romantic years allowed much aestheti-
cization of his body, the new political age demanded its asceticization for
it to be productive and accessible to a public life.
At this juncture, Mary announces her return to Wangwei’s life through
a peremptory telegraphed message, which instantly ‘‘revived many hopes
and dreams in him and brought back memories of the sweet past’’ (;
). Upon her return, Wangwei is compelled to confront his largely re-
pressed romantic past, his sexuality, and his new self-image. Much of
the rest of the narrative, therefore, depicts the gradual process in which
Wangwei and Mary realize that they are no longer compatible and are
in fact miserable together. Mary, as much as Wangwei, sees no remedy
to their strained relationship unless she takes the pains to ‘‘deny herself

. In his case study of the ‘‘romantic generation,’’ Leo Ou-fan Lee concludes, ‘‘the
literature of the s was filled with stories of how an independent Nora met and
flirted with a pale and pensive young man at a cafe or how a group of nature-loving
girl students bumped into a handsome art student doing a landscape painting at the
West Lake near Hangchow’’ (). This basic plot of ‘‘the freedom to love’’ appears in
all of Ding Ling’s three ‘‘revolution and love’’ stories: Wei Hu and Shanghai, Spring
 (I and II).
. Collected Works of Ding Ling, . The English translation collected in I Myself
Am a Woman has some curious omissions. Missing is the telling phrase ‘‘physical pain’’
(shenti shang de tongku), which, incidentally, is also truncated in a mainland edition
of Ding Ling daibiaozuo (Representative works by Ding Ling), ed. Jiao Shangzhi and
Liu Chunsheng (Zhengzhou: Henan renmin, ), .
116 Chinese Modern

and become a person with a mind like his’’ (; ). Although the
central consciousness of the narrative is Wangwei’s, much sympathetic
room is given to explaining Mary’s frustration and her reasoning. A con-
stant criss-crossing and clashing of two perspectives, as Meng Yue and
Dai Jinhua suggest,36 engender the dynamics of the narrative and bring
into relief a wide range of hierarchical values embodied by Wangwei
and Mary: reason/emotion, work/pleasure, public/private, political/per-
sonal, collective/individual, mind/body, heroism/hedonism, masculine/
feminine. What the narrative tension reveals, perhaps against Ding Ling’s
authorial intention, is an understanding that revolutionary movement,
just like modern industry or routinized office work, first has to develop
a work ethic reinforced by a mode of regimenting the sexualized human
body. It has to invent its own version of what Freud calls ‘‘the economics
of the libido’’ so as to maximize the productivity of the body.37
This ideologically justified need to control the body becomes more
pronounced soon after Mary’s arrival. On the same evening, as they en-
joy a leisurely dinner in a Cantonese restaurant and confess how much
they missed each other, Wangwei cannot help but appreciate the physical
attributes of the sensuous woman with him. His probing gaze over her
body is enough to arouse his erotic imagination. ‘‘She had taken off the
hundred-and-twenty-yuan coat and was wearing only a thin, light green,
tight-fitting, soft silk qipao that delicately revealed the intriguing parts of
her body’’ (figure ). As Mary continues her small talk, Wangwei finds
himself distracted by a growing ‘‘discomfort.’’ ‘‘A bodily instinct pressed
upon him, making him wish that at this very moment he could jump
upon her, press her down, and enjoy once again the ecstatic intoxication
on her beautiful flesh. For he did not have the need to express his love
in words. Several times he said, ‘Let’s eat up quickly!’ ’’ Yet Mary, ele-
gantly sipping wine and tea, is enjoying the pleasant intimacy of the res-
taurant with her lover too much to notice Wangwei’s turgid impatience.
‘‘Wangwei, on the other hand, gradually fell silent. He was suffering from
a desire that, aroused by love, could not yet be fulfilled. He tried to hold
himself together, he felt his entire body burning hot, and red capillaries
filled up his eyes that seemed ready to burst in flames. He remained quiet,

. Meng and Dai, Emerging from History, –.

. See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New
York: Norton, ), –.
 Shanghai, Spring  117

. Commercial advertisement, ‘‘International Dispensary Co.

Ltd.’’ (ca. ). From Lao yuefenpai guanggaohua (Advertising
images in old calendars), special issue of Hansheng (Echo
magazine), no.  (Taipei: Hansheng, ).

trying not to listen to her, to be vulnerable to her seduction, because he

was really feeling more pain than pleasure’’ (; ).
The self-control that Wangwei exercises here, however, is not nearly as
momentous as what he is about to achieve. If at this moment he manages
to contain his reactivated sexuality by diverting his thoughts to other ir-
relevant and trivial things, when he suddenly remembers that he has an
118 Chinese Modern

important meeting to chair later that evening, his decision to leave be-
hind an amorous Mary in his bare apartment comes as a remarkable tri-
umph. It is a triumph of his will over his body; it marks the priority now
given to a new source of excitement, the achievement of which consists in
postponing, and ultimately sublimating, the immediate gratification for
which his body yearns. The meeting that he hurries to attend, of which
there will be a series of timely repeats in the story, functions as a ritual, as
an act of good faith that convinces Wangwei of his own ability to displace
the libido and to productively devote his body to a greater cause. The
meeting is also a form of public life, to which Wangwei now entirely sub-
mits himself. The fact that Wangwei is constantly exhausted and unavail-
able, emotionally as well as physically, to a desiring Mary becomes one
effective way for him to safeguard his commitment through disciplining
his body.38
It would be a fallacy, as Michel Foucault reminds us, to think of the
revolutionary commitment that absorbs Wangwei as merely repressive.39
To the contrary, it is a discourse of sublimation that legitimizes a new
technology of the body and delegates to it new functions as well as sym-
bolic contents. The evocation of political identity is an ingenious part
of what Foucault describes as the ‘‘subtle, calculated technology of sub-
jection (assujetissement)’’ that answered the urgent need for controlling
‘‘multiplicity’’ in the modern liberal state. It is a technology that pro-
vided a ‘‘guarantee of the submission of forces and bodies’’ that became a
sociological reality with the demise of the sovereign body of the king.40
The same time that an individuated and juridical subject was called forth
as such, it also was subjected to a disciplinary power in the form of sys-
tematic classification, normalization, and externalization. For ‘‘the real,
corporal disciplines constituted the foundation of the formal, juridical
liberties.’’ Discipline as a new modality of power, with its ‘‘set of physico-

. ‘‘It was never enough for Mary, but when she saw that Wangwei was exhausted,
she would curtail her excitement. Wangwei would be so tired that his eyes would be
red, his head pounding, his joints stiff. Once home he would always fall asleep as soon
as he reached the bed, which was something that Mary also felt sorry about’’ (;
).
. See Michel Foucault, ‘‘Part Two, The Repressive Hypothesis,’’ in his History of
Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, ), –.
. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheri-
dan (New York: Vintage, ), –.
 Shanghai, Spring  119

political techniques,’’ mobilizes the body so as to regulate it, inscribes

on it political signification so as to restrict it. The asceticism practiced
by Wangwei, therefore, helps to incorporate the body into the political,
and the private into the public. As the narrative continues and the rift
between the two lovers widens, Wangwei’s body is represented as more
and more immune to the instinctual force that inflicted intense ‘‘physical
pain’’ at the beginning. The pleasure he now enjoys is more of an intellec-
tual nature, partly derived from a conscious resistance against immediate
bodily gratification. The same intellectualized pleasure enables him to in-
vest his body with global significance and eventually to mobilize it as a
political statement in a street demonstration. When confounded by the
possibility that Mary may leave him someday, Wangwei decides that he
should overcome the loss by making himself even busier. His faith now
unassailable, he refuses ‘‘to change his thinking due to the coming and
going of a woman in his life’’ (; ).
While Wangwei’s body undergoes conscientious training, Mary
throughout the story remains the same sensuous woman and is always
portrayed in the deliberate and decorative detail of the private sphere.41
Her ‘‘dignified and exciting’’ body, which she narcissistically appreciates
in a mirror, is her self-consciousness and individuality (figure ). Her de-
cision to leave Wangwei amounts to a refusal, by a city woman in the
post-May Fourth era, to relinquish what the romantic age has made avail-
able to her. The two reasons she gives for her departure in her farewell
note (his unfaithfulness to love and his obsession with work) point to the
centrality of romantic love in her existence (; ). By allowing Mary
a last chance to voice her anguish and, more significantly, by introducing
the reader into her private world of feminine pleasure and sensuousness,
the narrator explores, rather than dismisses, the young woman’s sensi-
bility and dilemma. In doing so, Ding Ling’s narrative presents more than
an ideological difference between Mary and Wangwei. A sociology-based
reading of both parts of Ding Ling’s novella may lead to the conclusion
that the growing number of educated women, such as Mary and Meilin,
in the s still had little access to the workplace and were forced to con-

. For a relevant discussion of the suppression of the detail as femininity in Chinese
political modernity, see Rey Chow, ‘‘Modernity and Narration—In Feminine Detail,’’
Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), –.
. Commercial advertisement, ‘‘The Central Agency, Ltd.’’ (ca. ). From Lao
yuefenpai guanggaohua (Advertising images in old calendars), special issue of
Hansheng (Echo magazine), no.  (Taipei: Hansheng, ).
 Shanghai, Spring  121

front, primarily as consumers, the new commodity of leisure in metro-

politan Shanghai.42 Their bodies, in other words, may not have been sub-
jected to the same degree of corporal retraining first undertaken by the
male population in an emerging disciplinary society. As a result, the Chi-
nese Noras that Lu Xun described in  were still besieged by boredom
and a lack of socialization.43
If the irreducibility of Mary’s sentient body indicates both an interi-
ority not yet externalized and engenders a desire to fulfill herself in ro-
mantic love, an aesthetics of details centered on the body is corroborated
by much of what the metropolis has to offer. During the same time that
Wangwei grows resistant to the lure of the city through his intellectual
belief, Mary is continually enlivened by the urban spectacle. For her, the
city cannot be abstracted into a metaphysical structure or concept; rather,
it embodies a way of life that sustains itself on concrete details, designs,
and objects. Her relation to the city therefore lies not in distancing her-
self, but in intimate immersion. ‘‘In the enjoyment of love, Mary was
forever insatiable. She’d drag him out onto the street to look for little
restaurants that they had never been to before, or sometimes they would
go to larger ones. After dinner they would take a leisurely walk along the
brilliantly illuminated, bustling streets because it was still too early for
the late movie’’ (; ).
When finally seated in a deluxe movie theater, Mary would sooner en-
joy and fantasize about its interior decorations than follow the story un-
folding on the screen. ‘‘Of the one yuan she spent to attend the movie,
eighty cents was for the soft, cushioned chair, the shiny brass banisters,
the velvet curtains, and the pleasing music. Only a country bumpkin

. In the text, we find a description of how Mary spent her day consuming popu-
lar culture while Wangwei went to his ‘‘work.’’ ‘‘Her interest focused entirely on her-
self. She would read tabloid papers, read about girl students or campus queens, sports
celebrities, movie stars, and pimps and prostitutes. Wangwei disapproved and some-
times, unable to put up with it, would say to her, ‘Mary! I don’t think this is good
entertainment . . .’ ’’ (–; ).
. For a discussion of the May Fourth understanding of Nora from Ibsen’s A Doll’s
House, see Elizabeth Eide, ‘‘Ibsen’s Nora and Chinese Interpretations of Female Eman-
cipation,’’ in Modern Chinese Literature and Its Social Context, Nobel Symposium (),
ed. Goran Malmqvist (Stockholm, ), –. Also see Eide’s  essay ‘‘Opti-
mistic and Disillusioned Noras in the Chinese Literary Scene, –,’’ in Woman
and Literature in China, –.
122 Chinese Modern

would come solely for the movie.’’ To Wangwei, however, cinema as a

bourgeois entertainment was condemnable because it ‘‘so easily numbed
people’s minds and influenced society for the worse.’’ He put up with
such senseless diversion only because he loved Mary and wished to com-
pensate for his absence during the day (–; ).
In tracing the historical metamorphosis of the privileged artist-flâneur
into a department store-bound flâneuse in nineteenth-century Paris, Pris-
cilla Ferguson comments that the emergence of commercial arcades fate-
fully transformed the practices of the city street. ‘‘No woman can discon-
nect herself from the city and its seductive spectacle. For she must either
desire the objects spread before her or herself be the object of desire, as-
sociated with and agent of the infinite seductive capacity of the city.’’ 44
The infinite seductive capacity of the city that now fascinates Mary the
flâneuse in Shanghai of the s (across its sizable French Concession?)
also originates in the presence of other people, to whom she in turn con-
stitutes an intriguing and performative other. For Wangwei, however, in
order to successfully resist the seductive city, he cannot acknowledge an
onlooking or indifferent crowd. He has to construct a collective us versus
a reactionary them. The urban spectacle becomes a conspiratorial illusion
because it depends on a constant and manipulative proliferation of empty
forms to conceal an impoverished content. The trivial and sensuous ob-
jects that define an aesthetic experience for Mary, furthermore, are but
an exploitation of the body as sensory fragments on which the modern
city flourishes. Wangwei’s critique of the city, in agreement with modern
political radicalism, has to begin with a rhetoric of collective identity and
destiny. His poetic vision of its transformation, too, calls upon a climac-
tic ‘‘surge of roaring waves’’ or an ‘‘erupting volcano’’ that would destroy
the phantasmagoric city in raging flames.45
Such an apocalyptic vision, composed of vivid images of natural forces,

. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Paris as Revolution: Writing the Nineteenth-Century

City (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), . See also –.
. Toward the end of the narrative, Wangwei was assigned to give a public speech
downtown. Before the secretly planned demonstration, he paced up and down the
street to examine the situation. ‘‘He felt an excitement that he couldn’t suppress, as if
he were seeing a surge of roaring waves toppling the mountains and churning up the
seas. He also imagined an erupting volcano engulfing the city in its raging flames. It
was possible that this might happen immediately, since so many people were ready for
it! And he, he would accelerate the great storm and ignite the flame!’’ (–; ).
 Shanghai, Spring  123

often underlies a revolutionary psychology and seems to articulate a prev-

alent frustration with another aspect of the urban experience: the routin-
ization of daily life. As much a spirited consumer in the city as she can be,
Mary in the story is also a modern housewife in training.46 Through this
domestic domain, or rather in Wangwei’s fierce resistance against it, we
see a patriarchal gender division being endorsed, as if in an absentminded
oversight, by the politicized public life that elates Wangwei. His impa-
tience with everyday life and refusal of leisure, however, are symptomatic
more of a fear than a self-confident rejection. They betray a fear of what
is not yet part of the socially and semiotically regulated public space. The
private home, as much as the seductive city spectacle, is threatening be-
cause it stands for what has not been fully infiltrated by the new discipline
mechanism. In the narrative structure of Shanghai, Spring  (I and II),
banal everyday life and its attendant domesticity are readily represented
as effeminate and accessory. Mary’s lack of a political consciousness, as
in the case of the besieged writer Zibin, is illustrated by her sole wish
to build a happy home. As a result, Wangwei has to reinforce his efforts
at self-discipline by removing himself from his apartment, by being con-
stantly absent from the scene. The spectacular explosion that he envisions
consequently indicates, rather than vengeance, a desire to force open and
share the private and intimate spheres of life. Only a unitary application
of the body would give coherence to everyday life and, at the same time,
prevent the body itself from receding from public life. The causal relation
between a ‘‘masculinization of the body politic’’ and a male domination
of the public space and discourse, which Gillian Rose retraces in her study
of women in everyday spaces,47 once again proves to be an instrumen-
tal component of the modern experience, even when the body is now
devoted to a revolutionary cause (figure ). In fact, from its very birth
during the great French Revolution, the modern revolutionary body has
been dominantly represented as male, public, and in continuous need of

. ‘‘Mary did not go out and run around anymore. She waited for Wangwei, and
while he was out even cleaned the room for him. She wanted to move to a better place
and see about getting one or two pieces of finer furniture’’ (; ).
. See Gillian Rose, ‘‘Women and Everyday Spaces,’’ in her Feminism and Geog-
raphy: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, ), –. Rose also observes that ‘‘a history of the white masculine hetero-
sexual bourgeois body in Euro-America can therefore be told in terms a series of de-
nials of corporeality’’ ().
124 Chinese Modern

. Woodcut, Bodou (Confrontation), by Yefu (). From

Zhongguo xinxing banhua wushi nian xuanji (Anthology of new
Chinese woodcuts in the past fifty years) (Shanghai: Renmin
meishu, ).

disciplining.48 The historical specificity of Wangwei’s body, in the final

analysis, derives not so much from its embeddedness in Chinese cultural
tradition, as from its eager acceptance of a modern universalism that rests,
as I suggest elsewhere, on a global imaginary of identity.49

. See Dorinda Outram, The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class and Political
Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, ), esp. .
. See my discussion of Chinese nationalism and its necessary subscription to a
global imaginary of identity in Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity:
 Shanghai, Spring  125

To better illustrate the unitary application of the body that revolution-

ary discourse allows, Ding Ling inserts another romantic couple into her
narrative as a contrast to the failure of Mary and Wangwei. This sec-
ond pair strikes a happy union between a plebeianized intellectual and
an ‘‘unaffected, healthy’’ tram conductress who possesses a ‘‘simple, cor-
rect understanding of politics’’ (; ). Peripheral though they are in
the story, their successful romance nonetheless signifies the central ideal
of a political and disciplined existence, which also justifies Wangwei’s
analysis of his difference from Mary in terms of social class and history.
Between Mary’s sensuous and, as is indicated by her exotic name, West-
ernized body and the naturally healthy and native body of the working-
class woman, a social physiology is constructed that interprets the human
body as a direct demonstration of historical and social forces. Fundamen-
tal to it is the contrast between a liberal, pleasure-oriented body and a
disciplined, socially productive body.

If Mary were a peasant girl, a factory worker, or a high school student,

then they would get along very well because there would be only one idea,
one outlook on life. He could lead her and she would follow. Yet Mary
was from a relatively well-to-do family and had never experienced hardship.
Her intelligence made her all the prouder and her education confirmed her
attitude toward life, which was a hedonist pursuit for pleasure. She believed
in herself and would yield to no one. (; )

A deep ambiguity, however, surfaces when such a comprehensive and

historicizing analysis still cannot explain away Wangwei’s longing for
Mary’s ‘‘flawless beauty.’’ It is his body, for all the disciplining it receives,
that refuses to deny the reality of what Mary has come to embody. After
she leaves him, Wangwei tries to keep himself occupied, ‘‘but as soon as
he lay down on his bed alone, he could not help but miss her sorely’’ (;
–).

The Body as Enunciation

In the end, the question of the body dramatically reasserts itself in the
closing scene when, in the commotion of a quickly dispersed political

The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
).
126 Chinese Modern

rally, Wangwei is arrested, hurled into a police patrol wagon, and finds
himself landing on top of other demonstrators who have met the same
fate. ‘‘As he looked out through the wired mesh, he spotted an elegant
lady by the entrance to a big department store. Ah, it was Mary!’’ In-
deed, Mary, ‘‘gorgeous and graceful as ever,’’ had apparently just finished
shopping in the company of a handsome young man. Through such ex-
traordinary coincidence, her primary function in the narrative is both dis-
ambiguated, so to speak, and ideologically condemned as embodying no
more than the bourgeois idea of a conspicuous consumer. At this sight, a
stunned Wangwei for some curious reason feels relieved and bids a men-
tal farewell: ‘‘Good, she is happy again. After all, she is that kind of per-
son, and I don’t have to worry about her anymore. So long, Mary’’ (;
–).
With this final moment of recognition, the narrative reexamines Wang-
wei’s revolutionary body with a turn of irony. Two dramatized forms
of body experience are brought together. Side by side with Wangwei’s
heroic body, dragged through the street and forcibly thrown onto a po-
litical collective, is Mary’s carefully protected and consumerist body, evi-
dently insulated against the disturbance nearby. Each directly participates
in a signifying spectacle in a public space and dramatizes one potential use
of the human body. Yet both bodies are objectified—one through politi-
cal insurgence, the other by the cityscape and, more specifically, by the
male gaze. The politicized body is now explicitly male, whereas the female
body remains resolutely indifferent. At this point, we see an almost com-
plete inversion of the gender distribution in the first part of the novella,
where it is Meilin who actively seeks a political life, much to the chagrin
of her self-obsessed husband, although her new social identity, as we have
seen, relies much on the strong presence of her mentor Ruoquan.
The deep irony of this final scene of aborted action, therefore, lies in
the close juxtaposition of two now disparate bodies, which until recently
were intimately connected; they problematize as much as rely on each
other for their own signification, and yet there is an unequal exchange.
Mary never looks back, and we see Wangwei, from behind the barred
window, look at and recognize Mary. The male political hero, obviously,
is privileged with a subject position from which he can observe and make
a judgment, but such a vantage point quickly collapses when his body is
subjected to brutalization on the one hand and disallowed differentiation
on the other. Collective action and political violence combine to moral-
 Shanghai, Spring  127

ize his body and prevent it from activating its own memory or acquiring
its own private history. It is abstracted into disembodied conceptuality.
As soon as he feels relieved, therefore, Wangwei is also compelled to de-
nounce his former lover as despicable and of a different social class. The
female body, given no chance to return the male gaze, is apparently con-
demned to a morally indifferent corporeality. At the same time, however,
it projects a concrete image of personal happiness and freedom. Wang-
wei’s last glimpse of Mary, ‘‘like a queen from a distant land,’’ captures
what he has consciously denied himself, and it epiphanically illuminates,
before he joins in a collective chanting of ‘‘Down with . . . ,’’ what his
body was once capable of and perhaps what it still desires, independently
of his will and passion. The handsome young man by her side now is in-
deed his alter ego. Thus, the irony of recognition. At the last moment,
Mary unexpectedly emerges as the narrative’s central character because
she becomes at once the object of a judgmental gaze and the object of
desire. Wangwei’s pursuit of a political life fulfills itself at the moment
when his body is used in a public performance, whereas Mary’s individual
negotiation with various demands on her sensuous body still firmly an-
chors her in the narrativity of the city space. His is a story that closes
with a certainty he always strives for, but her story remains open-ended,
if only because it is nothing out of the ordinary and resides in the private
sphere.
The eventual merging of Wangwei’s disciplined young body into the
political collective as itself a body of symbolic plenitude concludes the
narrative of Shanghai, Spring  and comes as the culmination of his
conscious self-transformation. His individual and indulgent body that
we initially observe in a private apartment eventually succeeds in acquir-
ing as well as enacting social meaning in a public space. As a metaphor,
Wangwei’s changed relation to his body illustrates the invention of a
‘‘politicized body’’ in revolutionary China, which was to provide a ma-
terial semiotic component for ordering everyday reality and signifying
the power of the body politic for years to come.50 A politicized body is
the body as public enunciation, as the unmediated site for the exercise
and demonstration of power. Upon this semiotically charged body, many
a spectacle will have to be staged so that it extends and eventually be-
. See Ann Anagnost, ‘‘The Politicized Body,’’ in Body, Subject and Power in China,
ed. Angela Zito and Tani E. Barlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ),
–, esp. .
128 Chinese Modern

comes identical with the public realm. Constant mobilization, through

corporal semiotics and physico-political techniques, becomes a necessary
means to keep such a body from imploding or succumbing to inertia.51
The turn to such an empowering externalization marks a new stage in
Ding Ling’s career as a writer, which in many ways parallels, if also mag-
nifies, the course of the Left literary movement as a radical outgrowth
of the liberal-humanist May Fourth tradition. For Ding Ling, writing
in the early s, the nodal point of literary practice was how to re-
claim the romanticized body from an earlier discourse of interiority and
eventually to dissolve in public life the same body, now retrained to be
purposeful rather than idly imaginative, productive rather than acutely
sensitive. More specifically, the newly plebeianized intellectual, inspired
by an ideologized collective, should not only be able to resist sensuous
details and libidinal urges, which we see in Wangwei’s coping with Mary
and his own ‘‘physical pain,’’ but also to cultivate a different sensory ap-
preciation of disagreeable poverty as an authenticating social reality, as
is the realization of another Wangwei-type young man during an oddly
agitating day of his life.52 What the romanticized body needed to over-
come, in other words, is an aesthetic that centers on the individuated
body and a sensibility that valorizes inner depth and self-exploration. In
the given historical context, this body was readily identified as Western,
urban, and bourgeois, the opposite of a nationalist and proletarian evo-
cation of a collective subject of history, in which belongs the adequately
disciplined working-class woman sketched in Shanghai, Spring  (II),
who also happens to be nameless.
The ideological campaign of the Left in the early s to proletarian-

. Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom offers an interesting discussion of the theatrical aspect of

the student protest ‘‘repertoire’’ developed in Shanghai in the decades after the May
Fourth movement in his Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China: The View from
Shanghai (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, ). For a concise version, see
his ‘‘The Evolution of the Shanghai Student Protest Repertoire; Or, Where Do Cor-
rect Tactics Come From?’’ collected in Shanghai Sojourners, ed. Frederic Wakeman Jr.
and Wen-hsin Yeh (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California,
), –.
. In the short story, ‘‘Yitian’’ ([One day], , in Collected Works of Ding Ling,
–), Ding Ling tells of how a young writer Lu Xiang tries to overcome his dis-
tance from political reality by constantly examining and negating his immediate re-
sponses to the dismal condition, spiritual as well as physical, of the working class. For
a close analysis of the story, see Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker, Ding Ling’s Fiction, –.
 Shanghai, Spring  129

ize the writer and make literature accessible to the working masses drew
heavily on a poetics of spectacular collective action mandated by an opti-
mistic historical vision. It also projected a new public life that would ap-
propriate urban modernity through a disciplining of the individual body.
The desire to endow literary practice with political significance entailed
a deeply utopian project, which was profoundly contradictory and as lib-
erating as it was limiting.53 In the summer of , Ding Ling once again
showed herself to be in the vanguard of the Left literary movement by
finishing the novella Shui (Flood) to offer a commanding view of a hun-
gry crowd of peasants, ‘‘roaring with a passion for life’’ and rising against
social injustice compounded by natural disaster.54 The most significant
achievement of the new novella, according to an approving critic at the
time, was its prompt attention to ‘‘major contemporary events,’’ which
would demand any writer to look beyond ‘‘the trivialities of daily life.’’
For this reason, Flood was hailed as indicating the birth of a new type of
fiction as well as a new type of writer.55

. In her study of the long but also loose relationship between the radical tradition
in the United States and Tillie Olsen, Deborah Rosenfelt focuses on three contradic-
tions of the literary policies of the Old Left. See Rosenfelt, ‘‘From the Thirties: Tillie
Olsen and the Radical Tradition,’’ –. Her summary of the heritage of the Old
Left is worth quoting in full here: ‘‘First, the left required great commitments of time
and energy for political work, on the whole valuing action over thought, deed over
word; yet it also validated the study and production of literature and art, providing a
first exposure to literature for many working-class people, fostering an appreciation of
a wide range of socially conscious literature, and offering important outlets for publi-
cation and literary exchange. Second, although much left-wing criticism, especially by
Communist Party writers, was narrowly prescriptive about the kind of literature con-
temporary writers should be producing, it also inspired—along with the times them-
selves—a social consciousness in writers that deepened their art. Third, for a woman in
the s, the left was a profoundly masculinist world in many of its human relation-
ships, in the orientation of its literature, and even in the language used to articulate
its cultural criticism; simultaneously, the left gave serious attention to women’s issues,
valued women’s contributions to public as well as to private life, and generated an
important body of theory on the woman question’’ (–).
. Shui (Flood), Collected Works of Ding Ling, .
. He Danren, ‘‘Guanyu xinde xiaoshuo de dansheng: ping Ding Ling de Shui ’’
(On the birth of a new fiction: review of Ding Ling’s Flood ’’), Beidou (The Big Dip-
per) : (January ), reprinted in Research Materials on Ding Ling, –. Here is
how He Danren defines a new writer: ‘‘At the present, a new writer is one who under-
stands class struggle correctly, identifies with the interests of the mass of workers and
peasants, and, equipped with dialectical materialism, clearly sees the force and future
130 Chinese Modern

This proved to be a powerful prophecy. With her new interest in de-

picting revolutionary peasant life, Ding Ling’s literary journey, and soon
the tortuous journey of her life, ventured beyond the imaginational geog-
raphy of Shanghai and began an earnest search for a redemptive politi-
cal modernity.56 Yet Shanghai, ‘‘city of amazing paradoxes and fantastic
contrasts,’’ would continue to exist and offer the same phantasmagoric
spectacle, to be either celebrated by the New Sensationists of the s
or narrated with nostalgia by modern romance writers such as Zhang Ai-
ling of the s. When the great city of urban modernity did reappear,
ever so fleetingly, in Ding Ling’s fateful story ‘‘In the Hospital’’ (),
Shanghai was a faint memory, a remote past that hardly bore any rela-
tionship, much less resemblance, to the heroine’s new communal life in
the Communist border region. There the aspiring young nurse, profes-
sionally trained in Shanghai, found herself hospitalized and would have
to survive on humiliation and self-disciplining. Her body, too, still had
to learn how to be useful and adapt to a new normativity.57

of the working mass: only the fiction written by such a writer can be deemed as new
fiction’’ ().
. It is by no accident that Ding Ling’s life should provide a central organizing
element for Spence’s historical narrative The Gate of Heavenly Peace. One critic has
called Ding Ling a paradigmatic searcher for ‘‘complete emancipation’’ (the emanci-
pation of the self and the collective) in modern Chinese literature. See Chen Huifen,
‘‘Chedi jiefang de zhuiqiu zhe he tansuo zhe’’ (A searcher for and explorer of complete
emancipation), Wenxue pinglun congkang (Journal of literary criticism), no.  ():
–.
. Ding Ling, ‘‘Zai yiyuan zhong,’’ Representative Works by Ding Ling, –.
Translated by Gary Bjorge as ‘‘In the Hospital,’’ in Modern Chinese Stories and Novellas,
–, ed. Joseph S. M. Lau, C. T. Hsia, and Leo Ou-fan Lee (New York: Columbia
University Press, ), –.
4
The Last Tubercular in Modern Chinese
Literature: On Ba Jin’s Cold Nights

Secretly I don’t believe this illness to be tuberculosis, at least not

primarily tuberculosis, but rather a sign of my general bankruptcy.
—Franz Kafka to Felice Bauer, 

The opening paragraph of Ba Jin’s (– ) last novel Hanye (Cold nights,
) presents a starkly modern spatiotemporal regime and its problem-
atic relationship to an individual subject. It describes a momentary sus-
pension of reality during an air raid, from which the murky landscape,
gradually coming into focus, appears to be nothing but imminently cata-
strophic. By instilling a sense of routinized emergency, however, the ur-
gent siren that had sounded and trailed off, before the beginning, also sug-
gests a paradoxical situation of permanent contingency. Against such an
inimical background, the protagonist of the novel finds himself unable to
concentrate, paralyzed by some internal agony.
The historical time was the winter of –, the darkest hour of
World War II when Japanese airplanes were systematically bombing
Chongqing, wartime capital of the Nationalist Republic of China. The
constant threat of air raids over the city effectively wiped out, in addi-
tion to a civilian sense of time and space, all credibility of any uplifting
rhetoric or hope for a final victory. By then, the war had apparently in-
stituted disarray as itself a kind of order in the hinterland city, and crisis
exigencies had turned into routine exercises of repetition. Resistance and
national salvation over the years had ossified into an abstract cause and
as such seemed increasingly vacuous and incapable of mobilizing or even
unifying the nation. This moment of pervasive despair and vulnerability,
which Ba Jin as a war refugee lived through in Chongqing, prompted
the veteran novelist to ponder the fate of individuals violently dislodged
by the war. Increasingly, Ba Jin, writing in the mid-s, turned his at-
tention to a realm of unheroic reality that seemed to remain beneath,
132 Chinese Modern

or unsublimated by, various overlapping constructs of subjectivity, such

as discourses of enlightenment, nationalist mobilization, and the sover-
eignty of the modern nation-state. A more mundane, bitter, and somatic
reality surfaced to highlight the bankruptcy, or at least irrelevance, of all
overarching systems of symbolic meaning.
The first paragraph of Cold Nights thus firmly sets up the narrative
mode of the novel and introduces the reader to an instance where the em-
battled subject is no longer meaningfully attached to the environment as
its responsive agent. On the contrary, he is apparently a withdrawn and
pensive subject.

The emergency air raid siren had sounded nearly half an hour ago; the faint
drone of airplanes could be heard in the sky; the streets were quiet without
a trace of light. Rising from the stone steps in front of a bank’s iron gate, he
walked down to the sidewalk and raised his head to look at the sky. It was
ashen, like a piece of faded black cloth. Save the dark shadows of some im-
posingly tall buildings across from him, he could not see a thing.Woodenly
he kept his head raised for quite a while, not really trying to hear anything
or see anything, but only, as it were, to pass some time. Yet time seemed
to be bent on thwarting him by passing very slowly—so slowly that he felt
as though it had stopped moving altogether. The chilly night air, gradually
penetrating his thinly-lined gown, suddenly made his body shiver in spite
of himself. Only at this did he lower his head and heave a painful sigh. He
said to himself in a low voice: ‘‘I cannot go on doing this anymore.’’ 1

. Ba Jin, Hanye (Cold nights), first published in , revised and collected in Ba
Jin wenji (Collected works of Ba Jin) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue, ), :. An En-
glish translation by Nathan K. Mao and Liu Ts’un-yan, Cold Nights, a Novel by Pa Chin
(Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, ), was based on the original  edition.
Mao and Liu claimed that the revision by Ba Jin of his own works ‘‘reflects his attempt
to adapt to the trends of Chinese politics in the s and s’’ (‘‘Preface,’’ xi). This
was evidently the case. See Olga Lang’s ‘‘Epilogue’’ to her pioneering Pa Chin and His
Writings: Chinese Youth Between the Two Revolutions (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, ), –, for a critical analysis of the systematic revisions carried
out by Ba Jin himself in order to make his writings acceptable to the new Commu-
nist regime. It also is true that the changes are ‘‘only minor stylistic and political’’ ones
(Mao and Liu, xi). A comparative reading of the two editions of Cold Nights suggests
that the revision has actually made the novel a better read. This observation does not
deny, however, that the textual revisions are deeply symptomatic of the heteronomous
status of literary discourse in modern China. Given the fact that Ba Jin’s works are
 The Last Tubercular 133

After one initial sentence registering the gloomy surroundings, the nar-
rative quickly dissociates the protagonist from a declared situation of
emergency and enters his private field of vision and perspective. Obvi-
ously inured to the predicted air raid, he finds his immediate enemy to
be the seemingly frozen time, which, in frustrating his wish, also consti-
tutes his passive relationship to the external environment. Time ceases to
be a valuable resource; neither does it seem to possess a directional flow.
The individual’s internalized experience of time, at this moment, sepa-
rates him from the historical present and becomes metonymic of his self-
consciousness. From the very beginning, he is effectively removed from
any position to claim membership in a collective identity. Instead, he is
assaulted by a growing sense of personal failure that seems to drive him
further into interiority.
Yet this insulating interiority is hardly a reliable safe haven, for his train
of thoughts, however empty they may be, are suddenly interrupted when
he involuntarily shivers because of the invasive cold air. His body, mark-
edly clad in a ‘‘thinly-lined gown,’’ serves to reattach the individual, not
to the given spatiotemporal regime as a condition of collective destiny,
but rather to a more immediate and irreducible physicality. At such a
rude awakening, he lowers his head and perforce sheds, so to speak, his
disembodied musings. His is already a demoralized body that inscribes a
reality no longer of the same order as the communal and nationalizable
experience of danger incurred by enemy invasion. It is this frail, pained
body that both determines the forced reflexivity of the individual subject
and incites its aspiration as well as its despair. Upon his articulation of a
desired self-transformation (‘‘I cannot go on doing this any more’’), an
intrusive voice responds pointedly: ‘‘Then what are you going to do? Do
you have the guts, a softy like you?’’ Startled, the man looks around, only

now widely available only in their revised version and that the same revisions are kept
intact, with the author’s approval, in an exhaustive -volume edition of Ba Jin quanji
(The complete works of Ba Jin) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue, –), the  version
of the text of Hanye should be regarded as the definitive edition and is therefore used
here. Mao and Liu’s English rendition, which, incidentally, is inadequate in some re-
spects, is also consulted. (For a detailed analysis of the inadequacies of this English
translation, see Jane Parish Yang’s critical review in Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles,
Reviews . (): –.) Further citations of Ba Jin’s text will be given as internal
page references, with the first number indicating the Chinese original and the second
the English translation.
134 Chinese Modern

to realize that no one is about and that it is his own voice contradicting
him (; ).
An imagined dialogue follows, and from here the novel proceeds to
narrate the existential angst and irreversible decay of the tuberculous pro-
fessional proofreader, whose full name, not revealed for the first time
until the fourth chapter, is Wang Wenxuan. As we soon find out, the
other voice that challenges Wenxuan at the beginning echoes his wife’s
opinion of him, now apparently internalized as reproof of his failure. By
contrast, Zeng Shusheng, his lover from college and common-law wife
of fourteen years, stands as a splendid success in her career as a bank
clerk. More resourceful financially as well as socially, she capably shoul-
ders the responsibility of sending their son to a private prep school and
eventually of supporting the whole family, which also includes Wenxuan’s
doting mother. The mother, determinedly disapproving her daughter-in-
law’s modern lifestyle and openly jealous of the younger woman, seizes
every opportunity to demean Shusheng and instigate estrangement be-
tween the couple. The feud and incessant bickering between Shusheng
and Wenxuan’s mother, as a result, continually torments Wenxuan, whose
indecisiveness and malleability only frustrates the two women in his life
and drives them further apart. As the war crisis deepens, Shusheng de-
cides to leave Chongqing, without her family, to pursue an elusive hap-
piness and self-fulfillment. In the end, when the war is suddenly won and
over, this miserable family completely falls apart. Wenxuan dies an excru-
ciating death on the day that a victory celebration is held in the city, and
a few months later, in a cold winter night, Shusheng comes back to the
old apartment to learn about his demise and the subsequent vanishing of
her son and mother-in-law.
A complex and richly symbolic novel, Cold Nights is generally consid-
ered to be the author’s masterpiece. With this tragic story, as C. T. Hsia
observes in A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, Ba Jin finally established
himself as a ‘‘psychological realist of great distinction’’ by fully presenting
‘‘the naked human condition of suffering and love.’’ 2 Suffering and love,
or rather suffering because of love, predominate the life of Wang Wen-
xuan, probably the last and best-known tuberculous patient portrayed in
modern Chinese literature. Yet the nakedness of the human condition is

. C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, – (New Haven, Conn.:

Yale University Press, ), –.
 The Last Tubercular 135

heavily mediated through overlapping discourses of meaning and social

determinations of identity. What collapses in the course of the novel,
as our reading will show, is the complex construct of subjectivity legiti-
mized by a series of modern practices and ideologies, such as individu-
ality, romantic love, the nuclear family, and finally the nation-state. Each
of these fundamental modern institutions is brought to crisis as Wang
Wenxuan’s body is corroded by tubercle bacilli and his world plagued
by uncertainty and hopelessness. The painful disease, which continually
prevents the invalid from assuming the position of a valid subject, loses
all of its romantic connotations and closely mirrors a general bankruptcy
that leads to the death of the individual. Tuberculosis in this case not
merely yields a symptom or metaphor, but also suggests its own diag-
nosis, demanding an etiological analysis of sickness as both meaning and,
ultimately, the undoing of meaning.
In the character of Wang Wenxuan, therefore, Ba Jin creates a virtu-
ally schizophrenic antihero whose failure to attach himself meaningfully
to any forms of identity, social as well as private, is aggravated by and
reflected in his tuberculosis. The disease functions as no less than a sur-
rogate identity. It drives his fears and desires inward, breeds ressentiment,
and offers masochism as a desperate escape. It also offers him a somatic
language, by means of which the invalid Wang Wenxuan is forced to in-
terpret and ultimately to invalidate his world with a vengeance. The sig-
nificance of the last tubercular in modern Chinese literature thus lies in a
demythologizing dialectic of failure and success.

Tuberculosis as Symptom

‘‘Nothing is more punitive,’’ so warns Susan Sontag, ‘‘than to give a dis-

ease a meaning—that meaning being invariably a moralistic one. Any im-
portant disease whose causality is murky, and for which treatment is in-
effectual, tends to be awash in significance.’’ 3 Tuberculosis and cancer are
the two master diseases of modernity, the metaphoric meanings of which
Sontag succinctly reconstructs in her influential book Illness as Metaphor.
Whereas  as a disease of the recent past signified an intriguing mix-

. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, first published in 
and , respectively (New York: Doubleday, ), .
136 Chinese Modern

ture of delicacy, spirituality, willful romanticization, and simultaneously

a failure of will, cancer as a still unconquered threat most often evokes
paranoia and bewilderment. Sontag’s central contention is that ‘‘illness
is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness—
and the healthiest way of being ill—is one most purified of, most resis-
tant to, metaphoric thinking.’’ 4 Nonetheless, she underscores a modern
predilection for giving disease at least a psychological explanation. In a
secular world after the Enlightenment, ‘‘psychologizing seems to pro-
vide control over the experiences and events (like grave illnesses) over
which people have in fact little or no control. Psychological understand-
ing undermines the ‘reality’ of a disease.’’ 5 However, one may also argue
that psychological discourse, just as previous notions of cosmic predesti-
nation or retribution, enriches the reality of illnesses by endowing them
with a symbolic depth and interpretability. A disease psychologized may
yield a more intense experience.
To liberate oneself from all lurid disease metaphors, which Sontag takes
to be the first step toward a healthy acceptance of death as natural, one
would have to develop a different relationship to one’s own body. The
body would have to be delivered not only from fear, agony, and the urge
to moralize, but also from social symbolism in general. It would become
a truly autonomous body, signifying nothing but itself, and inscribing no
other meaning than its own physiological reality. Such a blanched body,
in rendering superfluous all human imaginative efforts at coping with
and transcending pain, death, and eventually life itself, would spell the
end to sickness as a form of subjectivity, which is no less than what sus-
tains metaphoric thinking about diseases. The same self-sufficient body
would also suggest that modern subjectivity, its creative but rancorous
expression identified by Nietzsche as ressentiment, may itself be a sick-
ness incurred by the perceived impossibility of reconciling consciousness
with action, or words with deeds. In this sense, Sontag’s plea to end all
metaphoric uses of illness is a call for action rather than contemplation.
It voices a deeply utopian project of positive demystification, of freeing
the individual body from ‘‘the fantasy of inescapable fatality.’’ 6
With such utopian emancipation, however, the possibility always exists
of a historical reversal, or, simply, a repetition that belies it. The fantasy
. Ibid., .
. Ibid., .
. Ibid., .
 The Last Tubercular 137

of inescapable fatality seems to be able to either give rise to or cast doubt

over a rhetoric of liberation. For if an overt exploitation of illness as part
of a moralizing semiotics compelled Sontag to envision a self-sufficient
body and a fear-free landscape, then Ba Jin’s critical attention to individu-
als afflicted with tuberculosis and to the symbolism of diseases in general,
by contrast, followed an earlier period of celebrating new life, youth, and
a desiring body. Sickness as meaning, as the troublesome details of life,
became the focus of Ba Jin’s writings when he turned to look into ‘‘little
people and little things,’’ as summarized by the title of a collection of his
short stories published in .7 Mournful ‘‘groaning,’’ so some critics ob-
serve, now defined a deliberate mode of writing that came in to replace
the romantic writer’s earlier exuberant style in the tradition of an uncom-
promisingly antagonistic ‘‘J’accuse.’’ 8
For most of his writing career, Ba Jin was constantly inspired, as he
stated in a later preface to his  novel Family, by Georges Danton’s
motto: ‘‘Have courage, have courage, always have courage!’’ 9 An effec-
tive combination of anarchist rejection of patriarchal institutions, roman-
tic affirmation of the individual, and utopianism in the tradition of the
French Revolution made Ba Jin enormously popular among the young
educated readers of the s and his pen name a synonym for a radi-
cally modern imaginary and passion. With voluminous trilogies such as
Revolution (unfinished), Turbulent Stream, Love, and Fire, as Olga Lang
points out in her study, Ba Jin ‘‘helped to create among the intellectuals
an emotional climate that induced them to accept the Chinese revolu-
tion.’’ 10 Indeed, his combative writings, up until the early s, can be
read as a figurative genealogy of the revolutionary spirit in twentieth-
century China. The heroes in Ba Jin’s early fiction are mostly young

. Xiaoren xiaoshi (Shanghai: Wenhua shenghuo, ). This was Ba Jin’s last collec-
tion of short stories before the founding of the People’s Republic of China in .
It took the author well over three years, from March  to November , to fin-
ish the five stories in the slender volume. During this period, Ba Jin was forced by
the ongoing war to travel across southwest China. See Ba Jin, ‘‘Houji’’ (Postscript) to
Xiaoren xiaoshi, .
. See Chen Sihe and Li Hui, ‘‘Ba Jin chuangzuo fengge de yanbian’’ (On the evo-
lution of Ba Jin’s writing style), in Ba Jin zuopin pinglun ji (Essays on Ba Jin’s works),
ed. Jia Zhifang et al. (Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian, ), –, esp. .
. See ‘‘Preface’’ to the th ed. (May ), Family, trans. Sidney Shapiro, with intro.
by Olga Lang (New York: Doubleday, ), .
. Lang, Pa Chin and His Writings, .
138 Chinese Modern

rebels and idealists, who, always compassionate, altruistic, and ready to

act, abundantly display the characteristics longed for by the visionary
May Fourth generation. Their ebullient and expressive vitality, according
to one critic’s comprehensive analysis of the different ‘‘life forms’’ con-
structed in Ba Jin’s oeuvre, stands in contrast to the decay of the old as
much as to ‘‘the abject life’’ lived by the weak and resigned.11
Although the two central and opposite ‘‘life forms’’ in Ba Jin’s fictional
world, the exuberant and the decadent, explicitly convey the author’s
judgment and values, it is in presenting a third form of ‘‘abject life’’ that
Ba Jin is most successful and sophisticated. The reason, Zhang Minquan
explains, is that the author always retained a rich and multidimensional
childhood memory of the hapless and resigned, and that the mode of
these people’s lives better enabled realist representation.12 With a seem-
ingly sudden shift of his attention to wasted and unfulfilled lives in nar-
ratives such as Qiyuan (Leisure garden, ) and Cold Nights, Ba Jin
indeed noticeably modified his conception of literary realism. Realistic
description would no longer function as a sign of imminent and desirable
changes, or merely set up a stage for idealistic and heroic intervention.
On the contrary, the previous ideology of rationality implied in realist
discourse now gave way to a recognition that reality as an encompassing
and complicitous mass of attachments defies rationalization. Writing, as
the writer-narrator of Leisure Garden realizes with increasing urgency, is
rather a compensatory act and answers a desperate need to console one-
self with a happier and simpler imagined life. It registers the writer’s uto-
pian desire and serves as an imaginary solution to real and insurmount-
able contradictions.
Yet literary realism is at its most powerful when it confronts reality
as failure, especially when it deals with death as the horizon of life that
cannot be transcended. Such disillusionment with reality was the basic
structure of feeling at the origin of modern Chinese literature, and it
underlies virtually all of the narratives of the self that we find in, for in-
stance, Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, and early Ding Ling. Ba Jin’s  novel Leisure
Garden continues this tradition of exploring the difference between the
first-person narrator and the world that he acutely witnesses in its disin-

. Zhang Minquan, Ba Jin xiaoshuo de shengming tixi (The life forms in Ba Jin’s fic-
tion) (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi, ), –. The Chinese for these three ‘‘life forms’’
are ‘‘congshi shengming,’’ ‘‘fuxiu shengming,’’ and ‘‘weidun shengming.’’
. Ibid., –, –.
 The Last Tubercular 139

tegration. Toward the end of the narrative, several deaths occur around
Mr. Li, the writer-narrator, despite his inspired attempt to offer a heart-
warming ending to the novel on which he has been working. Almost
by accident, the purplish face of a drowned young man confronts the
writer-narrator and drives home a dimension of reality that could hardly
be sublimated: ‘‘Such is death! So quick, so simple, and so real!’’ 13 If sud-
den death at this point is for the first-person narrator largely a traumatic
event—in Lacanian terms, the horrifying eruption of the unsymbolizable
Real in Cold Nights—the death of the protagonist becomes a prolonged
and conscious process of expectation. By painstakingly narrating Wang
Wenxuan’s demise, Ba Jin not only gives voice to the muted agony of an
abject existence, but he also pushes to its limit the realist representation
of depth and subjectivity.
To a large extent, the maturity and psychological subtlety that Ba Jin
achieves in Cold Nights depend on the basic plot of the narrative, namely,
that of an individual’s life as failure. Such a summary abstraction may help
us isolate what Fredric Jameson has named an amphibious ‘‘ideologeme.’’
As the raw material or Saussurian langue underlying complex cultural ex-
pressions and systems, an ideologeme describes a dual formation rather
than a statement: ‘‘as a construct it must be susceptible to both a concep-
tual description and a narrative manifestation all at once.’’ 14 An ideolo-
geme, in other words, makes representable and also gives significance to
certain apparently unconnected experiences; it has the capacity of gener-
ating both the abstract and the concrete. The abstractable message of the
novel in question, therefore, cannot substitute for the complexity of its
narrative manifestation, for the same reason that a sociological classifi-
cation of Wang Wenxuan cannot replace or diminish his experience. An
emphasis on the fundamentally narrative character of apparently disem-
bodied ideologemes, as Jameson reminds us, ‘‘will offer the advantage
of restoring the complexity of transactions between opinion and proto-
narrative or libidinal fantasy.’’ 15 It is on the narrative level, on the level of
imaginative operation where the author engages and negotiates an ide-
ologeme, that the failure of an individual life, as a theme, yields successful

. Qiyuan (Leisure garden), first published in , collected in Collected Works of
Ba Jin, :.
. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ), .
. Ibid., .
140 Chinese Modern

symbolic construction and commentary. Libidinal fantasy, too, becomes

manifest only when the narrative is read as a complex explanation of the
individual’s complete and self-willed failure.
As we have seen, Cold Nights opens with a description of the uncer-
tain present in which Wang Wenxuan finds himself transfixed during an
air raid. This initial moment of immobility, however, signals a deeper
malaise, a deadly syndrome that results from the failure of both the en-
vironment and the individual. For this pathogenic condition of despair,
tuberculosis provides a perfect metaphor, because it was still a largely in-
curable disease in wartime China and remained ‘‘awash in significance.’’
One way to read the multiple meanings of tuberculosis in Cold Nights
is to see it as psychosomatic, as a willed illness through which Wenxuan
inflicts physical pain on himself so as to displace the larger anxieties in
his life. Such masochistic willing—paradoxically, the exercise of a weak
will—seems to be the revenge of Wenxuan, who has internalized, as we
see from the very beginning, his wife’s calling him a ‘‘softy.’’ Combining a
willed disease with a disease of the will, tuberculosis seems eventually to
offer him the only possible way to relate to others and identify himself.
The first indication of the onset of tuberculosis does not occur until the
ninth chapter, where we find a description of how on one ordinary rainy
day Wenxuan trips on his way to work and has to leave for home early
because of a rising fever. From then on, he successively demonstrates all
of the standard physical symptoms of pulmonary and then laryngeal tu-
berculosis that end in his anguished and voiceless death. Up until this
ill-fated rainy day, however, Wenxuan has actually been enjoying a brief
period of peaceful domestic life—at least since the last crisis between him
and his wife, Shusheng, was, to his mind, miraculously resolved. The
miracle that would bring Wenxuan this short-lived domestic bliss actu-
ally involves using his pained body as an object of pity and sympathy. It
establishes a behavioral pattern and determines his subsequent return to
a stage of infancy in exchange for compromise and security. Moreover,
the incident reveals the psychic structure of Wenxuan’s private life as that
underlying a masochist’s universe.
The miraculous resolution of a major crisis in the marriage of Wenxuan
and Shusheng, which occurs even before the novel begins, takes place
two nights after the couple had a fight and she moved out on him and
his mother in a fury. Earlier during the day, Wenxuan meets his wife in a
fancy coffee shop and tries, to no avail, to talk her into going home with
 The Last Tubercular 141

him. He does manage, nonetheless, to bring their hearts closer by remi-

niscing about their college days and their shared memories and visions.
They both had hoped to devote their lives to education, to build new
schools in the countryside and run them like a family (; ). Yet such
happy recollections of past idealism only demoralize them further about
their current situation.
Dejected, Wenxuan returns home by himself, but his mother allows
him no quiet by badmouthing her independent and unconventional
daughter-in-law. Not daring to refute his mother, who treats him like a
helpless child wronged by the outside world,16 and yet wanting to de-
fend his wife, Wenxuan has only himself to blame: ‘‘His heart seemed
to be drifting in some empty space searching for a haven. He felt that
he had not suffered enough pain or endured enough misery. He wanted
to scream, to cry bitterly, to experience intense pain, or to be beaten
mercilessly. Anything, except to remain quietly by his mother’s side’’
(; ).
With such masochistic urges, Wenxuan leaves home, bumps into an old
friend in a tavern, commiserates with him, and drinks until he feels ill.
Before he can find his way home late that night, he loses control, opens
his mouth, and ‘‘the supper he had eaten earlier shot out like a cataract.’’
This pathetic scene of Wenxuan throwing up in the street dramatizes the
connection between physical pain and the formation of his ego. Suffering
turns him into an object of curious gazes in a public place, but it also em-
boldens him and allows him a rare sense of self-centeredness. Overcome
by pain, ‘‘he had nothing to do with his surroundings anymore. At this
moment, he would not have turned around or even noticed, had some-
one dropped dead right next to him’’ (; ). Involuntary disgorging,
indeed, will eventually develop into a central trope of self-expression for
Wenxuan.
While he is absorbed in vomiting, his wife Shusheng happens to pass
by and recognizes him.

‘‘Are you sick?’’ she asked.

He shook his head. His breathing had gotten smoother, but tears were

. The description here is pertinent to what I discuss below: ‘‘His tears won her
sympathy, and her rage subsided. She looked at him lovingly, as if he were still her
young child who had been wronged by others and had come home to cry in front of
her’’ (–; ).
142 Chinese Modern

coming out again. They were tears of gratitude and sorrow, different from
those that had been caused by his vomiting. . . .
‘‘Are you really going to walk me home?’’ he asked in a quavering voice.
He looked at her as if intimidated.
‘‘If I don’t, I’m afraid you will go drinking again,’’ she replied, smiling.
He felt warmer, and much more relaxed.
‘‘I will never drink again,’’ he sounded like a child and then let her sup-
port him all the way home. (–; –)

Thus, even to his own surprise, Wenxuan succeeds in persuading Shu-

sheng to go home with him, not through adult, discursive reasoning,
as he had tried earlier, but by demonstrating his body in pain and by
underscoring his passivity. Since the demonstrative or persuasive feature
of masochism, according to Theodor Reik’s classical study, consists in the
masochist’s exhibition of pain, embarrassment, and humiliation,17 to con-
vince Shusheng to stay for good, Wenxuan has to undergo yet more suf-
fering in order to bring together the two feuding women in his life.When
they reach their candlelit home, his mother, not realizing that Wenxuan
is sick and that Shusheng is with him, tries to cheer him up by saying that
he should marry another woman once the war is over and he makes a for-
tune. As soon as she sees Shusheng, however, the mother turns sarcastic
and, on learning that Wenxuan has been drinking and has thrown up, is
greatly upset. She is alarmed because she believes that her husband, Wen-
xuan’s father, had died from alcoholism. ‘‘I’ve never allowed you to touch
alcohol since you were a kid. How come you still went out and drank?’’
She first demands an answer. Then, ‘‘speaking gently as if to a spoiled
child,’’ she asks what happened, but she seems to be hurt more because he
has brought back his wife.

‘‘When did you come across her?’’ she pressed him for an answer, another
emotion having made her oblivious to her son’s physical pain.
‘‘Why don’t you let him go to sleep?’’ Shusheng could not help inter-
rupting her again.
Ignoring the young woman, the mother continued to demand a full ex-
planation from her son.

. Theodor Reik, Masochism in Modern Man, trans. Margaret H. Beigel and Ger-
trud M. Kurth (New York: Farrar, Straus, ), –. The other two features of
masochism, according to Reik, are the special significance of fantasy and the element
of suspense.
 The Last Tubercular 143

‘‘I . . . I . . . ,’’ he struggled with words. Something churned violently in-

side him and shot up from his stomach. He tried to force it down, but lost
control instead and started disgorging noisily, sputtering vomit on both
himself and his mother. (; –)

At this sorry sight, the mother relents and gives her daughter-in-law
permission to take Wenxuan to bed. As Shusheng is tucking him in, he
realizes that he had not enjoyed such attentive care in years and becomes
‘‘as submissive as an infant.’’ Before he falls asleep, however, he reaches
out, grabs her hand, and makes his suffering into a negotiating device:
‘‘Please don’t leave me . . . whatever I did was for you . . .’’ (; ).
What Wenxuan enacts here is no less than a contract with Shusheng
and, by extension, with his own mother. A masochist contract, in Gilles
Deleuze’s psychoanalysis of masochism, forms a crucial strategy to pro-
tect the masochist’s world of fantasy and symbols from reality or even
from its hallucinatory return. Central to this masochistic imagination is
the banishment of the father who has proved to be ridiculously weak
and inadequate. By giving up every right over himself to the torturing
woman, ‘‘the masochist tries to exorcise the danger of the father and to
ensure that the temporal order or reality and experience will be in con-
formity with the symbolic order, in which the father has been abolished
for all time.’’ 18 With his father conspicuously dead and absent, Wenxuan
is now contractually attached to the two competing women to the extent
that he must continue his self-infantilization and let them define the order
of his reality and experience, at least as far as his domestic or libidinal life
is concerned.
At this point, as Deleuze points out, the masochist’s relationship to
his women is desexualized, and it is the father image in him that stands
to be expelled. What this process actualizes is ‘‘the transference of the
law onto the mother and the identification of the law with the image
of the mother.’’ 19 Following such a psychoanalytical interpretation, it is
not accidental that Wenxuan’s father is recalled, by the mother, only as a
negative example to prohibit any resemblance between father and son. It
also becomes significant that Wenxuan and Shusheng’s thirteen-year-old

. Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, in ‘‘Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty’’ by
Gilles Deleuze and ‘‘Venus in Furs’’ by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, trans. Jean McNeil
(New York: Zone Books, ), .
. Ibid., .
144 Chinese Modern

son (Xiaoxuan, or Young Xuan) appears to be an exact duplication of his

pale and reticent father. Never close to his mother, Xiaoxuan enjoys being
with his doting grandmother much more. Indeed, as we will discuss, the
two women function as different types of mother, the bad and the good,
and bring into relief the masochist’s deepest fear and desire.
A systematic psychoanalytical reading may yield a metanarrative of the
absent father in terms of abrupt historical changes and their impact on the
traditional symbolic system as well as the individual psyche. The expul-
sion of the father from the symbolic order is already staged, if we go back
to Ba Jin’s earlier works, through distinct plots in Leisure Garden (where
two fathers, one indulging and the other self-indulging, both fail in their
paternal responsibility to their sons) and Family (where the eldest son
of the grandchild generation has to assume, with great ambivalence, the
function of his deceased father). Such prevalence of absent or inadequate
father figures reflects the negation of patriarchal authority on the one
hand and the weakening of the law on the other. Wenxuan, born in the
year when the monarchy was overthrown (he was thirty-four years old in
) and educated with the new ideas of the May Fourth period, is there-
fore bound to inhabit a world where the image and likeness of the father
is ‘‘miniaturized, beaten, ridiculed, and humiliated.’’ Moreover, ‘‘what the
subject atones for is his resemblance to the father and the father’s like-
ness in him: the formula of masochism is the humiliated father.’’ 20 In this
light, Lu Xun’s paradigmatic influence at the origin of modern Chinese
literature is all the more astounding when we realize that the core narra-
tive he provided in ‘‘Diary of a Madman’’ describes a Confucian family
from which the father is nonetheless deleted and abolished. For the same
reason, we can better appreciate the psychoanalytical implication of their
statement when Meng Yue and Dai Jinhua compare the significance of
the New Culture movement of the May Fourth era to that of the 
Chinese Revolution. Both effect a ‘‘massive, prominent symbolic patri-
cide’’: one in the political field of patriarchal rule and order, the other in
the realm of culture and values.21
As a result of this irrevocable patricide, ‘‘the masochist experiences the
symbolic order as an intermaternal order in which the mother represents

. Ibid., .

. See Meng Yue and Dai Jinhua, Fuchu lishi dibiao: xiandai funü wenxue yanjiu
(Emerging from history: studies in modern women’s literature) (Zhengzhou: Henan
renmin, ), part I, –.
 The Last Tubercular 145

the law under certain prescribed conditions: she generates the symbolism
through which the masochist expresses himself.’’ 22 Part of the symbolism
for self-expression, for Wenxuan, is no less than to present his own body
as being subjected to increasing pain. His tuberculosis, therefore, is as
much a physical disease as it is a desire. It functions as what Lacan calls
the objet petit a, which indicates an irreducible otherness internal to the
psychic apparatus that at once impedes and enables, as an obturator, the
subject’s constitution. Such a presence allows a perverse pleasure, even
a semblance of agency, with the subject’s repeated efforts to contain and
confront an inherent displeasure or lack.23 The interest of Ba Jin’s novel, it
should be evident by now, lies not in a clinical case study of tuberculosis.
The disease is itself turned into a symptom of larger cultural anxiety, or
of the internal pain exacted by the new symbolic order into which the in-
valid now retreats. Tuberculosis, as in the case of the Jewish patient Franz
Kafka, becomes what Sander Gilman calls a ‘‘test case’’ that shores up the
individual’s ‘‘fundamental inability to control the cultural language of his
time.’’ 24
Wenxuan’s fever, cough, and eventually his spitting of blood there-
fore function as more than mere clinical symptoms. They serve as the
only effective language that helps him communicate his inner self as he
grows ever more reticent. Such somatic signs also reinforce the contrac-
tual relationship that he has entered with his mother and his wife. In
exhibiting his sick interior, Wenxuan’s ailing body compensates for his
inarticulateness and masochistically relates him to others. The blood he
coughs up, more specifically, continues and even ritualizes the symbol-
ism of vomiting that was established earlier. It is also the most powerful
means of verbalization available to him. Much agitated by the incessant

. Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, .

. See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed.
Jacques-Alan Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, ), –, –.
For an explication of Lacan’s notion of the objet petit a, see Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your
Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, ), –.
On p. , Žižek elaborates that ‘‘the very gesture of renouncing enjoyment produces
inevitably a surplus enjoyment that Lacan writes down as the ‘object small a.’ ’’ Ac-
cording to Žižek, this surplus enjoyment ( jouissance) derived from renunciation ‘‘gives
a clue to so-called ‘primal masochism.’ ’’
. Sander Gilman, Franz Kafka: The Jewish Patient (New York: Routledge, ),
. See the chapter, ‘‘Tuberculosis as a Test Case’’ (–) for a discussion of the
meaning of the disease and Kafka’s discourse on it.
146 Chinese Modern

quarreling between his mother and his wife on another night, Wenxuan
quietly leaves the apartment again, not bold enough to speak his mind:
‘‘I am going to die and you two are still bickering.’’ When he returns
home much later, all pale and shaken, he finds that the two women have
reached a truce. Upon Shusheng’s solicitation, he anxiously tries to de-
scribe what he has just witnessed, but ‘‘phlegm spurted out before his
words.’’ ‘‘ ‘Blood! Blood! You spat out blood!’ Terrified, the two women
cried in unison, and together they carried him to bed and laid him down’’
(; ).

Between Masochism and Ressentiment

The dramatic moment of Wenxuan spitting blood in front of his mother

and his wife qualitatively changes his life as a tubercular and its symbolic
mechanism as well. For this is the moment when he at last makes public
his fatal illness and, more important, his despair. Now officially an invalid,
he, as much as the people around him, is confronted with the question
of how to treat and make sense of his disease. In the process, Wenxuan’s
masochism, rather than his tuberculosis, makes possible a general psycho-
pathological study of the modern Chinese male subject.
Tellingly, Wenxuan’s mother and his wife, who throughout the novel
consistently represent separate generations, suggest two different ap-
proaches to his ailment. The mother, with her strong belief in traditional
values and practices, decides that Chinese medicine will best serve her
son. Shusheng, a determined practitioner of the May Fourth humanist
and liberal ideals, urges Wenxuan to see a doctor trained in modern West-
ern medical science. As for the patient himself, however, the rich symbol-
ism of what treatment to seek boils down to two mundane and practical
considerations: he does not want to disobey his mother, and, moreover,
Western medicine is more costly than a Chinese herbal cure. Even though
he finds the Chinese doctor’s diagnosis—exhaustion plus too strong an
element of fire in his liver—less than convincing, Wenxuan comforts him-
self by putting his faith in the long native tradition of medical practice
(; –). When later his condition worsens and he starts to lose his
voice, he finally goes to a crowded modern hospital, only to be turned
away by the steep price of a standard fluorescent examination prescribed
by the doctor (; ).
 The Last Tubercular 147

The two doctors in the novel, peripheral as they are, nevertheless high-
light the paradigmatic difficulty of making a choice on Wenxuan’s part.
Dr. Zhang, who significantly is related to Wenxuan’s mother, is older,
amiable, reassuring, and he visits his patient at home, whereas the name-
less doctor in the hospital, equipped with a cold stethoscope, appears
at best indifferent and impersonal. The contrast between them serves to
suggest a focal cultural opposition between tradition and modernity, or
that between organic community and organized society, which is also re-
flected in the antagonism between the mother and her daughter-in-law.
Both doctors fail to save Wenxuan’s life, and an outbreak of cholera will
abundantly expose the inadequacy of either medical institution: the epi-
demic immobilizes Dr. Zhang himself as a helpless patient and paralyzes
the city’s hospital system. The outbreak, a small-scale replica of the on-
going war, creates a crisis situation that renders choices by an individual
both more urgent and less tenable. When both terms of a conceivable bi-
nary opposition are brought into question through violence, choices can
hardly be made through privileging one term over the other. This impos-
sible situation lies at the heart of Wenxuan’s despair.
What further compounds the individual’s dilemma in a moment of
crisis, moreover, is not so much the difficulty of making a choice as the
inevitable failure of any decision, including the decision not to choose.
In the case of Wenxuan, the larger decision in his life has to do with his
mother and his wife. This is forcefully suggested early on in the novel
when an anxiety dream of Wenxuan’s, which he refuses to believe to be
a dream, makes up the entire second chapter. In this highly prophetic
dream, Wenxuan is heroically determined, against the urgings of his wife,
to go back to the city to look for his mother when war breaks out, inter-
rupting their ordinary conjugal life and sending interminable streams of
refugees from the city. Shusheng wants him to stay with her and their son,
telling him that they are his responsibility, but Wenxuan is not to be dis-
suaded, shouting, ‘‘I can’t abandon her and run away all by myself ’’ (;
). In the end, Shusheng resolutely leaves him, his mother remains for-
ever out of reach, and Wenxuan wakes up desperately fighting a phantom
crowd of strangers. The basic structure and tension of the novel, encoded
in this dream text through intricate condensation and displacement, thus
revolves around Wenxuan’s doomed effort to reconcile the two women
and two moral duties.
What this dream produces, in fact, is a ‘‘masochist text’’ that under-
148 Chinese Modern

scores the incompatibility of different conceptions of the individual sub-

ject at a moment when the presumed validity or legitimacy of the indi-
vidual is brought into question. Masochism in psychoanalytical terms can
be read as ‘‘a story that relates how the superego was destroyed and by
whom, and what was the sequel to this destruction.’’ 25 Kafka’s literary
discourse, for instance, over his experience of tuberculosis as a male Jew
in turn-of-the-century Prague offers such a masochist text. For Kafka,
according to Sander Gilman’s study, masochism ‘‘comes to be an acting
out of the conflict felt between the claims lodged against the individual
and the inability of that individual to counter these claims completely
because of the underlying incompleteness, the transitoriness of all con-
structions of the self.’’ 26 The original and most comprehensive masoch-
ist text, conceived by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (–) under the
title The Heritage of Cain, was to examine the entirety of human his-
tory through six dominant themes: love, property, money, the state, war,
and death.27 (These six forces that propel the cycling of a masochistic
history are also clearly present in what generates the anxiety dream to
which Wenxuan wakes up in a cold sweat.) Presiding over a masochist’s
world determined by the six uncontrollable forces are heroines who, in
Deleuze’s reading of Sacher-Masoch, have in common ‘‘a well-developed
and muscular figure, a proud nature, an imperious will and a cruel dispo-
sition even in their moments of tenderness and naiveté.’’ 28 These women
fall into three archetypes that closely correspond to a mythic view of the
evolution of human history in three stages, a prevalent historiographical
convention to which Sacher-Masoch as a nineteenth-century writer ap-
parently subscribed.29 Such a tripartite model of human evolution, obvi-
ously, is not what structures the meaning system in Cold Nights. Nor is
it entirely how Wenxuan relates to the women in his world. Instead, as
has been suggested, his masochistic universe is governed by two mother
figures, two strong-willed women who, in enacting the symbolic order as
intermaternal for the masochist, themselves symbolize different concep-
tions of the individual and claims against him.
From Shusheng’s perspective, since Wenxuan the ‘‘softy’’ always wants

. Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, .

. Gilman, Franz Kafka, .
. See Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, , .
. Ibid., .
. See ibid., –.
 The Last Tubercular 149

to be nice (the literal meaning of ‘‘laohaoren’’), he ends up constantly

compromising himself, even masochistically so, just to avoid conflict
with others and to divert the tension between being a son and a lover/
husband. ‘‘He could not bring together his mother and his wife, or choose
one between the two. He always tried to muddle through or put off
reality’’ (; ). For her, Wenxuan’s fatal mistake is that he never
thinks about himself and, worse, always turns his weakness into passive
aggression.30 If Shusheng’s criticism of Wenxuan is in agreement with
her liberal-humanist conception of the self, Wenxuan’s failure seems to be
complete when his mother also blames him for ‘‘not thinking about him-
self,’’ for being a ‘‘softy.’’ Both women complain that he is unnecessarily
sacrificing himself for the sake of the other person.31
What vivacious Shusheng consciously embodies in the novel, on one
level, is the May Fourth tradition of liberal-humanist ideas about per-
sonal freedom, happiness, and self-fulfillment. Her distinct cultural iden-
tity was acquired, emphatically, through her modern university educa-
tion. It is now faithfully reflected in the critical choices that she makes in
her life. Never close to her own son, Xiaoxuan, she admits that she is not
a good mother; she does not ever acknowledge the existence of her par-
ents or other relatives. She is a modern individualist par excellence in that
her selfhood is affirmed through freeing herself first from all family ties
and eventually from all moral scruples. She is, in Deleuze’s analysis of the
three women examined by Sacher-Masoch, the uterine, hetaeric woman.
Dedicated to love and beauty, ‘‘she is modern, and denounces marriage,
morality, the Church and the State as the inventions of man, which must
be destroyed.’’ 32 Her final decision to leave the endangered wartime capi-
tal Chongqing, in her own words, is based on her belief that she is still
young and hopeful; it constitutes a triumphant sacrifice of the sacrifice
that is expected of her as a mother and wife. ‘‘I am active, and love excite-
ment. I need to lead a passionate life.’’ ‘‘I am not a bad woman,’’ she states
in a long letter to Wenxuan in which she demands to be relieved of her
obligation as his common-law wife, to annul, in other words, the contract
between them. ‘‘My only fault is that I pursue freedom and happiness’’
(–; –). In reality, Shusheng’s success owes much to the fact
that she works as a clerk in a commercial bank and is vigorously pursued
. See her letter to Wenxuan, –; –.
. See, for instance, , ; , .
. Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, .
150 Chinese Modern

by her superior, Director Chen, a savvy, strong, and handsome banker,

the exact opposite of Wenxuan. Her job in effect stipulates—more than a
complete abandonment of her previous dreams as an educator—the sus-
pension of idealism itself. Thus, her financial resourcefulness and unre-
lenting pursuit of personal happiness ultimately constitute her failure, for
they involve a suppression of her utopian desires, or her socially signifi-
cant ideals. ‘‘Don’t talk to me about the ideals we used to have,’’ so pleads
Shusheng in her last letter to Wenxuan. She is away and thriving in the
frontier town of Lanzhou, while he lies dying in besieged Chongqing.
‘‘Living in an age and a life like ours . . . we are in no position to talk
about education or ideals any more’’ (; ).33
Needless to say, Shusheng’s ideological valorization of the self and indi-
vidual choice also leads to a concept of personal responsibility. Thus, she
expects Wenxuan to be her equal and companion, two roles that would
also serve as the foundation of her love for him. Yet, his inability to main-
tain an equal footing, most concretely demonstrated in his sickness and
financial dependence, finally makes her realize that no such foundation
exists. ‘‘Together we are not going to be happy, for there is not anything
connecting us. . . . I can only pity you, but can no longer love you. You
were not such a weakling before’’ (–; –). In this context, it
becomes extremely revealing that only after Shusheng had left him and
unilaterally dissolved their marriage contract was Wenxuan able to ex-
perience, for the first and sole time in the novel, sexual desire. Initially,
it was her attractive face, now vividly recalled, that excited his imagina-
tion. Then it was the ambivalent meaning of her action (her regular letters
inquiring about his health and her sending him money) that intrigued
Wenxuan and led him to fantasize about her life. At this moment, she
again became a woman with her free choice, and he, ‘‘an invalid nearing
his death, experienced a healthy man’s desires.’’ Yet ‘‘his urges tortured
him all the more because even he himself knew that they could not be
satisfied, not in the least’’ (; ).
If Shusheng acts as the hetaeric, bad mother in the masochistic world,
Wenxuan’s biological mother encompasses all the maternal functions of

. For a defense of the character Zeng Shusheng from a feminist perspective, see
Liu Huiying, ‘‘Chongchong fanli zhong de nüxing kunjing: yi nüquan piping jiedu
Ba Jin de Hanye’’ (The difficult situation of a woman facing various barriers: a femi-
nist interpretation of Cold nights by Ba Jin), in Zhongguo xiandai wenxue yanjiu congkan
(Journal of modern Chinese literature studies), no.  (), :–.
 The Last Tubercular 151

nurturing and protecting. To Wenxuan’s mother, the law of the father

is also transferred. The good mother, whom Deleuze describes as ‘‘cold,
maternal, severe’’ and, above all, ‘‘oral,’’ 34 is to triumph in the end, and
it is her alliance with the son that forms the foundation of the masoch-
ist’s realm of reality. The love that his mother expects from Wenxuan rests
precisely on his being weak and dependent, on his behaving like a submis-
sive child who completely surrenders his responsibility. Unlike Shusheng,
the mother does not produce a written statement of her beliefs, but she
is vocal and articulate, if often vociferous. Aided by her traditional edu-
cation, her values are systematic and contradict what Shusheng stands
for on almost every point. The mother resents, for instance, the fact that
Shusheng holds a job in a bank because she thinks it is improper and hu-
miliating. As much as an expression of the premodern gender hierarchy
(in terms of a masculine claim to the public workplace and an equation of
domesticity with feminine virtue), her frustration also amounts to a de-
nunciation of the modern capitalist commodification of labor as general-
ized prostitution. Herein lies the ambiguity of the exchange between the
mother and Shusheng: while the young woman heatedly protests being
sneered at as an enticing ‘‘flower vase’’ in the bank office (; ), she also
painfully realizes, in a different context, that she is being degraded and
taken advantage of (; ).
The mother’s most bitter complaint against the young woman, how-
ever, is that she is not a good mother to Xiaoxuan (‘‘Then I suppose you
will be free to fool around with your boyfriends. I’ve never seen a mother
like you’’ [; ]), and that she and Wenxuan never had a proper wed-
ding. For her, Shusheng is both a disqualified mother and an illegitimate
wife—two negative attributes that only serve to reinforce the mother’s
own authority and legitimacy. When Wenxuan musters the courage to ex-
plain that he and Shusheng understand each other, the mother turns a
deaf ear to such a feeble plea of romantic love. She firmly believes that,

. See Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, –, –. In Cold Nights, noticeable in-
stances occur in which the mother is described as expressing her feelings through an
oral urge. Besides the fact that she constantly worries about her son’s diet and feeds
him food and medicine, she often gnashes her teeth (yaoya qiechi) when she talks
about her daughter-in-law (cf. ;  and ; ). At one point, the description be-
comes most explicit: ‘‘ ‘I’d rather die and we all die, than see her again!’ She gnashed
her teeth, as if she were gnawing at that young woman’s flesh. After this outburst, she
returned to her room, paying no more attention to him’’ (; ).
152 Chinese Modern

now in the position of mother-in-law, she has the right to discipline the
young woman (; ).
Finally, the mother perceives her relationship to her son as one of ver-
tical control and subordination, and her love for Wenxuan is therefore
as protective as it is possessive. Shusheng’s conception of love, however,
presupposes a horizontal relationship of equivalence and mutual respon-
sibility among liberated and liberal subjects. From these two types of
love ensue two very different conceptions of the individual and the indi-
vidual’s duty, and two very different economies of desire and its satis-
faction. Furthermore, these two forms of love are metaphoric of two
opposing ideologies and social institutions: Confucian familism versus
liberal individualism. The narrative actually contains a moment of meta-
commentary when Shusheng is made aware of the fatal consequences of
these two conflicting loves; she has seen a production of Cao Yu’s play
Yuanye (The wilderness, ) and is now reminded of the tragedy befall-
ing the filial son/husband (; ). Her decision is eventually to escape
from this emotional dilemma in a flight to freedom, to sacrifice the sac-
rifice. It is at this point in Cold Nights that the psychological structure of
masochism necessarily extends and lends itself to a discourse of cultural
and political entrapment.
Caught in the middle of such conflicting demands and attachments is
Wenxuan the invalid, for whom the flight to freedom is never a viable
choice. While tuberculosis is deployed as a symptom of his masochistic
anxiety, he is also enabled by his tuberculous body to arrive at a proto-
political gesture of disavowal. His ailing body and the prospect of his
own death as an individual continually compel Wenxuan to distance him-
self from both his mother and his wife; his illness also leads him to decon-
struct various institutions of authority. The incessant bickering between
the bad and the good mothers incites Wenxuan to ever more intense mas-
ochistic pleasure in inflicting pain on himself. At the same time, the pro-
fusion of the official discourse of the sovereign nation-state, which the
suffering patient finds impervious to and irreconcilable with his own life,
leaves him seething in ressentiment. Such a transition, from weakness as
displacement to the Nietzschean ressentiment, seems to be an integral part
of the formation of the masochist’s ego. While the sadist, in Deleuze’s
analysis, externalizes his ego and posits it as the superego, the masoch-
ist nurtures his ego through multiple disavowals in the aftermath of the
 The Last Tubercular 153

superego’s removal.35 The masochistic ego emerges as such when it con-

verts its weakness into a source of strength and disavows the mother, with
the father already abolished. What Deleuze uncovers in Sacher-Masoch’s
description of sexual perversion, in other words, is no less than a rewrit-
ing of the Hegelian fable of the master and the slave, the triumph of an
internalized self-affirmation, or the revenge of ‘‘the weak as weak’’ that
Nietzsche would denounce.
For Wenxuan, therefore, masochism and ressentiment are of homologi-
cal value in shaping his personal and social existence. His monotonous
job as a proofreader consists mostly of double-checking texts that never
make much sense to him. With much poignancy, he realizes that he is
demeaned by money and the need to survive. Early in the novel, Wen-
xuan found himself tackling an impossible translation that bore hardly
any resemblance to the language he knew, but he had no right to make
changes. While he kept his eyes mechanically moving over words that
looked like a ‘‘bundle of entangled hempen cord,’’ his thoughts would
wander away: ‘‘I’m finished. All my happiness is robbed by the war, by life
itself, by those lofty and pretentious slogans, and by the proclamations
that are posted all over the streets’’ (; ). Such demurral, however,
would always remain internal and audible only to himself. ‘‘Yet there was
no point. He had protested like this thousands of times, but no one had
heard him, and no one ever knew that he would even entertain such a re-
sentment. To his face as well as behind his back, people would call him a
‘softy.’ He himself would also prefer the position of a softy. It had been
like this for several years now’’ (; –).
As his tuberculosis worsens and a general collapse looms, Wenxuan’s
relationship to the official discourse of patriotism, or what may be called
the dominant political economy of the sign, also changes. In the final
stage of his illness, when he almost loses his voice because of laryngeal tu-
berculosis but is still working in the publishing house, Wenxuan one day
accidentally spills some of his blood on a proof sheet from a propagandist
book trumpeting the impressive progress that China as a modern nation-
state has been making. Tubercular blood-spitting at this point becomes a

. See Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, chap. , ‘‘Sadistic Superego and Masochis-
tic Ego,’’ –. On p. , Deleuze writes: ‘‘The masochistic ego is only apparently
crushed by the superego. What insolence and humor, what irrepressible defiance and
ultimate triumph lie hidden behind an ego that claims to be so weak.’’
154 Chinese Modern

revelatory supplementation, signifying the eruption of a much more im-

mediate and brutal reality than what its ideological representation allows
or maintains. As the ultimate form of asserting himself through pain,
blood-spitting for Wenxuan metaphorically constitutes a deconstructive
writing that inserts radical difference and exposes any systematic imposi-
tion of meaning as inherently incomplete and incoherent.

He tried to wipe it off with a piece of waste paper, but he had to do it

very lightly, for he was afraid that he might break the fragile paper. Re-
moving the waste paper, he found that among the sentences celebrating
the improvements in people’s living conditions was still a faint trace of his
blood. ‘‘Because of your lies, I am going to bleed to death!’’ He thought
angrily, and almost wanted to tear that page to shreds. Yet he did not dare.
He looked at the stain for a while, sighed, and turned over the page when
he at last finished proofreading it. (; )

The indelible blood stain on the printed page thus registers a double
failure. On the one hand, it debunks the legitimizing narrative of the
nation-state by inserting what has been written over or erased. Wenxuan’s
attempt to wipe off the trace of his blood turns into a critical gesture of
bracketing, or putting under erasure, the assertive text proper. In the pro-
cess, the ideological self-representation of the nation-state is revealed as
at best artificial and necessarily incompatible with the raw and objectal
experiences of the individual. On the other hand, Wenxuan’s fear, his in-
ability to develop his awareness into political action, may also be read
as a failure on the part of the individual. His most bitter protests and
complaints, either political or domestic, are often uttered through an in-
terior monologue. His capacity for passive inner musings offers an index
of Wenxuan the ‘‘softy’s’’ failure in his social as well as his personal life.
Such complete failure may also constitute what Fredric Jameson detects
as an ‘‘authentic ressentiment’’ in the narratives of George Gissing. There
is an ‘‘exclusive preoccupation in Gissing with the anxieties of money,
the misery of hand-to-mouth survival, the absence of independent means
or a fixed income.’’ This preoccupation with the mundane aspects of life
serves the purpose of blocking Gissing’s characters from ever entering the
position of desiring subjects, because, in Jameson’s reading, the novelist
understands that any achieved desire or wish is bound to be inauthentic in
an age of universal commodification, while at the same time ‘‘an authen-
 The Last Tubercular 155

ticity at best pathetic clings to images of failure.’’ 36 As a result, ‘‘the whole

system of success and failure has been undermined from the outset by a
narrative strategy which may thus be read as something like the final form
of ressentiment itself.’’ 37 Instead of a bourgeois ‘‘commodity desire,’’ the
modern nation-state is now challenged by Ba Jin’s novel as the dominant
system of success and failure.
Wenxuan’s failure and ressentiment, in the final analysis, are inevitable
not so much because of the sovereignty of the nation-state now brought
into crisis by imperialist aggression, as because of his constitution as a
modern subject in the tradition of liberal individualism. Throughout the
novel, the narrator repeatedly observes that, although they once shared
the same youthful ideals and visions, Wenxuan and Shusheng seem to be-
long to two different historical ages and are no longer contemporaries
(, ; , ). Shusheng’s success is also her personal failure, not only
in that her idealism has to be compromised, but also because when she
comes back to Chongqing at the end of the war and finds no one but
former neighbors living in what used to be her home, she has to face the
emptiness of her survival and success. She is the lonely survivor, which
truthfully reflects her individualistic refusal to be burdened by any attach-
ments, be they familial or sentimental. Her story, just like that of Mary in
Ding Ling’s Shanghai, Spring , is the one to be continued and further
negotiated.
Wenxuan’s failure, conversely, succeeds in revealing the incongruity be-
tween ideological claims upon the individual subject and its actual condi-
tion of existence. The different periods that Wenxuan and Shusheng seem
to occupy, therefore, are actually two related aspects of the same modern
discourse of liberal individualism. Hence, the importance of their shared
liberal education and spiritual genealogy. From its inception, as Wendy
Brown has argued most succinctly, modern liberalism contains a ‘‘general
incitement’’ to a Nietzschean ressentiment among all liberated and liberal
subjects.

It is not only the tension between freedom and equality but the prior pre-
sumption of the self-reliant and self-made capacities of liberal subjects, con-

. Jameson, ‘‘Authentic Ressentiment: Generic Discontinuities and Ideologemes

in the ‘Experimental’ Novels of George Gissing,’’ in his Political Unconscious, .
. Ibid., .
156 Chinese Modern

joined with their unavowed dependence on and construction by a variety

of social relations and forces, which makes all liberal subjects, and not only
markedly disenfranchised ones, vulnerable to ressentiment: it is their situ-
atedness within power, their production by power, and liberal discourse’s
denial of this situatedness and production, which casts the liberal subject
into failure, the failure to make itself in the context of a discourse in which
its self-making is assumed, indeed, is its assumed nature.38

Wenxuan’s tuberculosis, his masochism, and ultimately his death all

make it impossible for him not to be aware of his own situatedness, of
the distance between his consumptive body and the production of him
as a modern subject. His attachments to the modern discourse of liberal
individualism, just like his attachments to the two women in his life, are
indeed mortally wounded. Haunted by death and with his energy de-
pleted, Wenxuan knows that he would rather not go on living, ‘‘but no
one would allow him to give up’’ (; ). He has to die a most ex-
cruciating death at the moment when the war ends and the entire city is
out celebrating a hollow national victory. This moment of jubilation is
wrought with ambiguity insofar as it also registers the masochist’s final
vengeance in his accusatory death. The essence and the aim of masoch-
ism as a cultural metaphor, as Theodor Reik once commented, is ‘‘victory
through defeat.’’ 39

The Death of the Last Tubercular

Nevertheless, death proves to be much too great a terror for Wenxuan,

no matter how hard he tries to attach himself to others as an infant, to
his inner self and fantasies, or even to the nation as a cause. The vision of
his decomposing body drives home the realization that he will face death
all by himself and that no redemptive system of meaning could spare him
the visceral fear and existential despair that he experiences alone.40 In his

. Wendy Brown, ‘‘Wounded Attachments: Late Modern Oppositional Political

Formations,’’ in The Identity in Question, ed. John Rajchman (New York: Routledge,
), .
. Reik, ‘‘Victory Through Defeat,’’ Masochism in Modern Man, –.
. The following describes a brief period when Wenxuan’s disease was apparently
stabilized and his life with his mother made routine, but he also knew that he was
 The Last Tubercular 157

death, therefore, it is the complete failure to sublimate the individual’s

pain that becomes the central issue, and the validity of the moral econ-
omy is brought into question. ‘‘When he finally expired, his eyes were
half closed, showing their whites, and his mouth wide open, as if he were
still demanding ‘justice’ from someone. It was about eight o’clock in the
evening. Out on the streets was the blaring sound of gongs and drums.
People were celebrating victory, aiming firecrackers at a giant dancing
dragon’’ (; ).
The insulation of the deathly inside from the festive outside, of the indi-
vidual from the collective, is unmistakable. Wenxuan’s death transforms
the psychic depths of an individual, which the novel explores with great
patience, into a larger and more universal question of social meaning and
justice. The symptomatology of the novel, in other words, gives way to
an etiological analysis, which explicitly acknowledges the desire for cure
and salvation. The moral discourse that underlies the novel finally makes
itself audible and unavoidable.
In fact, two other deaths directly described in the novel seem to point
to the same direction of social criticism. When Wenxuan’s schoolmate
Tang Baiqing, after some heavy drinking one night, throws himself in
front of a roaring truck, he has bitterly blamed society for failing him
and his youthful aspirations (–; –). Tang Baiqing’s disillusion-
ment with life and subsequent suicide, initially triggered by his young
wife’s death at childbirth, epitomize the utter despair and vulnerability
of a generation of educated Chinese, who found their May Fourth opti-
mistic ideals continually betrayed and crushed by war, by poverty, and
by death as the ultimate unreason. The second death, that of Old Zhong,
an older, fatherlike colleague of Wenxuan’s, occurs when the outbreak of
cholera claims as its casualties numerous individual lives in the city. His
abrupt death more focally exposes the failure of society to function and
protect its members. In the perfunctory burial of Old Zhong, Wenxuan

slowly approaching death: ‘‘ ‘What else can I do other than eat, sleep, and be sick?’ He
asked himself constantly. Forever unable to come up with an answer, he gave up think-
ing about it with a wry smile of despair. Once he seemed to find an answer. The dread-
ful word ‘death’ sent cold shivers down his spine and made him shudder. He began to
see his own body rotting, with worms crawling all over it. For many days thereafter
he did not dare to let his imagination wander again. His mother could not comfort
him: this was his secret. Nor could his wife give him any more solace, although she
kept sending him brief notes (at least once a week)’’ (–; –).
158 Chinese Modern

sees both his future and the social implications of his own fate (–;
–).
These two deaths, together with the prolonged and acutely experi-
enced death of the protagonist, introduce to moral discourse another re-
lated issue: the question of retribution. All of the main characters in the
novel ask, one way or another, the impossible question ‘‘Why do we de-
serve to suffer?’’ When the mother expressed frustration at the misery
of life during the war, Wenxuan reasoned: ‘‘We have never robbed or
stolen from anyone. Never hurt anyone either. Why shouldn’t we con-
tinue living?’’ (; ). Later, when Wenxuan was the one who indicated
that he might as well die to save all the trouble, his mother countered
with the same reasoning: ‘‘Stop thinking like that. We have never stolen,
robbed, murdered, or done anything unjust to others. Why shouldn’t we
live?’’ (; ). With the same belief in a sensible moral economy, Shu-
sheng would ask Wenxuan to understand her decision to pursue her own
happiness: ‘‘Living in an age and a life like ours, I, as a woman, have never
hurt anyone or done anything wicked, and yet what could I do?’’ (;
). In each of these cases, retribution or justice is never of a cosmic
order; rather, it is a principle deeply embedded in a vision of justice for
the human world. It is as protest against the bankruptcy of such principles
and moral economy that Wenxuan’s death acquires social pertinence and
revelatory force.
With his final gesture of voiceless accusation, Wenxuan also dies as the
last tubercular in modern Chinese literature. His agonizing death simul-
taneously culminates and puts an end to a long tradition of using tuber-
culosis as a metaphor for an enfeebled nation, a benighted populace, an
individual’s existential angst, or a continually thwarted sensitive mind.
From Lu Xun’s bony Little Shuan (‘‘Medicine’’) to Yu Dafu’s ailing and
nostalgic writer (‘‘Blue Smoke’’) to Ding Ling’s willful Sophia (‘‘Miss
Sophia’s Diary’’), the tuberculous individual in Chinese literature has
always been a symptom of a deeper malaise. Literary representations of
sickness or physical deformity invariably express an understandable desire
for social etiology and transformation. The development from an expres-
sive symptomatology to a more comprehensive and methodical discourse
of etiology seems to be inevitable. At the origin of modern Chinese lit-
erature, Lu Xun’s conception of literature as a medicinal discourse proved
to be paradigmatic and far-reaching. Similar politicization (in fact medi-
 The Last Tubercular 159

calization) of literary practice also occurred in Meiji Japan when, as Kara-

tani Kojin suggests, the successful institutionalization of modern Western
medicine and the nation-state made it necessary to represent subjective
interiority on the one hand, and to depict society ‘‘as ailing and in need
of a fundamental cure,’’ on the other.41
Evidently, the modernity of all such literary representations of disease
is grounded in the belief, implicit or explicit, that a cure can and should
be achieved through social engineering. We cannot afford to gloss over
the utopianism in the longing for a healthy and carefree human existence,
even though we also have to recognize what Karatani Kojin describes as
the ‘‘pernicious’’ nature of such a systematic eradication of disease. The
modern ‘‘mirage of health’’ constitutes a secular form of theology, ac-
cording to Karatani Kojin, ‘‘which sees the cause of illness as evil and
seeks to eliminate that evil. Though it has eliminated various sorts of
‘meaning’ which revolve around illness, scientific medicine is itself con-
trolled by a ‘meaning’ whose nature is even more pernicious.’’ 42
The disappearance of a sick antihero in modern Chinese literature after
Ba Jin’s Cold Nights is therefore no historical accident but an overdeter-
mined event that radiates multiple significations. The removal of a sick
body from literary discourse indicates a paradigmatic shift, through
which the focus of literary representation schematically changes from the
individual to the collective, from the interior to the exterior, from the
contemplative to the active. Instead of an individual passively contem-
plating his pain and suffering history as a betrayal of what he is promised,
a collective subject is now believed to be actively transforming the course
of history. Such is the fundamental logic of socialist realism, for which
sickness can be only a political allegory rather than a form of concentrated
experience of individuality. The absence of individualized experience of
pain thus metaphorically bespeaks the death of the individual. For the
collective body is never ill and is always optimistic. This vision of social
health and happiness infused Ba Jin, rejoicing in the still young People’s
Republic, with optimism about the new socialist regime and compelled
him to stress the historical specificity, or outmodedness, of his writing.

. Karatani Kojin, ‘‘Sickness as Meaning,’’ in his Origins of Modern Japanese Litera-
ture, translation ed. by Brett de Bary (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, ),
. See also ‘‘The Discovery of Interiority,’’ –.
. Karatani, ‘‘Sickness as Meaning,’’ .
160 Chinese Modern

I once cursed the old society with such pathos, and cried out against injus-
tice on behalf of those individuals. Now in great happiness and jubilation
I sing praise of our new society rising like the morning sun. . . . Constant
progress in science and our superior social system have conquered tubercu-
losis. It no longer causes much fear among us. I read Cold Nights in the last
two days again and felt like having had a nightmare, but such nightmares
are gone and are gone forever.43

Ba Jin’s rereading of his novel in , even his rereading of this rereading
in , was largely inspired by the hope that the individual body would
be always sheltered from uncertainty and trauma. For this reason, the au-
thor has insisted that the novel is a book full of hope rather than despair,
and that its main point is to criticize and denounce a dying society.44
The death of the last tubercular, Wang Wenxuan, thus historically ac-
companies the end of the liberal ideology of the state and of its tortured
relationship to individual subjects. The ressentiment to which all liberal
subjects are inevitably incited also comes to an end when the self-making
of the individual is no longer the issue in the socialist regime. The new
hero, free of disease and interiority, will attest to the success of sublima-
tion through participation in a national identity and the socialist project
of construction. Such sublimation, as we have suggested in our reading of
Ding Ling, is based on a constant politicization of the body. While there
is no sick body anymore, the human body is subjected to direct inscrip-
tion of social meaning. It is a signifying body to the extent that it has to
remain positively charged and externalized as part of an imaginary social
body of plenitude. Such is the condition for sublimation, through which
the individual’s fear of death is alleviated because the individual body is,
in fact, dissolved. In the end such a sublimational mechanism may prove
too much to impose, because even if the human body is no longer capable
of pain, it is still susceptible, in the end, to death.

. Ba Jin, ‘‘Tan Hanye’’ (On Cold nights), in Collected Works of Ba Jin, :.
. See Ba Jin, ‘‘Guanyu Hanye’’ (About Cold nights), in Chuangzuo huiyi lu (Remi-
niscences about my writing) (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing, ), excerpted in Ba Jin
yanjiu ziliao (Research materials on Ba Jin), ed. Li Cunguang (Fuzhou: Haixia wenyi,
), :–. During the late s and early s, Ba Jin was criticized for having
created such a pitiful character and giving readers no hope in Cold Nights. A represen-
tative expression of such criticism, even though it is enormously sympathetic, can be
found in Yu Simu, Zuojia Ba Jin (On the writer Ba Jin) (Hong Kong: Nanguo, ),
esp. –.
II
This page intentionally left blank
5
The Lyrical Age and Its Discontents:
On the Staging of Socialist New China in
The Young Generation

Only by radically remoulding the teaching, organisation and training

of the youth shall we be able to ensure that the efforts of the younger
generation will result in the creation of a communist society.
—V. I. Lenin, ‘‘The Tasks of the Youth Leagues’’ ()

In hindsight, it was not out of a personal whim that, in December ,

Chairman Mao decided to publish ten more of his classical-style poems,
all of which were then prominently publicized in The People’s Daily on
 January  as part of the ritualized national salutation to the new
year. The majority of these newly released works had been composed
after , except for one that was written in April  to commemorate
the triumphant capture of Nanjing, capital of the Republic of China, by
the People’s Liberation Army. In the centrally controlled symbolic ma-
chinery of the socialist People’s Republic, which was soon to celebrate
its fifteenth anniversary, such an official issuing of Mao Zedong’s poetry
was carefully designed to speed up the production of political incentives
and energy. In its wake, profuse exegeses and celebrations would follow,
elevating the poet’s voice and vision into the source of universal inspi-
ration. The elliptical poetic texts would often be expounded on as ap-
plicable policies, concrete exhortations, and eventually as philosophical
verities. The last couplet of Mao’s  ‘‘Reply to a Friend,’’ for instance,
consists of fourteen characters in the original: ‘‘And I am lost in dreams,
untrammeled dreams / Of the land of hibiscus glowing in the morning
sun.’’ 1 When Guo Moruo, the poet laureate of the state at the time, prof-

. Ten More Poems of Mao Tse-tung (Hong Kong: Eastern Horizon Press, ),
–. The translation here was adopted from the official journal Chinese Literature,
published by Peking Foreign Languages Press, May .
164 Chinese Modern

fered his interpretation, the radiant ‘‘land of hibiscus’’ became more than
a time-honored praise of the southern landscape. It now reflected the
glorious future of socialist China and, by extension, of the entire globe to
be brightened by an impending world revolution.2
Such optimistic confidence seemed precisely what the new poems were
intended to regenerate in the nation. In fact, the publication of this group
of poetic works by Mao marked the height of what literary critics have
come to describe as the ‘‘expressive’’ or ‘‘lyrical age’’ (shuqing shidai) in
modern China.3 The onset of this deeply romantic period was conve-
niently dated, in January , by the inauguration of a government-
sponsored journal, Shikan (Poetry), which grandly introduced itself by
publishing eighteen of Mao’s earlier poems. This event further welded
the systematic production of poetry in New China with Mao Zedong’s
revolutionary poetics of magnificence.4 In the same winter, an upsurge
in the socialist revolution had reportedly brought about advanced col-
lectivization in the Chinese countryside, and the socialist transformation
of society at large had also been accomplished at a furiously faster pace
than expected or planned. With the launching of the ambitious second
Five Year Plan (–), the young People’s Republic declared itself at a
new stage of peaceful construction. The strategic objective was to rapidly
modernize the country and to demonstrate the superiority of socialism
by catching up with England and surpassing the United States in the
shortest time possible. For a brief period, the imminence of a socialist
paradise enthralled the popular imagination and excited many a utopian

. See Guo Moruo, ‘‘ ‘Furongguo li jin zhaohui’: du Mao zhuxi xin fabiao de shici
‘Da youren’ ’’ (‘‘The land of hibiscus glowing in the morning sun’’: reading Chairman
Mao’s newly published poem ‘‘Reply to a friend’’), People’s Daily,  May .
. See Li Yang, Kangzheng suming zhi lu: shehui zhuyi xianshi zhuyi (–) yanjiu
(The path of resisting destiny: a study of socialist realism [–]) (Changchun:
Shidai wenyi, ), esp. –. Also see Zhang Geng’s assessment of dramatic works
from this period in his introduction to the officially sanctioned Zhongguo xin wenyi
daxi, –: xiju ji (Compendium of new Chinese arts and literature, –:
the drama collection),  vols., ed. Zhang Geng (Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian, ),
esp. :–. The play Nianqing de yidai (The young generation) that is discussed later
is collected here, :–.
. See Zhang Jiong, ‘‘Mao Zedong yu xin Zhongguo shige’’ (Mao Zedong and
poetry in new China), Dangdai zuojia pinglun (Review of contemporary writers), no. 
(): –. Mao’s exuberant idealism and romanticism, according to the author, had
a deep impact on poetic discourse during the early years of the People’s Republic.
 The Lyrical Age and Its Discontents 165

fantasy. It was apparently an age of great passion and expectations, an

age in which the boldest dreams about human happiness were collectively
dreamed, and the most ordinary moments in life gloriously poeticized. In
April  a mass campaign to collect new folklore was under way, enthu-
siastically endorsed by Mao Zedong himself, who pointed out that new
Chinese poetry would flourish when workers in the field of poetry first
drew on a native tradition and, more importantly, combined realism with
romanticism.5 Soon after, the formula of ‘‘dialectically bringing together
revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism’’ was theoretically
presented as the sole viable method of literary production for the great,
rhapsodic socialist epoch.6 For this new literary style, Chairman Mao’s
poetry, which consistently ‘‘articulates a sublime heroics,’’ 7 already pro-
vided a brilliant example.
The euphoric lyrical age, according to the critic Li Yang, became his-
torically possible when the unprecedented socialist transformation of
society allowed a genuinely national subject to emerge and take center
stage. Only after the People’s Republic had consolidated itself as a mod-
ern nation-state, ‘‘only after we had found our subjectivity as Chinese,
could we begin historical creation and turn into a lyrical subject.’’ 8 The
defining feature of this lyricism, from the mid-s to the eve of the
Cultural Revolution in , was its fervent celebration of the populist
identity of the nation.What enabled the lyrical subject to emote and rhap-
sodize was the joy of direct participation in a collective life and national
destiny.9 This belief in immediate access to eternal rejuvenation would
in turn help enliven everyday life with metaphysical expectations and re-
veal global significance in all mundane details. Negated in one stroke,
therefore, were the prose of the world and individual finiteness and un-
certainty. Appropriate for a culture of lyrical exuberance and transcen-

. See editorial, ‘‘Da guimo de shouji quanguo min’ge’’ (Collect folklore in the
country on a large scale), People’s Daily,  April .
. See Zhou Yang, ‘‘Xin minge kaituo le shige de xin daolu’’ (New folklore has
broadened a new path for poetry), Hongqi (Red flag), no.  (June ): –.
. Ban Wang, The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-
Century China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, ), . See pp. –
 of Ban Wang’s book for an insightful reading of the symbolic significance of Mao
Zedong’s poetic discourse.
. Li Yang, The Path of Resisting Destiny, .
. See ibid., .
166 Chinese Modern

dence, poetic vision would invariably prevail over narrative temporality,

and poetic diction and imagery offered the master medium of expression
and communication. More than aestheticizing politics alone, it was a tri-
umphant moment of aestheticizing everyday life in the socialist mode.
‘‘Just as Chairman Mao is a statesman-poet,’’ as Ban Wang points out,
‘‘the party-state is an aesthetic state.’’ 10
The nationally incited urge to enact a poetic life was probably most
observable in modern spoken drama (huaju), where from  through
 a series of plays about either contemporary life or the revolutionary
heritage were carefully developed and produced to achieve national im-
pact. The staging of the nation in the form of theatrical spectacle was a
purposeful enterprise and a phenomenal success. The achievements were
so momentous that in March  the Ministry of Culture held an award
ceremony, for the first time ever, to commend some twenty plays and
productions of modern drama in the previous year. As if to bear witness
to astonishing progress on the ideological front, Chairman Mao, usually
accompanied by other leaders of the nation, watched the production of
twelve new plays from August  through November .11 Given
the prominence it enjoyed, this extraordinary moment may well be de-
scribed as the golden age in modern Chinese drama, although it also was
the historical occasion that Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife and a one-time film
actress, would seize to prepare for her own entry onto the national politi-
cal stage. One of the prizewinning plays that Mao did not manage to see
during this period was Nianqing de yidai (The young generation), a four-
act modern drama originally produced by three Shanghai-based theater
groups in the summer of . In October of the same year, Yao Wen-
yuan, an energetic literary critic who would later be bitterly denounced,
together with Jiang Qing, as a member of the infamous ‘‘Gang of Four,’’
penned an effusive essay to cheer the latest harvest in the burgeoning field
of modern drama, exalting the play as ‘‘the song of youth in the age of
socialist revolution.’’ 12

. Ban Wang, The Sublime Figure of History, .

. See headline reports in the government-sponsored journal Xiju bao (Journal of
drama) from August  to December .
. See Yao Wenyuan, ‘‘Shehui zhuyi geming shidai de qingchun zhi ge: ping Nian-
qing de yidai ’’ (The song of youth in the age of socialist revolution: on The young gen-
eration), Wenyi bao (Literary gazette), no.  (October ): –. One of the earliest
positive reviews of the play, published in June , already recognized its thematic
 The Lyrical Age and Its Discontents 167

The lauded socialist song of youth is definitely lyrical, and The Young
Generation reads like a good specimen of the imagination and logic of
that bygone time. What I attempt to do in this chapter is conduct an ar-
chaeology of the lyrical culture by also uncovering the deep anxiety and
discontents that it desperately wished to suppress. This excavation project
therefore involves the careful task of reconstructing not only what was
staged and visible, but also what determined the theatrical spectacle and
representation. The anxiety, as much as the lyricism embedded in the play,
may still be abundantly pertinent, insofar as we continue to find ourselves
confronted with the same dilemmas of modernity.

The Politics of Lyricism

By one contemporary account, The Young Generation may well have been
the most popular of all the modern-style plays recognized by the Minis-
try of Culture in .13 Within less than two years of its first production,
a definitive version of the play was published by the Chinese Drama Press
(with an initial printing of , copies). In addition to the nearly sixty
theaters across the nation that put on the play, it also was adapted into
various regional opera productions and tanci performances, and finally it
was made into a much-awaited movie (figure ). Obviously its quick as-
cendance to the limelight on a national scale foreshadowed the path that
would be taken by the ‘‘model theater’’ groomed by Jiang Qing during
the Cultural Revolution. The original author of the play, however, re-
mained unusually reticent during this exciting transmutation, although
he dutifully went through all the stages of revision and adaptation. In
sharp contrast to other newly laureated playwrights, Chen Yun, as far as

timeliness. See Su Kun, ‘‘Yichu yinren zhumu de xinxi: jianlun ‘Nianqing de yidai’
zhuti de xianshi yiyi’’ (An important new play: on the contemporary meaning of the
theme of The young generation), Shanghai xiju (Shanghai drama), no.  (June ):
–.
. According to the Journal of Drama (no.  [April ]: –), by March ,
fifty-eight theater groups had put on The Young Generation in twenty-seven cities, com-
pared to fifty-three for Nihong dengxia de shaobing (On guard under the neon lights),
forty-some for Qianwan buyao wangji (Never forget), and twenty-eight for Lei Feng.
During December  alone, forty-seven theaters were playing The Young Generation.
In the same month the play was also adopted into seven different local operas (Peking,
Shanghai, Canton, etc.) that together put on  productions.
168 Chinese Modern

. Film poster, Nianqing de yidai (The young generation)

(). From Dazhong dianying (Popular cinema) (Beijing,
June ).

one can tell, never offered any platitudinous statements about his motiva-
tion or inspiration.14 Amazingly little was made known about the writer

. For instance, two other award-winning writers, Hu Wanchun and Cong Shen,
did not hesitate to reveal to the public either how they were inspired by Chairman
Mao’s teachings or what they learned from writing the play. See Hu Wanchun,
‘‘Chuxie huaju de ganxiang’’ (Thoughts at writing modern drama for the first time),
Journal of Drama, no.  (April ): –; Cong Shen, ‘‘Qianwan buyao wangji
zhuti de xingcheng’’ (The formation of the theme of Never forget), Journal of Drama,
no.  (April ): –.
 The Lyrical Age and Its Discontents 169

who helped shape the idealist profile of an entire generation of Chinese

youth.
Its overwhelming popularity aside, the play was certainly the most in-
fluential and most paradigmatic of the new drama on contemporary life.
The heated discussion and philosophizing it generated almost immedi-
ately after its debut testify to the ideological need it fulfilled. One of
the earliest commentaries on The Young Generation welcomed it for its
‘‘thought-provoking theme,’’ which was to treat the education of young
people as an integral part of the continuing class struggle, domestic as
well as international.15 Together with several other prizewinning plays,
The Young Generation raised and answered ‘‘questions with which mil-
lions of people are concerned,’’ one authoritative critic stated. All of the
new plays, better than any other literary genres, helped define and dra-
matize the ‘‘major themes’’ of the historical situation, but this work in
particular ‘‘has not only excited countless young people, but also touched
numerous parents.’’ What it put forth to the audience was therefore an
urgent question that had to be addressed seriously by the entire society:
‘‘how to cultivate and educate Communist successors and how to lead
the young people onto the revolutionary road.’’ 16 Another commentator
more pointedly directed a rhetorical question to the target group of the
play: ‘‘What is the meaning of the ‘young generation’? And what kind of
‘young generation’ should we make?’’ 17
Evidently ‘‘the young generation’’ was more than an apt title for a
play about educating the young. It acknowledged a grave social reality,
namely, the coming of age of the generation that grew up with the

. See Wen Ping, ‘‘Faren shensi de zhuti: du huaju Nianqing de yidai ’’ (A thought-
provoking theme: a reading of the play The young generation), Journal of Drama, no.
 (August ): –. Ouyang Wenbin in another essay attributed the forcefulness
of the play to its editorializing style and philosophical profundity. See his ‘‘Nianqing de
yidai qianlun’’ (A brief essay on The young generation), Shanghai xiju (Shanghai drama),
no.  (December ): –.
. See Hou Jinjing, ‘‘Guanxin he tichu qianbaiwan qunzhong suo guanxin de
wenti: duju mantan’’ (Notice and address issues that millions of people are concerned
with: remarks on recent plays), Journal of Drama, no.  (April ): –.
. See Yang Haibo, ‘‘Ba geming de huoju ju de genggao ranshao de gengwang’’
(Raise higher the revolutionary torch and make it burn harder), Journal of Drama,
no.  (October ): –. The same article was reprinted in the bimonthly Zhongguo
qingnian (Chinese youth), nos. – (October ): –. A forum on The Young
Generation is featured in this combined issue, including a lengthy plot synopsis.
170 Chinese Modern

People’s Republic. By singling out this generation for theatrical treat-

ment, in turn, the play articulated a deep uneasiness about the identity
and political orientation of contemporary youth. In this sense, the
‘‘thought-provoking theme’’ that The Young Generation introduced was
actually an intensified awareness of youth as a problem, of the need
for greater social guidance and political authority. It also initiated a
new discourse about the family structure and everyday life during a self-
consciously socialist era. Soon after The Young Generation appeared in
Shanghai, a play called Zhu ni jiankang (To your health) was produced in
Harbin, in northeastern China; it quickly became the next national sen-
sation and won the same prize as the previous play, although not without
a revised, more alarmist title, Qianwan buyao wangji (Never forget).18 In
addition to these two prominent dramatic works, a movie was promptly
made to present and resolve a similar family problem in which a college-
educated youngest son is humbled and taught how to respect his father,
older brother, and working-class family origins.19
Of all the stage and filmic representations of the youth question, how-
ever, it is The Young Generation that remains the most lyrical and, as we
will discuss, the most dramatic. It was widely praised for its profound
dialogues and poetic language. One director, for instance, projected the
artistic style of the play in these schematic terms: ‘‘youthful revolution-
ary enthusiasm; lucid philosophical theorizing; a vigorous and refreshing
basic tone; lyricism in the style of a poetic essay.’’ 20 Only such an im-
passioned style of lyrical poetry, noted the director, would do justice to
the ethos of contemporary youth and simultaneously reflect an uplifting
Zeitgeist. Yet the director was also perfectly aware of the gravity of the
dramatic conflict at hand. The intended effect was to compel the audience
to think ‘‘what attitude a revolutionary youth should have toward the

. For the first version of the play, see Cong Shen, Zhu ni jiankang (To your health),
Juben (Scripts), (October-November ): –; see also Cong Shen, Qianwan bu-
yao wangji (Never forget) (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, ). For a critical analysis of
the play, see Xiaobing Tang, ‘‘Qianwan buyao wangji de lishi yiyi: guanyu richang
shenghuo de jiaolü jiqi xiandaixing’’ (The historical significance of Never forget: on the
anxiety of everyday life and its modernity), in Zai jiedu, ed. Tang Xiaobing (Hong
Kong: Oxford University Press, ), –.
. For the script, see Hu Wanchun and Fu Chaowu, Jiating wenti (Family problem)
(Shanghai: Shanghai wenhua, ).
. See Xu Xiaozhong, ‘‘Nianqing de yidai daoyan zhaji’’ (Directorial notes on The
young generation), Journal of Drama, no.  (February ): –.
 The Lyrical Age and Its Discontents 171

revolutionary cause, and how to inherit the revolutionary tradition and

carry on the cause.’’ 21 The director’s observations, therefore, shed light
on the political designs behind the lyrical style, and they reveal direct
connections between a high-spirited lyricism and a possible legitimacy
crisis in the revolution. In this instance, lyricism becomes a technical solu-
tion, a strategy of mobilization that serves to engage and coordinate the
young population. It belongs to the modern technology that relentlessly
aestheticizes politics and that programs popular sentiment and its grati-
fication in a mass society. The lyrical subject, too, is the creation of what
Louis Althusser calls the ideological state apparatus that operates to sys-
tematically interpolate the individual in an imaginary relationship to the
real condition in which he or she exists.22
Although, as we learn from Althusser, what constitutes the real condi-
tion of existence cannot always be readily grasped, the ideological func-
tion of lyricism appears more and more deliberate when we realize that
The Young Generation intersected with a number of historical develop-
ments underpinning the lyrical age. By , when the play was first put
on, the socialist New China had weathered a series of severe political
crises, not the least among them the disastrous consequences of the Great
Leap Forward of  and the Sino-Soviet split. A more direct challenge
had come about even earlier in the restless – political season, when
urban dwellers and intellectuals, in part bestirred by the  Hungarian
uprising, made their dissent and discontent heard. The opposition was
quickly suppressed as a ‘‘bourgeois rightist counterattack’’ on the prole-
tarian dictatorship, but the necessity of continuously deepening the revo-
lution in order to safeguard its achievements was brought home. The
following massive failure of the Great Leap Forward led to widespread
famine, and Mao Zedong the visionary and his ‘‘storming approach’’ were
forced to the second front.23 Yet while his utopian economics was dis-
credited, Mao soon reasserted his leadership on the ideological front by
warning against a happy obliviousness to the protracted and fierce class

. Ibid., .

. See Louis Althusser, ‘‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,’’ in his Lenin
and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review
Press, ), –.
. See Lowell Dittmer, China’s Continuous Revolution: The Post-Liberation Epoch,
– (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), for a discussion of the dif-
ference between an ‘‘engineering’’ and a ‘‘storming’’ approach, esp. –.
172 Chinese Modern

struggle during the socialist period. His concern was that the more prag-
matic ‘‘engineering approach’’ had created ‘‘in a peacetime context a new
type of cadre, whose narrow professional/bureaucratic interests caused
one to lose sight of the revolutionary mission.’’ 24 Remembering the origi-
nal mission subsequently became a key component in political reasoning
and discourse.
Mao Zedong’s deep fear for the future of the revolution was also greatly
compounded by the de-Stalinization of the Soviet Union since the mid-
s and by the pro-American liberalization policies adopted by Josip
Tito’s Yugoslavia. Revisionism now posed a real danger from within,
threatening to derail the revolution just as ominously as imperialist ag-
gression, embodied by American forces stationed in Taiwan, Japan, and
South Korea, would from without. In short, the grim geopolitical situa-
tion seemed to demand that the nation be once again mobilized to de-
fend the revolution’s gains, if not its very existence. China had to stand
independently of the two superpowers and unite with the oppressed but
increasingly independent Third World nations across Asia, Africa, and
Latin America. The vision of a world revolution was therefore an inte-
gral part of the Chinese lyrical age because it grew out of a geopolitical
realignment. Moreover, it supplied an ultimate mission of commitment
and made lyricism possible by introducing a discourse of infinite deferral.
This global aspiration found its vivid expression in one of Mao’s better-
known poems, dated  January :

The Four Seas are rising, clouds and waters raging,

The Five Continents are rocking, wind and thunder roaring.
Away with all pests!
Our force is irresistible.25

To ensure that such a cosmic task was accomplished and the revolution-
ary cause continued, campaigns of varying scales were waged one after
another, now often envisioned as a massive offensive rather than as guer-
rilla warfare. The lyrical age was first of all an age of politicized passion.
At the outset of , a ‘‘socialist education campaign’’ was started in the
countryside and would become a test run of the systematic mobilization

. Ibid., .

. ‘‘Reply to Comrade Kuo Mo-jo: To the Melody of Man Chiang Hung,’’ in Ten
More Poems of Mao Tse-tung, , –.
 The Lyrical Age and Its Discontents 173

during the upcoming Cultural Revolution.26 In February, top leaders of

the nation, the Party, and the People’s Liberation Army () offered
aphoristic sayings and calligraphy to urge every Chinese to learn from Lei
Feng, an exemplary soldier and Good Samaritan. Less than a year later,
the example set by Lei Feng was supplemented by that of the  itself,
and when the nation was called upon to emulate the army,27 military
uniforms and paraphernalia turned into proud fashion statements. With
the publication of Quotations from Chairman Mao in May , the cam-
paign to collectively ‘‘study Chairman Mao’s works’’ gained momentum
and would further institutionalize a standard political parlance for the
nation. During the same riveting period, two equally far-reaching move-
ments unfolded, both adding credibility to the doctrine of self-reliance
and the vision of utopian modernity. Dazhai and Daqing, a production
brigade and an oil field, respectively, were promoted as model units for
the agricultural and industrial battlefronts. While these mobilizations re-
inforced the socialist triumvirate of the workers, peasants, and soldiers, a
continual but much quieter campaign had been under way. It first sought
to return a large number of rural young people, who had migrated to
industrial cities during the Great Leap Forward, to the countryside. By
early , the ‘‘return to the village’’ initiative (huixiang) had grown
into a full-fledged social movement to relocate urban youth throughout
the underdeveloped interior (shangshan xiaxiang).28 Then hailed as an act
that would revolutionize traditional values and practices, millions of edu-
cated urban youth settling in the remote areas would indeed change the
social and cultural landscape of the nation. Some fifteen years later, the
same displaced generation would fight their tortuous way back, only to
radically reconfigure the human and political geography of the country

. For an early but still informative study of this campaign, see Richard Baum and
F. C. Teiwes, Ssu-ch’ing: The Socialist Education Movement of – (Berkeley: Cen-
ter for Chinese Studies, ).
. Editorial, ‘‘Quanguo douyao xuexi jiefangjun’’ (The whole nation must learn
from the People’s Liberation Army), People’s Daily,  February .
. Editorial, ‘‘Zhishi qingnian shangshan xiaxiang shi yifeng yisu de geming xing-
dong’’ (Educated youth going to the countryside is a revolutionary act to change tra-
ditional practices), The People’s Daily,  March . For a good study of this topic, see
John Gardner, ‘‘Educated Youth and Urban-Rural Inequalities, –,’’ in The City
in Communist China, ed. John Wilson Lewis (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, ), –.
174 Chinese Modern

yet again. Finally, partially in response to the concern dramatized by The

Young Generation, in the summer of  a brief campaign ‘‘to train suc-
cessors to the revolutionary cause’’ intervened, heralded by a stern cri-
tique of ‘‘Khrushchev’s phony Communism’’ and its historical lessons for
the world revolution.29
Yet these were not all of the bestirring activities that demanded con-
stant political enthusiasm and recharging. Those two heady years, 
and , also witnessed increasingly thunderous marches and parades
across Tiananmen Square as well as other public spaces all over China
in spirited support of the civil rights movement in the United States.
Every instance of resistance against American imperialism, be it in Viet-
nam, Cuba, Panama, or Zaire (the Congo), would have the resolute back-
ing of the Chinese and was lauded in massive demonstrations. For three
consecutive days in January , for example, ‘‘workers in drama in the
capital assumed their fighting position and marched to the streets and
Tiananmen Square’’ to voice their moral support for the valiant Panama-
nian people.30 Imaginary international solidarity, obviously, supplied a
new source of energy for the lyrical age and made the lyrical subject a
new revolutionary cosmopolitan.
The flow of emotional energy, therefore, had to be constantly re-
directed in order to maintain its vital force, and the capacity for lyrical
response and agitation had to be continually enhanced. For it is not so
much the content of lyricism as the ability to practice revolutionary lyri-
cism, not the énoncé but the act of enunciation, that completes the ideo-
logical interpolation of the lyrical subject. This political economy of pas-
sion sustaining the lyrical age, however, ran a very real risk of exhaustion,
even though physical fatigue and pain were always welcomed as signs of
passionate devotion. As if acutely aware of this possibility, a February
 essay in Zhongguo qingnian (Chinese youth), an organ of the Com-
munist Youth League, specifically advised its young readers on ‘‘how to

. See Stuart R. Schram, ‘‘Introduction: The Cultural Revolution in Historical

Perspective,’’ Authority, Participation and Cultural Change in China, ed. Stuart R.
Schram (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), –. Schram’s introduc-
tion provides a concise historical survey of the period discussed in this chapter.
. See ‘‘Woguo xijujie jianjue zhichi Banama remin de fan Mei aiguo zhengyi dou-
zheng’’ (The drama circle in our country firmly supports the Panamanian people’s
patriotic struggle against America), Journal of Drama, no.  (January ): .
 The Lyrical Age and Its Discontents 175

cultivate and maintain robust revolutionary enthusiasm.’’ 31 In its effort

to stimulate revolutionary passion among the young, the same journal
serialized a discussion, for the greater part of , of what constituted a
correct understanding of ‘‘happiness.’’ Toward the end, it became appar-
ent that a rigid opposition was set up between self and collective, bour-
geois hedonism and proletarian asceticism, material satisfaction and revo-
lutionary determination. The main thrust of most writings, however, was
to convince the reader that ‘‘you are actually happy.’’ ‘‘Young comrades,
we now live in a happy country. We must not live in happiness without
knowing what it is,’’ so concludes a severe essay denouncing bourgeois
decadence and hedonism. The culminating metaphors that the author
employs are graphic and indicative of the volatile ‘‘polemical symbolism’’
that would saturate public discourse and practice during the forthcoming
Cultural Revolution.32

If we ignore our current happy life and abandon the broad road of revo-
lutionary happiness, if we instead seek happiness in the enjoyment of a
materialistic life, or worse, in the cesspool of bourgeois decadence and de-
generation, then we will sink to the bottom and become a pitiful bug in
life. To soar in the open sky like a brave eagle, and to glide over waves like
a seagull in the hurricane of revolutionary struggle: this is our chance to be
heroes and offer our talent to the revolution. . . .33

The destiny of the young, as advocated in this  essay, lies in seek-
ing happiness in perpetual commitment and confrontation. Yet, at the
same time, this youthful restlessness must be made productive and har-
nessed to a foundational purpose or institution. It must be socialized
and stopped from growing into a blind antiestablishmentarian and self-
destructive impulse or energy. The meaning of youth, so explained a
recitational poem from the same period, was ‘‘to strive forward, work
selflessly, and always remain modest.’’ Collectively written by the May

. ‘‘Zenyang peiyang he baochi wangsheng de geming reqing’’ (How to cultivate

and maintain robust revolutionary enthusiasm), Chinese Youth, nos. – (February
): –.
. See Dittmer, China’s Continuous Revolution, –.
. Gan Feng, ‘‘He zichan jieji xiangle zhuyi huaqing jiexian: tan zenyang zhengque
kandai wuzhi shenghuo’’ (Stay clear of bourgeois hedonism: on how to correctly view
material life), Chinese Youth, no.  (August ): .
176 Chinese Modern

Fourth Literary Society at Peking University, the poem, ‘‘Let youth shine
forth,’’ ends with a crescendo of directives:

Female chorus: Offer it to our motherland,

Our fiery life!
Male chorus: Offer it to the world,
Our brilliant youth!
Together: Offer it to the future,
The principle of our existence:
Forever revolution! 34

The Re-enchantment of Necessity

The central conflict of the play The Young Generation seems to revolve
around contrasting perceptions of happiness. All of the action takes place
in the living room of the Lin family home in an industrial suburb of
Shanghai (figure ). The time is the beginning of summer, when the main
character, Xiao Jiye, a -year-old geologist, returns from his prospect-
ing team stationed in the frontier region of Qinghai to verify the team’s
recent discovery of a rare mineral resource. His old classmate Lin Yu-
sheng, now also a teammate, is already back in Shanghai on sick leave,
supposedly suffering from disabling rheumatoid arthritis in his knees.
While Xiao Jiye, three years older, is passionate about his work and can
hardly wait to go back to the field, Lin Yusheng much prefers life in the
city and even forges a medical report in order to stay in Shanghai. The
dénouement is not reached until Yusheng’s misdeed is exposed, and a
long-held family secret is subsequently revealed. In the process, all mem-
bers of the Lin family (his parents, younger sister, and girlfriend), as well
as Xiao Jiye’s grandmother, play an indispensable role in accordance with
each character’s symbolic composition and function. The play ends with
a rousing scene where everyone is gathered onstage to send Lin Yusheng
back to the prospecting team, his younger sister Lin Lan to the country-
side, and other graduating students of the Geological Institute to remote
areas, including Qinghai and Tibet. Among the older generation left be-

. The May Fourth Literary Society of Peking University (recorded by Li Guan-
ding, Yang Kuangman, Wang Yi), ‘‘Rang qingchun shanguang (jiti langsong shi)’’ (Let
youth shine forth [recitational poem]), Shikan (Poetry), no.  (February ): .
 The Lyrical Age and Its Discontents 177

hind, incidentally, is Xiao Jiye the tireless young man, recovering from
the removal of a tumorous growth in one leg.
As Kai-yu Hsü comments in an anthology, the play, by ‘‘treating the
problem of getting young people to work in faraway places, touches a
sore issue known as the ‘rustification of the young generation,’ or the end-
less task of fighting the corrupting influence of city life.’’ For this reason,
Hsü observes, ‘‘it has continuing significance in the People’s Republic,’’
even in the reform era of the s.35 The corrupting influence of city
life inflicts its damages mainly on Lin Yusheng, although its seemingly
resourceful agent is a shadowy Young Wu, who never appears onstage.
By making Young Wu an absent presence, critics have long agreed, the
playwright showed great ingenuity in highlighting the constant and in-
visible danger of bourgeois ideology and lifestyle.36 Symptoms of Yu-
sheng’s infirmity extend beyond the forged document he submits as an
excuse. They include signs of his being a deft urban consumer and his
conception of a happy life. Yusheng makes his first entrance by pushing
onto the stage a bicycle draped with shopping bags. He is getting ready
to celebrate his girlfriend Xia Qianru’s birthday with canned food, des-
sert, and a fancy dress.37 The future he anticipates for himself and Qianru
is one of stability and high cultural entertainment: ‘‘During the day we
go to work together. After we come back in the evening, we can listen
to music, read a novel or some poetry, go to a movie. On weekends we
can go to the park, or get together with some friends. . . . Of course we’ll

. Kai-yu Hsü, introduction to The Young Generation, in Literature of the People’s
Republic of China, ed. Kai-yu Hsü and Ting Wang (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, ), .
. See Yao Wenyuan, ‘‘The Song of Youth in the Age of Socialist Revolution,’’
Literary Gazette (October ): . Nonetheless, Yao Wenyuan also thinks that the
audience should be clearly informed of what becomes of Young Wu, the despicable
‘‘representative of bourgeois forces.’’
. In the  version, Lin Yusheng is the first person onstage in act . This was
changed in the  edition, where Xiao Jiye appears first in order to set a different
tone for the play. See Chen Yun, Nianqing de yidai (The young generation), Scripts,
no.  (August ): ; Chen Yun, Zhang Lihui, and Xu Jingxian, Nianqing de yidai
(The young generation) (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, ), . Except for minor rearrang-
ing and rewording, these two versions show no significant differences. Nonetheless,
they will be compared continually in this chapter, with the first version referred to as
the original edition, and the second as the revised edition. The page reference immedi-
ately following a citation refers to the revised edition.
 178 Chinese Modern

. Stage design, Nianqing de yidai (The young generation) (). From Xiji bao (Journal
of drama) (Beijing, November ).

have to do a good job at our work. We definitely will have to score some
successes in our careers’’ ().
This picture of routinized urban existence, however, appears to Xiao
Jiye—the positive role model that the play creates—to be unbearably
banal, trivial, and selfish. During the first exchange between these two
friends, Yusheng asks Jiye whether he still writes poetry. This allows Jiye a
chance to describe, with full lyrical rhythm, his life as a geologist: ‘‘Life in
the field is itself poetry! High mountains, dark forests, deserts and rivers,
everywhere is poetry, everywhere is a struggle’’ (). What the one-time
poet does not tell Yusheng about is the leg injury that he suffered in an
accident, which is another reason for his coming back to Shanghai at this
point. In act , at a high point of the clash between their divergent ap-
proaches to life, Jiye and Yusheng engage in a heated debate about their
worldviews. With mounting eloquence, Jiye charges Yusheng with insu-
lating himself complacently in his own little universe, reminds him of the
mission to bring happiness to millions of other people, and warns him
against putting his own interest before that of the country. The danger
of Yusheng’s behavior, Jiye orates, comes from his not wanting to con-
 The Lyrical Age and Its Discontents 179

tinue the revolution. ‘‘The danger also lies in the corruption of your mind
by individualism before you even know it. It will take away your ideals,
wear down your fighting will, and drag you deeper and deeper into the
bourgeois quagmire’’ ().
The ‘‘bourgeois quagmire’’ into which the young generation must be
prevented from sliding was a stock political phrase during this period
of revolutionary lyricism. As used by Xiao Jiye here, it more often de-
scribes the inertia and banality of everyday life in secular modernity than
it does a clearly identified hostile force. The image of a sucking ‘‘quag-
mire’’ (nikeng) directly denounces the narrow private world (xiao tiandi )
that threatens to substitute for the global will and vision of a revolution-
ary foot soldier. It articulates an almost idealist fear of impurity, contami-
nation, and unwholesomeness. This implicit elitism is most strident when
pursuits of material satisfaction are frequently condemned as vulgar and
in bad taste.When Jiye criticizes Yusheng for obsessing about his personal
happiness, he makes it clear that the point is not whether self-interest is
legitimate or not, but that a morally better existence is one that is fully
integrated into a collective cause. He goes on to invalidate the concept
of legitimacy by arguing that an individual right, even if it is legitimate,
needs to be subordinated to the putative interests of the nation-state ().
Part of the reasoning here reflects an entrenched Confucian tradition
of moralizing human behavior and relations. This philosophical tradition
and discursive habit, reinforced by a Leninist opposition between society
at large and the socialist state, finds in legitimate self-interest nothing
but a moral betrayal of, or even a latent threat to, the collective good.38
The fear of impurity, at the same time, also expresses a deep-seated cul-
tural anxiety over a possible loss of national identity and distinction. For
‘‘bourgeois individualism,’’ while rejected as incompatible with proletar-
ian ideals, is primarily constructed as a Western infection and malaise. The

. See, for instance, Yao Wenyuan’s analysis of Lin Yusheng’s notion of ‘‘legitimate
individualism’’ in his ‘‘The Song of Youth in the Age of Socialist Revolution,’’ Literary
Gazette (October ): esp. . The two key texts that determined the vanguardist cri-
tique of everyday life during this period were Lenin’s ‘‘ ‘Left-Wing’ Communism—An
Infantile Disorder’’ and ‘‘The Tasks of the Youth Leagues,’’ both written in  and
collected in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Lenin Anthology (New York: Norton, ),
–, –. Lenin’s concern with the continuation of the communist revolution
in everyday life had a major impact on the policies adopted by the Tenth Plenum of
the Eighth Congress of the  in the fall of .
180 Chinese Modern

‘‘quagmire’’ is doubly reprehensible, therefore, because it is foreign and

heterogeneous, as much as synonymous with degeneration and capitula-
tion.
Moreover, the same marshy area of danger also includes personal feel-
ings and attachments, which will only mire any resolute action. When
Lin Yusheng’s girlfriend, Xia Qianru, engages in self-examination, for ex-
ample, she characterizes her recent emotional dependence as having fallen
into a ‘‘thick and deep quagmire’’ (). Earlier in the play, her involve-
ment with Yusheng makes her rather compliant to his plan of remaining
in the city, although she also feels constant pangs of conscience. At one
point, Qianru reveals her hesitations to Lin Lan, Yusheng’s younger sis-
ter, who bluntly questions why she should be so submissive. ‘‘You will
understand it when you fall in love with someone,’’ Qianru feebly ex-
plains. Upon this revelation, the eighteen-year-old high school graduate
solemnly announces: ‘‘If this is what love is all about, I will never fall in
love in my life. Never!’’ ().
As the female and younger counterpart of Xiao Jiye, Lin Lan is also
presented as a positive role model with abundant poetic passion, if only
more zealous and excitable. Part of her function in the play is to glam-
orize the current policy of relocating educated youth from the city to
the countryside. So she not only refuses to be tempted to study at a film
school, but she also manages to miss the entrance exams for an agricul-
tural institute by saving the life of a heart-attack patient. What she sets
her mind and imagination on is ‘‘engaging in another revolution’’ on a
collective farm in the mountainous Jinggangshan area. In the end, her
enthusiasm is so contagious that Li Rongsheng, a ‘‘social youth’’ two
years her junior, happily quits idling around and joins her in a new long
march to the hinterland. Oftentimes serving as the comic relief of the
play, Li Rongsheng is a minor character whose presence nonetheless re-
veals an incoherent core of social reality. His initial disdain for menial
labor, criticized as an instance of bourgeois influence, darkly acknowl-
edges the growing problem of providing jobs for urban youth. In addi-
tion, his lack of proper occupation, in spite of his working-class family
background, brings to the surface a rigid social structure and stratification
that is unable to recognize an individual with no institutional affiliation.
This nonrecognition, just as in the case of denying legitimacy to indi-
vidual interests, often translates into a political ambiguity or even suspi-
cion of whomever remains independent in society. Hence, the use of awk-
 The Lyrical Age and Its Discontents 181

ward categories such as ‘‘social youth’’ or ‘‘people in society’’ when such

terms actually designate those who are marginalized in the new socialist
order and are supported by no particular work units.39
In many ways Lin Lan demonstrates onstage the upbringing and train-
ing of the Red Guard generation of the forthcoming Cultural Revolu-
tion. Her ardent idealism and self-abnegation identify her as a proud
youth of the Mao Zedong era.40 Her epigonic pain at having missed all
the great historical moments adds to her impatience with an ordinary
existence. She decides to go to the countryside because ‘‘Chairman Mao
and the Party call upon us to aid the agricultural front’’ (). Telling her-
self that ‘‘since our fathers are a generation of iron men, we must not
be a bunch of cowards’’ (), she longs to live ‘‘where Chairman Mao
once lived, and where revolutionary martyrs shed their blood’’ (). In
this exuberant high school graduate, we find an ideal person envisioned
by the lyrical age: while her passion constitutes her thinking, her moti-
vation acknowledges no internal origin. Allowing herself no interiority
or self-reflection, she derives confidence and pleasurable reassurance from
continually striving to merge into a grand collective subject. Her hap-
piness lies in becoming a faithful seed—wherever she is sown, she will
grow, blossom, and yield fruit (). More concretely, she expresses her
anticipation of the revolutionary future through an unwavering respect
for her father, a respect that entails nothing short of filial piety. (To this
structure of familial subordination and its implications, we will return in
the next section.)
The creation of Xiao Jiye and Lin Lan as inspiring characters onstage

. It is clear that a Leninist resistance to society is revealed by such loaded demo-
graphic categories. In its official as well as popular usage, ‘‘society’’ often indicates
an impure, complicated, and damaging influence on the morale of an emerging new
order. See, for example, Hou Jinjing, ‘‘Notice and Address Issues that Millions of
People Are Concerned with,’’ Journal of Drama, no.  (April ): –. When
explicating the significance of the play Never Forget, the critic emphasizes that ‘‘every
worker, and every member of the cadre will have to remain in a web of contacts with
various social relations (relatives, friends, and people from the same hometown). As a
result, all these social groups will form an extremely complicated relationship in our
everyday life’’ ().
. See Mi Hedu, Hongweibing zhe yidai (The red guard generation) (Hong Kong:
Joint Publishing, ), esp. –. For a psychological portrayal of the Red Guard
generation, see also Anita Chan, Children of Mao: Personality Development and Political
Activism in the Red Guard Generation (Seattle: University of Washington Press, ).
182 Chinese Modern

historically answered the question of how the young generation ought

to socialize and integrate itself into the revolutionary enterprise. Social
integration for youth could be achieved only through political mobiliza-
tion, since the existing social structure was not viewed as stable but rather
as in the permanent process of exciting transformation. Youthfulness and
social movement, therefore, formed the basis of a rhapsodic confidence
of the lyrical age, to which The Young Generation was self-consciously
erected as a magnifying mirror. Far from random, for example, was the
playwright’s decision to focus on graduates from a geology institute, be-
cause in the early s Liu Shaoqi, then president of the People’s Re-
public, had in a memorable phrase romanticized their future occupation
as contiguous with revolutionary warfare: ‘‘Geological workers are the
guerrillas for the period of peaceful construction.’’ 41 This peculiar meta-
phor calls forth a central myth of the lyrical age, namely, that peace is to
be waged with the same intensity and devotion as war. The source for
the new lyricism, following this mythical thinking, lies not in routinized
work or orderliness, but rather in constant motion and the excitement of
overcoming inertia.
Within the play, the action is therefore meaningfully set at the begin-
ning of summer, ‘‘the season when high school graduates decide either
to go on to college or to work, and when college graduates are about
to enter the real world; it is a time when young people are filled with
hope, happiness, passion, and restlessness’’ ().42 Yet the play and its dra-
matic conflict are structurally disallowed to pursue the various possibili-
ties faced by the young; they do not even address as a concrete problem
society’s growing inability to absorb or accommodate its young popu-
lation. The choice of living either in a city or in a rural area is recast as
a moral and ideological decision over which form of happiness to pur-
sue and what political vision to identify with. Much poetic passion and

. Quoted in Shi Tao, Xia Chun, and Shi Lianxing, ‘‘Nianqing de yidai daoyan san-
ren tan’’ (Conversation among three directors about The young generation), Journal of
Drama, no.  (October ): . This connection to Liu Shaoqi may partly explain
why the play was denounced during the Cultural Revolution when he was disgraced
and driven from the presidency.
. In the  version, the time is instead described as full of ‘‘hope, vexation, pas-
sion and restlessness’’ (). The minor change here is indicative of the general line of
revision; the reading of the play is more uplifting, more heroic, and more idealistic as
a result.
 The Lyrical Age and Its Discontents 183

philosophical grandiosity is generated in the process, often rendering in-

expressible the thorny details of a mundane situation. By the end of the
play, for instance, Lin Yusheng agrees to return to his prospecting team,
but we are never certain what will become of his relationship to Xia
Qianru, who is apparently assigned to a different area. Instead, before the
final curtain falls, Lin Lan, the spokesperson of the young generation, is
to speak with the ‘‘utmost passion’’ and directly to the audience. At this
point, the audience can no longer watch as spectators but must partake of
the communal exhortation and share the same ‘‘hope, happiness, passion,
and restlessness.’’

Lin Lan: (Walks to the front, facing the audience) Good-bye, teachers!
Classmates! Comrades! We are on our way, leaving you and
heading to different posts. Like seeds spread over the land, we
will take root there, germinate, blossom, and yield fruit. Good-
bye! Dear comrades, we are on our way to create a beautiful
future, with your expectations and blessings! ()

The necessity of such a passionate life, as has been suggested, grows

from resisting the bureaucratic rationalizations of political and social en-
gineering. The massive transfer of educated youth to the countryside had
the logistical purpose of managing unemployment in the urban area; it
agreed with the general policy of developing streamlined socialist ‘‘pro-
ducer cities’’ (instead of ‘‘consumer cities’’), the point of which was still
to enhance urban manageability.43 Demographically and politically, this
transfer carried out the strategy of populating the frontier regions with
Han Chinese settlers. On a more visionary level, the relocation program
was to contribute to the long-term goal of eliminating the entrenched
disparity between the city and the countryside, although the result often
seemed to add new strains to the relation between peasants and city
dwellers.44
Given that central planning was the guiding principle and ideology
underlying all such objectives, the source of spectacular youthful enthusi-
asm could not but be grand state rationality. The target of this manufac-

. See R. J. R. Kirkby, Urbanization in China: Town and Country in a Develop-

ing Economy, – .. (New York: Columbia University Press, ), esp. –,
–.
. See Gardner, ‘‘Educated Youth and Urban-Rural Inequalities, –,’’ –.
184 Chinese Modern

tured passion, therefore, is to overcome apathy as much as to sublimate

mundane details of life. While trying to first persuade Xia Qianru of the
need to accept her job assignment, Xiao Jiye explains: ‘‘Of all the gradu-
ates, who doesn’t have some practical difficulties? For instance, some may
have a family problem; some may have an emotional entanglement; some
may suffer from bad health; still some others may be sensitive to cold or
heat, and so on. If everyone stresses only their own problems, what do
you think will happen?’’ (). Lin Yusheng’s greatest offense, in the eyes
of Xiao Jiye, is to put his own happiness ‘‘above the collective interest and
outside state planning’’ (). For this reason, Xiao Jiye himself must be
projected as a hero whose last concern is his own physical pain or well-
being. When faced with the possibility of losing a leg to cancer, he sees no
alternative but staying at his job as a geologist. ‘‘Even if they really have
to amputate it, I will return to the team on crutches. I may not climb
mountains anymore, but I can stay in the flat area; I may not go outside
anymore, but I can work in a tent. No matter what, I will work on the
surveying team till the end of my life. . . .’’ ().
Another instance of Xiao Jiye’s poetic attitude toward life, this mo-
ment also reveals that a new work ethic is being promoted, and that the
ordinary is reenchanted as an integral part of the glorious whole. If this
political economy of passion exhibited on stage is run by the cultural de-
partment in the bureaucratic central planning, there is a parallel structure
of symbolic rationality that oversees and resolves the dramatic conflict.
The need to train a revolutionary young generation will acquire its sym-
bolic value largely in terms of continuing a family tradition.

Family as the Symbolic Order

Three generations are represented in the play, and every character is re-
lated, either symbolically or biologically, as a member of one extended
revolutionary family. The youngest generation—the third—includes not
only all the main characters, but other students of the Geological Insti-
tute and high school graduates. The parents of Lin Yusheng and Lin Lan
stand for the middle generation, here portrayed as a generation of revolu-
tionary veterans or functionaries. Father Lin Jian, an invincible  gen-
eral in the past, suggests a natural continuity between the task of socialist
construction and the history of revolutionary war. Upon retiring from
 The Lyrical Age and Its Discontents 185

the army, he asked to work in agriculture but was instead appointed to be

in charge of a large factory, a duty he now discharges with the diligence
of a general. As we soon realize, his specific job bears little relevance, as
long as he fulfills his position as a revolutionary father figure.45 Mother
Xia Shujuan represents the bureaucratic class that is usually referred to as
‘‘state cadre.’’ Now in her mid-forties, she follows a routine work sched-
ule and spends more time with the two children than her husband, who is
always kept busy on the frontline and comes home only once in a while.
In one stage production, the director decided to show Xia Shujuan as a
sickly person in order to make her laxity toward Lin Yusheng more cred-
ible.46 In the revised version, by contrast, she shows no signs of illness,
but she still acts the indulgent mother who is also to learn a hard lesson
in the course of the play.
While the anchoring role given to father Lin Jian may suggest a patri-
archal inclination, the presence of Grandma Xiao seems to counterbal-
ance that impression. As the only spokesperson of the first generation,
Grandma Xiao, a retired worker, has an enormous investment in her
parentless grandson, Xiao Jiye. With considerable self-control and dig-
nity, she is the person to break the news to Jiye that he may lose his leg.
To encourage the stricken young man, she sits him down and narrates the
hardship she went through to raise him, her only grandchild, since 
when the little boy was one year old and his father was murdered by the
Nationalist Guomindang. Incidentally, Jiye’s father was her last son to
die, and Jiye’s mother is never mentioned (). Because of her seniority
and contribution, Grandma Xiao also commands great respect from the
second generation. In the revised version of , she directly intervenes
and cautions Lin Jian to mind the goings-on in his family, complaining
in particular that Xia Shujuan has been less than rigorous in educating the
children (–). Through her concern about the well-being of the third
generation, the task of training revolutionary successors is highlighted
and put on the agenda.
What Grandma Xiao embodies on stage is a firm and gentle ‘‘revolu-
tionary mother,’’ a widely accepted honorific title for older women revo-
lutionaries in China during the s.47 She bestows her maternal care

. In an earlier version of the play, Lin Jian is still a general.

. See Shi Tao, Xia Chun, and Shi Lianxing, ‘‘Conversation Among Three Direc-
tors,’’ Journal of Drama, no.  (October ): –.
. After The Young Generation was produced in Beijing, a reporter from Liter-
186 Chinese Modern

from the distance of a grandmother, which seems to enable her to put

in perspective her love for the child. Gracefully aged and versed in folk-
loric wisdom, she has the greatest stake in ensuring that the revolution-
ary cause, now recounted as a family tradition, will be continued. In the
play, Grandma Xiao is a generalized grandparent, whose gender does not
lead to automatic questioning of patriarchy but on the contrary adds to
it a benign and personable feature.48 Of no small genealogical import is
the fact that she is Xiao Jiye’s paternal grandmother; hence, her surname
Xiao, which has long replaced her own family name. At the same time, as
a close next-door neighbor to the Lins, she participates in their family life
as grandmother to both Lin Yusheng and Lin Lan. In a carefully arranged
plot development, Lin Lan receives her first edification from Grandma
Xiao at the conclusion of act . By the end of act , with little time lapsed
since the previous act, Lin Lan is already making a solemn guarantee to
her father, Lin Jian: ‘‘Do not worry, Father! We will march to the end
along your road!’’ (–).
Lin Lan, as we have witnessed, is the more poetic of the two young
people in the Lin family, although she is also more of a doctrinaire, as
characterized by Lin Yusheng (). She is quick to criticize her brother
and even his girlfriend, and she would sooner share her thoughts with
her father than seek support from her mother. While praised for personi-
fying the ‘‘purity, bravery and high degree of self-disciplining possessed
by young people raised by the Communist education,’’ 49 Lin Lan always
listens to her father as the admiring daughter she is. She presents a con-
tinual semiotic and political taming, since the Yan’an era, of the woman
who had been placed in a subject position by May Fourth liberal human-

ary Gazette interviewed some ‘‘old soldiers’’ (an army general, the vice-president of
the national women’s federation, and the deputy minister of geology) to reflect their
appreciation of the play. Upon entering Mother Yang Zhihua’s home, the reporter
wrote, you would immediately feel that this was a ‘‘revolutionary family.’’ Mother
Yang (widow of the prominent Communist leader and theorist Qu Qiubai) particu-
larly identified with Grandma Xiao in the play; the character onstage ‘‘expresses what
we old people have in mind. We are just like her in life.’’ See Fang Mao, ‘‘Laozhanshi
tan Nianqing de yidai’’ (Old soldiers talk about The young generation), Literary Gazette,
no.  (October ): –.
. Her role foreshadows what is to become a standard grandmother in the ‘‘model
opera’’ Red Lantern of the Cultural Revolution.
. Yao Wenyuan, ‘‘The Song of Youth in the Age of Socialist Revolution,’’ Literary
Gazette, no.  (October ): .
 The Lyrical Age and Its Discontents 187

ism. A central trope for this process is precisely to change her role from
that of a lover to a faithful daughter, often a daughter to the Party.50 In
concert with this identity makeover, Lin Lan must be free of attachments
and have no romantic interests; her male friend Li Rongsheng needs to be
younger and even childlike. Yet nowhere are the patriarchal values more
readily affirmed than in the central action of the play, which amounts to
a communal effort at rescuing Lin Yusheng the prodigal son, who finally
comes to his senses and becomes aware of his obligations as family heir.
His new consciousness acquires a general significance through revelations
about his true identity, which also serve to convey the centrality of family
structure to the symbolic order.
From all appearances, Lin Yusheng takes great pride in his disting-
uished family background. He confidently enjoys the prestige that comes
with his father’s prominence and he knows when to use his family’s in-
fluence and connections to his own benefit. When Xiao Jiye warns him of
sinking into the ‘‘bourgeois quagmire,’’ all Yusheng needs to say is ‘‘Don’t
you scare me. I’m not from a bourgeois family’’ (). In the earlier ver-
sion, he promptly adds, ‘‘Please bear in mind that my family is a revo-
lutionary family,’’ to which Jiye will answer, ‘‘But that honor belongs to
your parents.’’ 51 This exchange, deleted from the  edition, hints at
the different social status between the Lins and the Xiaos: a cadre family
versus a working class family. The modified version, however, prevents
this divisive reading by giving Jiye’s rebuttal a more magnanimous and
more general appeal: ‘‘We are all revolutionary offspring. So we need to
be all the more careful’’ (). The subsequent revelation is not to contra-
dict Jiye’s statement here, for that would truly put in disarray a host of
basic assumptions about the constitution of a revolutionary tradition. On
the contrary, Yusheng is to be confirmed as a revolutionary descendant,
except that he is not the biological son of Lin Jian and Xia Shujuan.
This brings us to the climax of the play, when Lin Yusheng tearfully
reads the farewell letter that his mother wrote him, with her own blood,

. See Meng Yue and Dai Jinhua, Fuchu lishi dibiao: xiandai funü wenxue yanjiu
(Emerging from history: studies in modern women’s literature) (Kaifeng: Henan ren-
min, ), –. For another interesting interpretation, although from a different
perspective, see C. T. Hsia, ‘‘Residual Femininity: Women in Chinese Communist
Fiction,’’ in Chinese Communist Literature, ed. Cyril Birch (New York: Praeger, ),
–.
. Scripts (August ): .
188 Chinese Modern

moments before she was executed by ‘‘the enemy’’ for participating in

a labor movement. This primal scene of sacrifice happened twenty-four
years earlier, when Yusheng (in the earliest production his name meant
‘‘prison-born’’) was three days old. Since then, Lin Jian has taken care
of the young boy, and he and Xia Shujuan decide to tell the truth only
now because Yusheng, in Lin Jian’s opinion, puts to shame more than the
family by forging the medical report. ‘‘You have humiliated the working
class. . . . You failed the Party’s effort in raising you, failed your teach-
ers’ instructions. Worst of all, you let down your deceased parents!’’ ()
With everyone present duly shocked, Lin Jian produces the letter from
a box and orders Yusheng to read it aloud. The stage is at this moment
turned into an emotionalized history class by the public reading.

Lin Yusheng: (Reads aloud ) ‘‘My dear child:

The executioner has raised his murderous knife. Our com-
rades are singing in an impassioned voice, and we are going
to the execution ground very soon. From now on, you will
never see your own parents.
Dear child, I write this letter to you so that you will re-
member: your parents were both workers. . . . You may for-
get your father, you may forget your mother, but you may
never forget that there are still class enemies in the world!
You must fight for the noble ideals of communism! . . .
Time is up. The doors are clanging! The executioner is
here! Farewell, my dear child! We are leaving, but don’t you
forget your roots, not your roots . . .’’ (Toward the letter)
Mother, my own mother! (Hunches over on the table, cry-
ing) () 52

So much had to go into this document for it to be usable in the present

context that its first version was twice as long, until one sensible  gen-
eral in the audience commented that, realistically, the mother would not
have sufficient time to pen an essay once the executioner was in sight.53
Nonetheless, its overt constructedness did not seem to compromise its

. Act  is translated by Kevin O’Connor and Constantine Tung, collected in Lit-
erature of the People’s Republic of China, –. For a full translation of the letter, see
.
. See Shi Tao, Xia Chun, and Shi Lianxing, ‘‘Conversation Among Three Direc-
tors,’’ .
 The Lyrical Age and Its Discontents 189

emotional reverberations or ideological pertinence. It was even published

in the national newspaper Chinese Youth so that readers could digest and
memorize the text.54 Within the play, the guilty conscience activated by
the letter strikes not only Lin Yusheng, who soon after dashes into the
timely thunderstorm that rages outside, but also Lin Jian the adoptive
father. ‘‘My old comrades-in-arms! You sacrificed everything for the revo-
lution, exchanging your blood and life for what we have today. But, what
can I say . . . I let you down. I haven’t brought him up as someone you’d
hoped for’’ (). In fact, everyone at the scene, except Lin Lan, has reason
to feel ashamed: Xia Shujuan, the doting mother, falls silent; Xia Qianru,
the compliant girlfriend, realizes what she must do. The pleading voice
from the past loudly demands redemptive action.
The logic that fulfills itself in this climactic scene is deeply rooted in the
notion of indebtedness, or even in a secularized version of original sin.
Since the ultimate sacrifice was already made in an exchange, gratitude
becomes the only payment that a later generation can offer to the revo-
lutionary martyrs. That sacrifice instills a guilt-ridden self-conception in
the young generation, and it requires a conformist relationship to the
great deeds of the past. In this logic of symbolic exchange, forgetting
the past constitutes an unspeakable betrayal and amounts to denying
one’s own origin and therefore one’s identity. By contrast, the effort to
keep alive a historical memory expresses the desire for continuity and for
making the future comprehensible by connecting it, if not subjecting it,
to the heroic past. A significant portion of the cultural-political energy
in the young People’s Republic was spent, as Dittmer observes, to satisfy
the need of reminding the revolutionary Party of its charismatic origins
and commitment.55
Yet even greater cultural specificity resides in the predominant family
structure, through which the demand for gratitude as a form of ideologi-
cal conformity is made in The Young Generation. The revelation of Lin
Yusheng’s true identity does not at all result in the collapse of his world
or a reversal of fortune, such as a family secret, also revealed against the
background of ominous thunder, would do in a classical tragedy by Cao
Yu in the s. Instead of bringing it to a crisis, the revelation fortifies
the family by turning its symbolic composition into its own reason for

. See Chinese Youth ( October ).

. Dittmer, China’s Continuous Revolution, .
190 Chinese Modern

being and its strength. As the son to both his biological and adoptive par-
ents, who represent the past and the present of the same cause, Yusheng
is doubly obliged to continue the revolution as a family tradition. What
the revelation and its subsequent effects illustrate, however, is not that
the revolutionary cause is one family’s business; rather, it has the life of a
family enterprise, which can be sustained only by the continuing efforts
of generations. This is certainly Lin Jian’s understanding when, after Yu-
sheng runs off to come to his senses in the drenching rain, he asks of
his daughter, Lin Lan: ‘‘Our generation took great pains to seize politi-
cal power and establish a proletarian family enterprise [ jiaye]. . . . How
about our next generation? Will they all continue along our road to its
end?’’ ()
The composition of the Lin family makes intelligible a parallel between
filial piety and the historical mission of the young generation. It also helps
naturalize the family as the symbolic order of the new socialist society,
which now identifies and positions its members in terms of family rela-
tions. What complicates this new symbolic order is that while it models
itself after the extended family, it also discourages the natural family as
the smallest and most exclusive social unit. Thus, the two recombined or
artificial families in the play: the Xiaos and the Lins.56 This type of heavily
denaturalized revolutionary family would find its classical representation
in the ‘‘model opera’’ Hongdeng ji (The red lantern), in which a family
of three generations accommodates three separate surnames. This com-
munal family also embodies an unmistakable utopian effort at creating a
personable revolutionary society.
The flip side of this dominant order, however, is that anyone who does
not belong in the socialized familial structure is viewed as a stranger or

. In one of the earliest articles explicating the significance of The Young Generation,
the author apparently noticed the importance of introducing a new concept and prac-
tice of kinship in the new socialist society, and he concluded that revolution is similar
to a family enterprise and that family education was part of class education. ‘‘Family-
based social relations are historically extinct in our real life, but traditional family and
kinship concepts are far from eliminated. They are still part of the remaining feudalist
ideology. For us today, children are not only the next generation of the family, but also
of the revolution. Children and their parents are not only family members, but also
comrades in the continual development of the revolutionary cause.’’ See Wen Ping, ‘‘A
Thought-provoking Theme: A Reading of the Play The Young Generation,’’ Journal of
Drama, no.  (August ): .
 The Lyrical Age and Its Discontents 191

even an automatic suspect. Lin Lan’s young friend Li Rongsheng, for ex-
ample, is a problematic ‘‘social youth’’ until he meets Lin Jian, becomes
domesticated, and addresses Xia Shujuan as ‘‘aunt’’ (bomu). While Lin
Lan successfully introduces Li Rongsheng to her family, her brother Lin
Yusheng never manages to bring home, or onstage, Young Wu, a dubious
friend of bad influence and a different class origin.57 In fact, friendship
now has to be reinvented because it often presents a lateral association
that undermines the family-centered vertical social structure.58 Thanks to
the new value of familiarity, Lin Yusheng’s girlfriend, Xia Qianru, can-
not be a total stranger but happens to be the niece of his foster mother.
What the lyrical age envisions for itself is a society that does not need or
acknowledge strangers. It is an enlarged family to which any unfamiliar
element or presence evokes the horror of a quagmire, of invading virus
and infectious diseases. Yet to those who accept and participate in the
symbolic order, as Lin Yusheng describes with much gratitude before re-
turning to the prospecting team, ‘‘our society is truly a big warm family.
If someone falls, numerous comradely hands will reach out from all di-
rections. Now all comrades have extended their hands to me. . . . Please
wait and see’’ (). The dramatic conflict is resolved only when he begins
to heed his duty and indebtedness to the ‘‘big warm family.’’

Climax: The Ecstasy of Staged Life

The final scene of The Young Generation creates an arousing display of mo-
tion and youthful anticipation. Visionary stage directions suggest how to
achieve the desired effect:

(One after another, trucks pass in the near background, carrying young
people on their way to life; waves of passionate singing come through.)
(People enthusiastically bid farewell to one another.)
.....

. According to Lin Lan, Young Wu is a parasite who comes from a wealthy family
and does not work (). Apparently his family used to own a large business and now
lives on interest since its property was nationalized in the mid-s.
. For an earlier study of this topic, see Ezra F. Vogel, ‘‘From Friendship to
Comradeship: The Change in Personal Relations in China,’’ China Quarterly, no. 
(January-March ): –.
 192 Chinese Modern

. Stage design, Nianqing de yidai (The young generation) (). From Xiji bao (Journal
of drama) (Beijing, November ).

(The young people [onstage] wave good-bye to the audience; trucks

continue to pass nearby; singing arises; further away trains are moving into
the distance.) ()

In the midst of this landscape of socialist modernization and a crescendo

of commotion, Lin Lan the practicing poet delivers, ‘‘with utmost pas-
sion,’’ an officious parting speech to her parents, Grandma Xiao, Brother
Jiye, and, most important, the theater audience. Just as Lin Yusheng on-
stage is compelled to be grateful to a caring socialist society of a family,
so the audience of ‘‘classmates and comrades’’ must participate in the
communal salutation to the revolutionary youth. Here the desire to en-
gage and educate the audience finds its most explicit expression. From the
perspective of genre conventions, this ending serves to reinforce public
space and launches the dramatic action beyond the limited area of the Lin
family household (figure ). One way to take stock of the political agenda
of the play is indeed to see it as actively eliminating a viable living room
drama.59 A gradual disappearance of enclosed domestic space agrees well
with the central ideological message that the play wants to convey. In one

. See Raymond Williams, ‘‘Theatre as a Political Forum,’’ in his The Politics of
Modernism: Against the New Conformists, ed. with intro. by Tony Pinkney (London:
Verso, ), –, for a succinct analysis of the formal and intellectual crisis within
the naturalist convention of focusing on the domestic bourgeois household in Euro-
pean drama at the turn of the century.
 The Lyrical Age and Its Discontents 193

actual staging by the Beijing People’s Art Theater, the set designer found
it necessary to create a new environment for the final scene, where, with
the help of a rotating stage, a panoramic view of the cityscape of Shanghai
came to light and replaced the background of an encircling wall.60
The theatrical dynamic at the final moment is complex because it in-
vites audience participation but deliberately precludes any possible inter-
action. By looking in the direction of the audience and addressing it as a
collectivity, actors onstage are no longer part of a safely distanced spec-
tacle for observation. On the contrary, they actively reach out and seek
to elevate the audience, while dominating the interplay by prescribing
audience reaction. This interpolating operation is consciously carried out
throughout the play. In one director’s rendering, when Lin Lan vows to
continue the cause of her father’s generation, instead of verbalizing her
intention, she comes forward from the rear of the stage to join Grandma
Xiao and her father. Once their visual dominance is established, ‘‘the three
of them direct their excited, grave but earnest gaze toward the audience,
and slowly move it up and beyond. . . .’’ 61 The same guiding gaze, in fact,
does more than pin the audience in a morally and politically passive posi-
tion. Since it is no longer a personalized look, it also ricochets, as it were,
to impose self-examination on the actors themselves. The experience of
playing Lin Lan both in the theater and on the screen, actress Cao Lei re-
ported, ‘‘was not only two years of learning from her, but also two years
of following the example of progressive people in real life and of studying
advanced ideas.’’ 62 At the Chinese Children’s Art Theater, the director re-
counted, the entire staff assigned to produce The Young Generation was
seized by a growing anxiety when they realized that they could not suc-
cessfully enact the play unless they first developed ‘‘ideas and sentiments
as well as qualities that are characteristic of our times.’’ 63 For them, too,

. See Liu Lu, ‘‘Tan Nianqing de yidai bujing sheji’’ (On the set design of The young
generation), Journal of Drama, no.  (November ): –. A different design,
by the Chinese Children’s Art Theater, combined the original two scenes and created
one setting that relocates the site of action to a more public place—the intermediary
area connecting the Lin and Xiao households. See Xu Xiaozhong, ‘‘Directorial Notes,’’
Journal of Drama, no.  (February ): .
. Xu Xiaozhong, ‘‘Directorial Notes,’’ .
. Cao Lei, ‘‘Zai he Lin Lan xiangchu de rizi li’’ (In the days spent with Lin Lan),
Dazhong dianying (Popular cinema), nos. – (August-September ): .
. See Xu Xiaozhong, ‘‘Directorial Notes,’’ .
194 Chinese Modern

participation in the play was a training session, professional as well as

ideological.
What we witness here is a telling instance of collectivized cultural pro-
duction in the lyrical age. The theatrical dimension of The Young Genera-
tion revealed the centrality of the stage to the logic of the popular imagi-
nation of this visionary period. It was an age when the stage was expected
to be a truthful mirror of life, and life itself was celebrated as a grand
stage for purposeful action. Staging became the most expedient and most
effective art form through which to enact national aspiration and gen-
erate revolutionary enthusiasm. Not surprisingly, it was at the height of
this lyrical period that theater rapidly superseded the novel, cinema, and
even poetry in its status as socialist mass culture.64
In a  article, ‘‘Masters in Life, Masters on Stage,’’ a well-known
actress-cum-writer marveled at the continuity between contemporary life
and the stage. A parade of metaphors helped Huang Zongying illustrate
the importance of theater to the unfolding of a ‘‘socialist cultural revolu-
tion.’’ The stage ‘‘is the fighting ground between new ideas and old forces;
it is the platform for a singing contest to express communist ideals; it is
the forum for a heated debate between the proletarian and the bourgeois
world views; it is the fatal battleground of class struggle.’’ 65 A literary
theoretician also sought to explain, from a slightly different angle, the
relevance of the ‘‘seething life’’ represented on stage during –:

In this condition, drama is more than art work for people to appreciate,
and theater is more than a place to entertain. These plays, because they pro-
foundly reflect the revolutionary spirit of our time and portray the intense
struggle in our historical period, become a mirror that helps people under-
stand life in our times, a searchlight that illuminates the road for people
to advance on, a textbook for life that guides people in how to engage in
struggle.66

. For an illuminating discussion of the obsession with the ‘‘stage’’ metaphor in
modern Chinese political culture, see Joseph Levenson, Revolution and Cosmopolitan-
ism: The Western Stage and the Chinese Stages (Berkeley: University of California Press,
).
. Huang Zongying, ‘‘Shenghuo de zhuren, wutai de zhuren: dayan xiandai jumu
suixiang’’ (Masters in life, masters on stage: thoughts on mass productions of modern
drama), Literary Gazette, no.  (January ): –.
. Feng Mu, ‘‘Wutai shang feiteng de shenghuo: cong jinnian lai huaju chuangzuo
 The Lyrical Age and Its Discontents 195

In one case, theater is viewed as restaging, although in a more in-

tense dramatic form, the confrontations in real life; in another, the stage
is called upon to project greater clarity onto reality. Both understand-
ings emphasize the crystallizing function of public theater rather than its
cathartic or entertaining aspects. The mass appeal of theater lies in the
prevailing metaphor that ‘‘all the world is a stage,’’ which encourages us
all to dream of, or even participate in, a simplified and yet highly purpose-
ful existence. It is the politicized theater that encapsulates a deep utopian
desire for global transformation. For theater best expresses the impulse
to sublimate life into an artistic experience; in the final analysis, it defies
experiential time by staging a spatial and theatrical spectacle. The beauty
of such theatrical spectacle is also the violence with which it recasts a
mundane and normalized life. Hence, the arousing theatrics of all revo-
lutionary enterprises. However, while ecstasy stimulated by staged life
may ignite explosive youthful energy, the need to sustain such energy and
passion will in the end present a sobering challenge, even the spectacle’s
undoing. If a staged spectacle lets us achieve a supreme joy at the expense
of temporal duration, we also will seek, when a state of excitement leads
to fatigue and pensiveness, comfort and self-reassurance through narra-
tives, the quintessential art form of temporality. The resurgence of nar-
rativity in the wake of theatricality, therefore, may be yet another sign of
the arrival of a postrevolutionary age.

de chengjiu tanqi’’ (The seething life on stage: remarks on the achievements of theater
in recent years), Literary Gazette, no.  (February ): .
6
Residual Modernism:
Narratives of the Self in the s

The rhetoric of postmodernism, perhaps because it is largely amorphous

and self-contradictory, holds a peculiar, almost uncanny, fascination for
the cultural imaginary in China since the late s. Its thematized trope
of discontinuity seems to capture and ensure a general relief, a com-
forting sense of finally having left behind a nightmarish period of his-
tory, together with all the collective political aspirations and idealism that
marked a tumultuous era of revolution. The celebrated postmodern play-
fulness and difference provide justification for a cynical detachment and
at the same time promises various new forms of engagement in the field
of discursive and representational practices. The persistent discrediting of
notions such as ‘‘totality’’ and ‘‘teleology’’ that one finds in the postmod-
ern theoretical discourse also serves to delegitimize the existing political
reality of authoritarianism. Finally, postmodernism, with its ambiguous
suggestion of historical periodization, readily meets the need of an emer-
gent cultural logic when it at once conjoins a postrevolutionary (perhaps
postsocialist as well) local space with a postmodern world (or simply the
United States) and allows for a creative and enfranchising mockery of the
revolutionary heritage. In this light, we can say it is the fairly uncertain
feeling of being ‘‘post’’ rather than specifically ‘‘postmodern’’ that delivers
some comfort as well as a new space for the imagination.

Postmodernism as Foreclosure

This conflation of a postrevolutionary ethos with postmodernist dis-

course has its additional historical relevance because of the introduction
of a ‘‘socialist market economy.’’ The peculiar synchronic juxtaposition
of different modes of production (represented in such various forms of
ownership as state-run, cooperative, joint-venture, and private single-
household businesses) only adds to a general disorientation and skepti-
 Residual Modernism 197

cism. While the authoritarian political order in existence is continually

challenged by a new social reality, the growing market economy also
meets considerable resistance from the ideological holdover of a previous
revolutionary age. Both socialism and capitalism, as two narrativizable
historical choices, are questioned and discredited. This situation can be
characterized as postmodern, as I have argued elsewhere, not only be-
cause it easily confirms the disappearance of all master narratives, but also
because the term ‘‘postmodernism’’ best describes an intensified histori-
cal predicament where the persistence of modernity is perceived as such
with dismaying clarity.1 Expressive of a cultural logic that recognizes a
peculiar situation where it is not possible either to resist or fully accept
modernity, the postmodernist discourse in contemporary China thus be-
comes the symptom of a historic anxiety that is, nevertheless, foreclosed
as such.
But the ironic turn of history is that postmodernism, because of the
contradictions it indicates and articulates, invokes rather than cancels or
supersedes modernism in this particular juncture. The unusual juxtaposi-
tion of different modes of production, in fact, seems to be precisely what
Fredric Jameson thinks to be the typical condition of possibility for the
emergence of a modernist aesthetics and politics in turn-of-the-century
Europe. In commenting on the striking ‘‘coexistence of distinct moments
of history’’ in Kafka’s fiction—in particular, The Trial—Jameson observes
that it is ‘‘the peculiar overlap of future and past, in this case, the re-
sistance of archaic feudal structures to irresistible modernizing tenden-
cies—of tendential organization and the residual survival of the not yet
‘modern’ in some other sense—that is the condition of possibility for
high modernism as such.’’ ‘‘What follows paradoxically as a consequence,’’
Jameson continues, ‘‘is that in that case the postmodern must be char-
acterized as a situation in which the survival, the residue, the holdover,
the archaic, has finally been swept away without a trace. In the post-

. See my essay ‘‘The Function of New Theory: What Does It Mean to Talk About
Postmodernism in China?’’ in Politics, Ideology and Literary Discourse in Modern China:
Theoretical Interventions and Cultural Critique, ed. Liu Kang and Xiaobing Tang (Dur-
ham, N.C.: Duke University Press, ), –. For a more recent critique of post-
modernist discourse in China, see Jing Wang, ‘‘The Pseudoproposition of ‘Chinese
Postmodernism’: Ge Fei and the Experimental Showcase,’’ in her High Culture Fever:
Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China (Berkeley: University of California
Press, ), –.
198 Chinese Modern

modern, then, the past itself has disappeared (along with the well-known
‘sense of the past’ or historicity and collective memory).’’ 2 This is, of
course, a hypothetical consequence. Whether or not the triumph of the
‘‘postmodern’’ can be so thoroughgoing is very much open to debate,
and, as Jameson suggests, to regard postmodernism as a complete and
memory-free system would buy into the very ideology of the postmod-
ernist celebration of the death of history. The residual traces of modern-
ism in the postmodernist discourse are instead a constant and must be
seen ‘‘in another light, less as anachronisms than as necessary failures that
inscribe the particular postmodern project back into its context, while at
the same time reopening the question of the modern itself for reexami-
nation.’’ 3 Those traces of modernism would only reveal the condition of
modernity, of which the discourse of postmodernism is yet another ideo-
logical representation.
Clearly for Jameson the ‘‘residuality of the modern’’ can work as a
powerful strategy to contextualize the postmodernist theoretical dis-
course. The notion of ‘‘residual modernism,’’ it seems to me, can also be
a very fruitful concept in discussing some contemporary Chinese literary
production, especially the avant-garde fiction that is very often cheered
as outright ‘‘postmodern.’’ In discussing the ‘‘cultural challenge’’ posed
by the experimental writings in the mid-s, for instance, critic Zhang
Yiwu specifically uses the concept ‘‘postmodernist’’ to characterize the
ideological and historical underpinnings of the new form of writing.
Faced with the new challenges, ‘‘the two discourses of Reality and Moder-
nity’’ that have sustained modern Chinese literature find themselves com-
ing to a rapid demise. The narratives of the experimental fiction express
a ‘‘postmodern’’ consciousness and ‘‘terminate in their own fashion the
sacred tradition of May Fourth humanism, while at the same time making
impossible the fantasy entertained by intellectuals about their values and
positions.’’ 4 But this ‘‘end of idealism’’ that the author believes to be the
characteristic of ‘‘postmodernity’’ seems still to implicate much of the

. Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham,

N.C.: Duke University Press, ), . See ‘‘Notes Toward a Theory of the Modern’’
in ‘‘Secondary Elaborations’’ for a discussion of the relationship between modernity,
modernization, and modernism, –.
. Jameson, Postmodernism, xvi.
. Zhang Yiwu, ‘‘Lixiang zhuyi de zhongjie’’ (The end of idealism), Beijing wenxue
(Beijing literature) (April ): .
 Residual Modernism 199

modernist anxiety and despair. In fact, the narrator ‘‘I’’ of most experi-
mental fiction he describes is identifiably a modernist hero: it is a narrator
without a privileged position, having no control over events, and even
less control over the ceaseless movement of language itself.
I shall not argue over who has a better definition of either ‘‘modernism’’
or ‘‘postmodernism’’ here, for both terms are constantly being redefined
and expanded, anyway. What I intend to describe by the concept of ‘‘re-
sidual modernism’’ is not so much an outmoded literary production or
some kind of revival as it is a conscious appropriation of a certain codified
modernism. The creators of avant-garde fiction in late twentieth-century
China are far removed, spatially and temporally, from the so-called high
modernism of the West, and the conditions of possibility for either are
also significantly different. Yet in the ‘‘residual modernism’’ that I discuss
below there is an obvious appropriation of, if not careful subscription to,
what Raymond Williams critically called the ‘‘ideology of modernism.’’
This ideology expresses itself as a selective reading of modern European
literature that applauds some writers over others ‘‘for their denaturaliz-
ing of language, their break with the allegedly prior view that language is
either a clear, transparent glass or a mirror, and for making abruptly ap-
parent in the very texture of their narratives the problematic status of the
author and his authority.’’ 5 For Williams, this ideological canonization of
modernism has a close relationship to the conservative post-World War II
settlement in the West and owes a great deal to a rapid depoliticizing ap-
propriation of modernist techniques by consumer capitalism. With this
development, modernism has lost its critical thrust along with its ‘‘anti-
bourgeois stance.’’
But in residual modernism, this very ‘‘ideology of modernism’’ is re-
stored its critical and oppositional potency, and its inner contradictions
are revealed rather than concealed or smoothed out. Residual modern-
ism in China, furthermore, appears to be not merely a transplantation of
modernist techniques, but also a resumption of a modernist ethos and
even modernist themes, only in much more intensified and self-conscious
forms. This added intensity, however, is paradoxically what ultimately
may lead to a postmodern foreclosure of anxiety, because it is an intensity
experienced as already circumscribed and understood. In other words,
. Raymond Williams, ‘‘When Was Modernism?’’ in his The Politics of Modernism:
Against the New Conformists, ed. with intro. by Tony Pinkney (London: Verso, ),
.
200 Chinese Modern

even if a classical modernist narrative (what Williams called an ‘‘intense,

singular narrative of unsettlement, homelessness, solitude and impover-
ished independence’’) is restaged, it implicitly conveys a sense of relief.
This relief is what I will call a postmodernist sensibility of residual mod-
ernism, or we can say that the unconscious of residual modernism strives
for precisely such masochistic relief. In the avant-garde writings of the
mid-s, especially in some narratives of the self by Yu Hua and Su
Tong, we can certainly see this residual modernism at work.

The Problematic of Experience

Yu Hua’s first major publication was ‘‘Shibasui chumen yuanxing’’ (On

the road at age eighteen, ),6 a short story about a young man who sets
out to see and experience the real world. The young man, as the first per-
son narrator, relates the events of one late afternoon when he was walking
on a mountain road, ‘‘like a boat floating on the sea.’’ He could not find
an inn, and, as evening fell, he had to hitchhike, getting a ride on a truck
that was heading in the same direction from which he had just come. The
truck was carrying a load of apples, and when it broke down along the
way, it was robbed and demolished by a crowd of peasants and children.
The young man, too, was badly beaten while trying to stop the mob. A
highly allegorical story, it is a narrative about initiation and reconciliation
that adroitly blends obvious narrative elements of traditional bildungs-
roman, Kafkaesque absurdity with a sense of humor, and the theme of
random yet methodical violence that would soon develop into one of the
author’s preoccupying motifs. Since the story is narrated as past personal
experience, it also acquires a quietly detached tone that makes the events
it describes all the more graphic and perplexing.
‘‘On the Road at Age Eighteen’’ was immediately recognized as a sig-

. Yu Hua, ‘‘Shibasui chumen yuanxing,’’ Beijing Literature (January ); col-

lected in Yu Hua, Shibasui chumen yuanxing (On the road at age eighteen) (Taipei:
Yuanliu, ), –. Although translations of passages in this chapter are my own,
a complete English translation is available in Yu Hua, The Past and the Punishments,
trans. Andrew F. Jones (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, ), –. In the
following discussion, references to page numbers are given in parentheses in the text,
with the first number referring to the Yuanliu edition and the second to Jones’s trans-
lation.
 Residual Modernism 201

nificant literary work because it introduced, said the critics, a new mode
of writing in contemporary Chinese literature. In his preface to Yu Hua’s
first collection, literary critic Li Tuo, who was directly responsible for the
success of the young writer, observes that ‘‘Yu Hua’s fiction completely
shatters our age-old conventional understanding of the relationship be-
tween literature and reality, language and the objective world.’’ 7 Follow-
ing Roland Barthes’s early defensive apology for literary modernism, Li
Tuo gives Yu Hua and other young experimental writers a modernist
reading and enthusiastically celebrates the belated arrival of a ‘‘writerly
literature.’’ This author-oriented literary production has ‘‘as its prior pur-
pose to disrupt a given dominant language order, so as not only to prob-
lematize all existing literary and cultural codings but also to turn the act
of writing into the exciting and risky process of creating a new universe.’’
The emergence of this writerly literature, according to Li Tuo, formed an
irresistible ‘‘avalanche’’ and signaled another ‘‘emancipation of language’’
that would contribute to a rewriting of modern Chinese literary history.8
Although he does not specifically use the term ‘‘modernist,’’ Li Tuo
shows an excitement over Yu Hua’s fiction that comes largely from the
recognition of a modernist politics of language at work. The critic is
also sharply aware of a possible historical discrepancy. He points out that
even if such a fascination with the newly discovered nonreferentiality and
self-sufficiency of language has lost its freshness in the West, it is pro-
foundly revolutionary in China. The ‘‘ideology of modernism’’ that Wil-
liams characterizes is thus ideologized once again, and its residual critical
impulse reenergized and inscribed back. At this point it also becomes evi-
dent that beneath this obvious transferability of modernist techniques,
‘‘residual modernism’’ suggests a recognized recurrence of the condition
of possibility that nurtured Western modernism in the first place. If, as
Walter Benjamin argued, Baudelaire wrote for an age in which modern
technologies of information brought about the ‘‘increasing atrophy of ex-
perience,’’ and communicability of experience became a lost value, and if
all of Proust’s heroic literary efforts (by means of which the nineteenth
century was finally made ‘‘ripe for memories’’) were concentrated on re-

. Li Tuo, ‘‘Xu: xuebeng hechu?’’ (Preface: Where will the avalanche go?), On the
Road at Age Eighteen, . Incidentally, this piece was originally published as a headline
article in Wenlun bao (Journal of literary criticism) on  June , one day after the
Tiananmen incident.
. Ibid., –.
202 Chinese Modern

capturing past experience, modernism in the West then had as one of

its obsessions the problem or impossibility of real experience.9 Language
was consequently problematized either because print mass media caused
language to be devalued or because traditional linguistic habits had lost
their relevance and impact. In other words, the modernist politics of lan-
guage gained currency because a certain form of experience made it neces-
sary to question language and reveal its unreliability to the extent that the
writer had to construct his or her own world in and through language.
Denaturalized language finally became symptomatic of an existing social
order that was radically disintegrated and delegitimized.
If this is the case, Yu Hua’s story offers a convenient point of depar-
ture for analyzing how a ‘‘residual modernism’’ helps to grasp a historical
experience that constantly brings to crisis all given traditions and expec-
tations. To assert that ‘‘On the Road at Age Eighteen’’ has a distinct mod-
ernist imagination is more than a theoretical conjecture, since at the time
of its composition its author was enchanted by the writings of Kafka,
which he had previously come across by chance.10 As in the abstractly
absurd world of K or the inarticulate Gregor of ‘‘Metamorphosis,’’ the
sequence of events Yu Hua’s young hero experiences has a disturbing
simplicity. Here, the narrative unfolds to belie a certain paradigm of ex-
perience and to parallel the emergence of a new self-consciousness. The
force of the narrative lies in its problematizing the very category of ex-
perience. In the beginning, the protagonist, who is very proud of the few
brownish hairs poking out on his chin, finds himself at home on the road
by himself. ‘‘All the mountains and clouds. They reminded me of people
I knew. So I called them aloud by their nicknames.’’ As he looks for an
inn for the night, he realizes that no one knows what lies ahead. They all
tell him to ‘‘go over and have a look.’’ The journey soon turns into a try-
ing process from which the protagonist will have to emerge with a new
self-conception and a new relationship to the outside world. The imagi-
nary continuity between him and other people will break down and be
displaced.
In a sense, the story can be read as a miniature of the bildungsroman

. See Benjamin’s essays on Baudelaire, Proust, and Leskov in Illuminations, trans.

Harry Zohn, ed. with intro. by Hannah Arendt (New York.: Schochen Books, ),
esp. –, –.
. Zhu Wei, ‘‘Guanyu Yu Hua’’ (About Yu Hua), On the Road at Age Eighteen, .
 Residual Modernism 203

in which the young hero or ‘‘youth,’’ as Franco Moretti shows, sets off

to experience and explore at once the two fundamentally constitutive
aspects of modernity: mobility and interiority. Ever since Wilhelm Meis-
ters Wanderjahre, ‘‘ ‘apprenticeship’ is no longer the slow and predict-
able progress towards one’s father’s work, but rather an uncertain ex-
ploration of social space, which the nineteenth century—through travel
and adventure, wandering and getting lost, ‘Boheme’ and ‘parvenir’—will
underline countless times.’’ 11 In Europe, the bildungsroman has been in-
deed a ‘‘symbolic form’’ of modernity, through which one of the constant
contradictions of modern bourgeois culture—individual autonomy and
social integration—is represented and given different articulations. The
central character of the drama of the bildungsroman is invariably youth.
Not surprisingly, in Chinese fiction of the late s, especially in narra-
tives by Su Tong and Yu Hua, critics have also noticed a strong ‘‘youth
consciousness’’ that corresponds to a pervasive restlessness in society at
large. ‘‘What is noteworthy is that this ‘youth mentality’ to a certain de-
gree echoes a general mood in contemporary China. As the entire society
slips out of paternalistic protection and unity, the sense of family is dis-
appearing, and people are obliged to secure a position of their own. In
addition, an intensified market economy starts to make society insensitive
toward cultural values.’’ 12
The peculiarity about Yu Hua’s story is that it is a narrative that forcibly
brings together classical plots of the European bildungsroman that were
developed over a good half of the nineteenth century through different
political and social formations. In analyzing the ending of Balzac’s Lost
Illusions as a sample of the bildungsroman at its third dialectical stage,
Moretti points out that, by this point, ‘‘the narrative of youth is no longer
the symbolic form able to ‘humanize’ the social structure, as in Wilhelm

. Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture
(London: Verso, ), . The introduction, ‘‘The Bildungsroman as Symbolic Form,’’
is a succinct essay that deals not only with modernity but with the historical condition
of modernism.
. Wang Zheng and Xiao Hua, ‘‘Hubu de qingnian yishi: yu Su Tong youguan de
huo wuguan de’’ (Complementary youth consciousness: things having or not having
to do with Su Tong), Dushu (Reading) (July-August ): –. This brief article
is a brilliant study of the group of young writers represented by Su Tong and Yu Hua.
The authors seem to go directly to the heart of the matter when they talk about a
‘‘youth consciousness’’ that reminds one of modernism ().
204 Chinese Modern

Meister, nor, as in The Red and the Black, to question its cultural legiti-
macy. It only acts to magnify the indifferent and inhuman vigor of the
modern world, which it reconstructs—as if it were an autopsy—from the
wounds inflicted upon the individual.’’ 13 In ‘‘On the Road at Age Eigh-
teen,’’ we witness, albeit metaphorically, all three of these distinct mo-
ments transformed and juxtaposed into one extremely seminal narrative
by means of its rich symbolism. The ‘‘apprenticeship’’ motif appears at
the very end of the story, as a moment of the past that has by now been
fully disproved. The hero, after the utterly unintelligible ‘‘catastrophe,’’
lies down inside the badly damaged truck and recalls one sunny, mild
morning when his father prepared a red backpack for him and told him
that he should get to know the outside world. ‘‘So I put the beautiful red
backpack on my back. Father patted me once on the back of my head,
just like patting a pony on its rump. At this I dashed out of my home
with great joy and started to run happily, like a greatly excited horse’’
(; ). The presence of the father in the story is not so much recalled
as it is undermined and reduced. Throughout the narrative, the oedipal
attachment is strenuously repressed or simply forgotten (or are these two
mental activities one and the same, anyway?) until the last moment when
it returns only to be disavowed. The real world of experience is discon-
tinuous with the ‘‘outside world’’ that the father evoked in the beginning,
which is now carefully postponed to the last lines of the story. The figure
of the father stands for a deceptive promise, a beautiful lie that has to be
exposed as such. Recalling his father and that distant ‘‘sunny, mild morn-
ing’’ brings some comfort to the hero, either because he now knows that
he, by reason of his own (psychological and physical) experience, has ir-
revocably entered the real world, or because he realizes the world of his
father is no more than a fantasy. When the red backpack, prepared by the
father and a strong symbol of the revolutionary heritage, is taken away
effortlessly by the mysterious and faithless truck driver, the idealism of
the father is debunked through the young hero’s direct experience of be-
trayal and violence.14

. Moretti, The Way of the World, .

. The red backpack seems to be a favorite symbol of a bygone revolutionary
age. In Su Tong’s novella Yijiu sansi nian de taowang (Nineteen thirty-four escapes),
the young protagonist in search of history also carries a red backpack. For an En-
glish translation, see Michael Duke, trans., Raise the Red Lantern (New York: William
Morrow, ), –.
 Residual Modernism 205

If the red backpack embodies the ideological baggage of the father’s

generation, it also constitutes an identity of the young protagonist.When
the backpack is taken away, for a moment he feels that he has nothing
left. ‘‘It was completely dark by now, and there was absolutely no one
around, except for the truck and myself, both every inch wounded’’ (;
). His experience of violence cuts short the course of development pre-
scribed in the classical bildungsroman, where the individual is expected to
be properly socialized at the conclusion of the narrative, either through
a happy marriage or in the form of a fully mature personality. Violence
now imposes upon the hero a new self-conception, a realization that be-
tween him and the world (in this case darkness and other people) there
is an unsettling relationship of rupture and discontinuity. To resist vio-
lence, to stand against the objectifying power of betrayal and sheer force
in the real world, the hero has to assert himself through discovering his
own world, namely, his subjective interiority. ‘‘On the Road at Age Eigh-
teen,’’ therefore, is a parable about the painful birth of self-consciousness
in a postrevolutionary era when all existing languages and meaning sys-
tems are shown to be incapable of explaining and containing individual
experiences. Experience itself now needs restructuring.
The process through which the new self-consciousness appropriates in-
teriority as its necessary form is closely mirrored and externalized in the
unfortunate truck in the story that constantly breaks down. If the inn
the hero initially looks for signifies a purposeful end (although simulta-
neously a very practical purpose), the truck that ends up taking him in
the opposite direction completely displaces all notions of destination and
necessity. It in fact introduces sheer contingency. ‘‘Although the truck
was going to where I had just come from, I couldn’t care less about direc-
tion. I needed an inn for now. Since there was no inn, I needed a truck,
and the truck was right in front of me’’ (; ). Once the truck is repaired
and he and the driver start enjoying each other’s company, neither of
them appears to care much about where they are going. ‘‘It now mattered
little to us what lay ahead. As long as the truck was moving, we could
always go over and have a look’’ (; ). At this point, the meaning and
purpose of the journey is grasped (or lost?) in the process of traveling,
and the moving truck is made home, both literally and metaphorically.
But this acquired carefreeness that is associated with the truck soon
comes to an end when it once again breaks down. Then, in an oddly
casual manner, the driver announces that the truck is beyond repair, and
206 Chinese Modern

our young hero again has to worry about finding an inn. Yet what is to
happen next makes irrelevant his brief enjoyment of mobility and his new
understanding of purposefulness. Violence intervenes to short-circuit his
potentially adventurous process of finding a home, and it forestalls the
happy ending of a conventional bildungsroman narrative.15 First, five
people on bicycles with big baskets attached on either side come down a
hill. When they discover a truckload of apples, they start unloading the
truck. Taken aback, the young man steps over to stop the robbery and is
punched in the nose, ‘‘blood gushing out like sad tears.’’ Meanwhile, the
truck driver appears indifferent to what is going on and takes pleasure in
looking at the young man’s broken nose. Then more people on bicycles
arrive carrying big baskets, and finally even a hand tractor operator par-
ticipates in this ‘‘catastrophe.’’ The protagonist tries once more to con-
front the crowd and is beaten, kicked, and pelted with apples. ‘‘I didn’t
even have the strength to be angry. All I could do was watch this scene
with growing indignation. I was angriest with the truck driver’’ (; ).
The ‘‘catastrophe’’ 16 that he witnesses has a most ominous atmosphere
about it. It is not merely a brutal violation of all social relations and in-
stitutions; it is also violence made absolute because of the absence of any
significant articulation. Throughout the incident, not a single meaning-
ful word is uttered except for the hero’s angry and futile protests. Even
the physical pain he sustains is mostly inflicted by the ‘‘numerous fists
and feet’’ that apparently belong to no one particular person. Thus, the
faceless crowd more than dispossesses the truck driver of his property;
it deprives the event itself of meaning and intelligibility. A catastrophic
experience such as this one becomes almost beyond rationalization when
meaning is neither revealed nor enriched by means of violence, but, on
the contrary, meaning is reduced or even canceled. Rather than suggest-

. In commenting on the classical bildungsroman, Benjamin writes: ‘‘By integrat-

ing the social process with the development of a person, it bestows the most fragile
justification on the order determining it. The legitimacy it provides stands in direct
opposition to reality. Particularly in the Bildungsroman, it is this inadequacy that is
actualized.’’ From ‘‘The Storyteller, Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,’’ Illu-
minations, . In this light, Yu Hua’s refusal to represent such an integration suggests
the recognized discontinuity between the social process and personal development.
. It is significant that the phrase ‘‘haojie’’ is used here, a term that conventionally
refers to the Cultural Revolution of the s. At the lexical level, a certain historical
referentiality is built into the narrative.
 Residual Modernism 207

ing a liberating revolution, the robbery has the full implication of an in-
human war.17 ‘‘I wanted to scream, but when I opened my mouth, no
sound emerged’’ (; ).
When communication is violently suspended by an absence of reason
or, shall we say, by civilized barbarism, and when violence reduces the
human subject to his body and his body alone, the subject has to with-
draw and observe the goings-on from a distrustful distance. It is a de-
tached ‘‘gaze’’ that treats others as objects. The objectifying ‘‘gaze’’ that
the young man now directs toward things and people around him has
been forced upon him because he is the object of violence in the first
place. ‘‘I saw the apples on the ground being picked up. . . . I saw them re-
move window panes from the truck. . . . I saw the ground being swept all
clean. . . . All I could do was look, because I had no strength left even to
be angry’’ (; –). Finally, he watches as the truck driver jumps onto
the hand tractor, carrying the young man’s red backpack, his sole posses-
sion. ‘‘I was hungry and cold, and I was left with nothing.’’ Victimized as
well as brutalized, the young man now sees his own condition mirrored
in another victim, the demolished truck. Here we have some of the most
gripping lines of the story:

I sat there for a long time before I struggled to get up slowly. It was very
hard for me because every move caused intense pain all over my body. Yet
I still managed to get up. I limped over to the truck. It looked extremely
miserable. It lay there with wounds all over it, and then I knew that I myself
had wounds all over.
It was completely dark by now, and there was absolutely no one around,
except for the truck and myself, both every inch wounded. I looked at it
with great sadness; it looked back at me with great sadness. I reached out
to feel it. It was icy cold. (; )

. For Benjamin, catastrophic experience seems directly related to the increasing
incommunicability of experience. In the wake of World War I, ‘‘was it not notice-
able at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent—not
richer, but poorer in communicable experience? . . . For never has experience been
contradicted more thoroughly than strategic experience by tactical warfare, economic
experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by
those in power.’’ From ‘‘The Storyteller,’’ Illuminations, . We need to keep in mind
that it was not until after World War I that modernism in the West gained its full swing
and voiced an ‘‘age of anxiety.’’
208 Chinese Modern

In the damaged truck he sees not only the miserable consequence of

violence, but also a shocking revelation. The truck provides a mirror
image of his own wounded condition, and he is given a chance to see
himself as a victim, as an object upon which senseless violence has been
unleashed. In other words, in looking at the truck, the hero sees him-
self as others would see him and realizes his own susceptibility to being
treated in the same manner as a truck can be. It is this awareness of his
own objectifiability, of the revealed truth of his own vulnerability, that
gives rise to a sympathetic identification between himself and the truck.
At the same time, by locating in the silent truck an external symbol for
his new self-conception, the young man at once acquires and articulates
his subjectivity as a site of resistance against objectification. In the post-
catastrophic moment, such a discourse of subjective interiority seems to
supply a most consoling answer to the disturbing phenomena of human
weakness and irrational violence, both revealed only at a historical mo-
ment of danger. It was in direct response to the horrifying spectacle of the
great French Revolution, it seems necessary to recall, that Hegel devel-
oped his philosophy of subjectivity and the notion of Innerlichkeit. Both
echoing Hegel’s postrevolutionary reflection and condemning the ‘‘catas-
trophe’’ of the Cultural Revolution (–), Liu Zaifu in the s
proposed to study a fulfilling ‘‘subjectivity of literature’’ in opposition to
an institutionalized inhumanism.18
The metaphor of ‘‘subjectivity as a site of resistance against objectifica-
tion’’ is a spatial one, and interiority, too, is conceivable only insofar as

. See Liu Zaifu lunwen xuan (Selection of essays by Liu Zaifu) (Hong Kong:
Dadi, ). I discuss this point in my essay on ‘‘The Function of New Theory.’’ At
the same moment that Liu Zaifu’s theory was evoking vehement debates and con-
troversy, narratives of the self became such a dominant phenomenon in literary pro-
duction that some critics began feeling uneasy. See, for instance, Huang Hao, ‘‘Jiaose
jinzhang: yige shuode taiduo tailei de ‘wo’—xin shiqi diyi rencheng xiaoshuo de jiti
pibei’’ (An intense role: An ‘I’ that is exhausted from speaking too much—collective
fatigue of the first-person fiction in the new period,’’ Zuojia wenxue yuekan (Writer’s
literary monthly), no.  (March ): –. Huang Hao gives some interesting
statistics in this article. Some  percent of contemporary fiction is narrated by an
indefatigable ‘‘I.’’ In this context, Lukács’s accusation of a ‘‘carnival of interiorized fe-
tishism’’ in Western modernism appears at once understandable and yet misleading.
Both Huang Hao’s critical essay and Lukács’s general denunciation of modernism fail
to comprehend a literary discourse that, while trying to overcome its historical condi-
tion, reveals some fundamental contradictions determining its own production.
 Residual Modernism 209

it bears an oppositional relationship to that which constitutes exteriority.

In the story we find precisely such a spatial restructuring. Realizing that
he is getting icy cold, just like the truck, the young man gets inside the
truck and lies down. ‘‘I smelled the gas that had come out. It smelled the
same as the blood that had come out of my body. . . . I felt that even
though the truck was wounded, its heart was still healthy and warm. I
knew that my heart was also healthy and warm. I had been looking for
an inn, and who would have thought that the inn should be here in you’’
(–; –). The hero is finally home again, a home he finds and cre-
ates for himself and which now serves as a constant reminder—by means
of its location and condition—of the absence of any social integration.
He has set out hoping to know ‘‘the outside world’’ but ends up by know-
ing himself better. By finally identifying himself with the truck, which
has replaced the inn, the young hero now possesses his own space and
is enabled to articulate his redefined identity on the one hand and dis-
own the mystifying heritage of his father on the other. His entire journey,
therefore, comes through as a modernist voyage of self-discovery that is
inseparable from a disintegrating world of experience.
More than a metaphor of the birth of subjectivity in Chinese fiction of
the s, ‘‘On the Road at Age Eighteen’’ also marks a turning point in
Yu Hua’s own development. From this moment on, it is observed, ‘‘Yu
Hua recognized his new self from a previous obscurity, and his fiction
acquired its own independent life for the first time.’’ 19 This new iden-
tity that the author found for his fictional world is a productive one that
expresses itself in continuous narrational experimentation and thematic
variations. The subject matter of methodical cruelty and violence, by no
means bereft of its historical reference and implicit social judgment, is
masterfully developed and enriched in a series of stories best represented
by ‘‘Xianshi yizhong’’ (One kind of reality). The critical interest in prob-
lematizing language and representation is pursued in narratives such as
‘‘Shishi ru yan’’ (This world of clouds), and a structurally perfect ‘‘Gu-
dian aiqing’’ (Classical love) parodies traditional narrative patterns and
cultural myths.20

. Zhu Wei, ‘‘About Yu Hua,’’ . See – for a summary of Yu Hua’s writings
from  through . Here, Zhu Wei believes that Yu Hua has finished a three-stage
leap, a process of gradually discovering his own narrative voice and his own imagined
world of absolute reality.
. ‘‘Xianshi yizhong,’’ ‘‘Shishi ru yan,’’ and ‘‘Gudian aiqing,’’ collected, respectively,
210 Chinese Modern

The central organizing principle of Yu Hua’s writing nevertheless re-

mains the same: an unrelenting critique of our everyday experience. Re-
viewing his own literary production in a  preface to one of his col-
lections, Yu Hua summarizes that his major intellectual concern has been
to reveal a multidimensional and contradictory reality that remains ob-
scured and simplified, not only by our everyday life and commonsensical
order, but also by our language conventions. Thus, violence and catas-
trophe have their thematic value because they expose a chaotic reality
that is the suppressed truth of our seemingly well-ordered existence. On
the level of language, too, Yu Hua believes in constantly challenging
common sense because the ‘‘indeterminate narrative language’’ sought by
him focuses on concrete experience, whereas the ‘‘fixed language of the
masses’’ only conveys judgment. ‘‘The language of the masses presents us
with a world that is an incessant repetition. For that reason, my effort at
finding a new language has as its aim to reveal to my friends and readers a
world that has not yet been repeated.’’ 21 The commonsensical world that
Yu Hua wishes to derail and the fixed everyday language of the masses he
finds so oppressive both belong to a sociohistorical reality against which
the writer has to assert his identity with an increasing emphasis. The criti-
cal stance he takes against everyday life and the world of ‘‘ordinary admin-
istration’’ becomes available partly because of his self-conscious subscrip-
tion to the aesthetics and political ideology in the modernist tradition of
Kafka, Joyce, Robbe-Grillet, Faulkner, and Kawabata Yasunari.22 In Yu
Hua, we find one of the defining characteristics of ‘‘residual modernism’’:
the ideology of modernism, as both a theoretical complex and a mode of
literary production, now proves to be a fundamentally historicizing dis-
course because it reveals the condition of modernity and strips it of any
possible euphoria. Through residual modernism, therefore, the modern-
ist imperative for the New as well as the modernist fascination with the
self are retrospectively shown to be deeply rooted in a recognized mo-
ment of incompleteness where all forms of social practice and existence

in Yu Hua’s On the Road at Age Eighteen and Shishi ru yan (This world of clouds)
(Taipei: Yuanliu, ).
. ‘‘Zuozhe xu: xuwei de zuopin’’ (Preface by the author: hypocritical artworks),
This World of Clouds, . One important aspect of residual modernism is its theoretical
sophistication.
. Yu Hua specifically mentions all these writers in the essay ‘‘Hypocritical Art-
works’’ when he talks about the formal tradition of fiction. ‘‘Preface by the Author,’’ .
 Residual Modernism 211

suddenly exhibit a peculiar residuality because their contradictory juxta-

position makes coherent experience at once desirable and unattainable.
If the high modernism of Kafka and his contemporaries is, in Jameson’s
words, ‘‘characterized by a situation of incomplete modernization,’’ 23 then
in residual modernism the features and foreseeable consequences of the
unfinished project of modernity are grasped simultaneously. This lack of
ambiguity in historical vision will only make residual modernism all the
more conscious of its own residuality as an oppositional presence.

The Unreal Urban Space

‘‘On the Road at Age Eighteen’’ can be read as a metaphor for the gene-
sis of residual modernism at a distinct historical moment of incomplete
modernization. In this light, it becomes significant that different modes
of transportation are carefully inscribed in the narrative. The truck, repre-
senting the most advanced technology in comparison with the bicycle
and the hand tractor, is simply unable to fulfill its function and is system-
atically torn apart. The fate of the truck thus becomes emblematic of the
antagonistic situation from which modernity struggles to emerge. It also
resolutely dispels any nostalgic illusion about an idyllic premodern har-
mony. Thus, the violence, to which the truck as well as the protagonist
are subjected, both symbolizes the crisis that such a coexistence is likely
to incur and explains the agonizing necessity of residual modernism. This
historicizing reading, however, does not make violence any more mean-
ingful or acceptable to the individual; on the contrary, violence is revealed
to be the precondition of meaning and to have its own history. This sepa-
ration of a narrativizable collective movement from individual experience
once again testifies to the defining condition of modernity.24

. Jameson, Postmodernism, .

. In another short story, ‘‘Siwang xüshu’’ (Narrative of death), Yu Hua further ex-
plores the historical significance of violence when the first-person narrator there tells
of how ‘‘I,’’ a truck driver, was murdered by a family of peasants with various farm-
ing instruments (a glittering scythe, a hoe, and a shovel) after an accident in which ‘‘I’’
killed their beautiful daughter. In the very end, with ‘‘my’’ body systematically pierced
and cut up, ‘‘my blood ran about. My blood looked like the roots of a one-hundred-
year-old tree that have surfaced above the ground. Then I died.’’ In On the Road at Age
Eighteen, –.
212 Chinese Modern

Yet Yu Hua’s persistent interest in violence as an expression of a his-

torical moment of incompleteness unexpectedly brings him face-to-face
with another aspect of modernity. Ordinary, everyday urban life is now
examined in Yijiubaliu nian (; ), an epic-spirited novella about
the disturbing reappearance of a violent past in the figure of a demented
teacher. Taken from his family one night during the Cultural Revolution,
and now a madman recognized by no one, the former teacher, now a
ghost of violence, haunts a small, peaceful town and systematically inflicts
on himself all the atrocious ancient forms of physical punishment that
he used to study as a hobby. The novella  is another highly symbolic
story that treats violence as a disruptive return of the repressed. The town
is crowded, inhabited by people who are eager to frequent movie the-
aters, cafés, and various product expos, the sole purpose of which, com-
ments the narrator, ‘‘is to make people forget, to make people feel happy
at this very moment.’’ It is a postrevolutionary urban landscape where a
mindless ‘‘they’’ count on fashions and consumption to help them leave
behind a painful past.

The catastrophe that occurred more than ten years ago now appears to be
a mere fleeting cloud, and the slogans painted on the walls are completely
covered up by repeated whitewashing. They see no trace of the past when
they walk on the streets, they see only the present. Now there are lots of ex-
cited people walking on the streets, lots of bicyclists ringing their bells, and
lots of cars blowing up lots of dust. Now there is a van with big speakers
slowly moving along, the speakers loudly promoting birth control and ad-
vising people on how to avoid pregnancy. Now there is another similar van
also slowly moving along, loudly reminding people of the misery caused
by traffic accidents.25

Into this complacently regular and uneventful everyday life enters the
story’s protagonist, a limping madman who takes pleasure in stabbing,
amputating, and castrating himself publicly in the street. More like a
ghost from the past than a real human being, he is conveniently ignored
and will finally realize that this world needs desperately to forget its past:

. Yijiubaliu nian () in On the Road at Age Eighteen, –; . The second
page number here refers to Andrew F. Jones’s English translation of the novella in The
Past and the Punishments, –. The phrase for ‘‘catastrophe’’ here is again ‘‘haojie,’’
the same as in ‘‘On the Road at Age Eighteen.’’
 Residual Modernism 213

‘‘He saw people walking around in the street over there. He looked at
them as if looking at a stage from afar. They appeared on the stage, talked
there and made all kinds of gestures. He was not among them; there was
something in between. They were they, and he was he’’ (; ). The
ghost of violence is eventually expelled and everyday life happily resumes
its normal course.
Despite its explicitly accusatory message (the relationship between hu-
man cruelty and civilization is revealed as a given), the narrative about the
return of the repressed identifies for the author another source of frus-
tration—regulated and repressive everyday life. The significance of Yu
Hua’s  lies in the fact that it depicts a peculiar postcatastrophic culture
that strains to displace its revolutionary memory and desire by locating
gratification, very often an impoverished kind, in the realm of consump-
tion and mass culture (specifically represented in the novella by Marlboro
cigarettes, Nestlé’s Coffee, and romances by the Taiwanese writer Qiong
Yao). While the Cultural Revolution as a massive social movement still
haunts the sensitive writer with the enormous passion and horror that it
generated, the complacency of a new consumer culture repels him and
strikes him as unbearably boring. Thus, in another more complex and
experimental novella, ‘‘Ciwen xiangei shaonü Yang Liu’’ (This story is
dedicated to a girl named Yang Liu), the narrator, now a first-person ‘‘I,’’
opens the carefully organized story with an ambivalent condemnation of
‘‘bourgeois’’ practicality: ‘‘For a long time, I had been living a bourgeois
life. The place where I lived was called Smoke, and my apartment was a
one-story house by the river. The structure of the house was an unimagi-
native rectangle, which suggested how simple and unambiguous my life
was.’’ 26
The story, with parallel but intentionally disorienting repetition and
heavy symbolism, tells how this ‘‘unimaginative’’ existence is first chal-
lenged by the complexity of real experience and then transformed by the
insertion of an interiority that, symbolized by the image of the girl Yang
Liu, can be at once libidinal desire and historical consciousness. The girl
is both self and other, both imagination and memory, and her arrival at
the ‘‘inner heart’’ of the narrator makes him restless because she exposes

. Ciwen xiangei shaonü Yang Liu in This World of Clouds, . Translated as ‘‘This
Story Is For Willow’’ by Denis C. Mair, it is collected in China’s Avant-Garde Fiction,
ed. Jing Wang (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, ), –.
214 Chinese Modern

an ‘‘absence’’ in his life (, ). The girl appears when he, as usual, is
roaming the streets aimlessly at night, looking at all the curtained win-
dows, greatly perplexed by the inimical presence of other people. The
urban landscape is deeply unsettling because ‘‘I,’’ the narrator, is at once
drawn to it and has to resist it. It is a space that becomes increasingly flat
and homogeneous, from which history is in danger of disappearing once
and for all.
This rising urban space irresistibly captures the imagination of Yu Hua
and his generation and presents them with a troubling prospect. For
them the new forms of experience made possible by the city are con-
tinually contradicted and made unreal by other spaces and times. It is
a space that has to be constantly confronted and examined in terms of
the rural and the historical; traces of both are ineradicable as a reminder
of the situation of incomplete modernization. This characteristic skepti-
cism toward city life is distinct not only in Yu Hua, but it is also readily
recognizable in the writings of Ge Fei and Su Tong. In Ge Fei’s stories,
we witness a constant moving back and forth between two spaces—the
country and the city. Most often it is this movement that creates tension
and generates his narratives. As a result, the typical setting for his stories
is some unspecified liminal site.27 Tension between these two conflicting
spaces also seems to permeate the fictional world of Su Tong, who, how-
ever, tries meticulously to keep them separate. Thus, on the one hand,
he produces such notable works as Yijiu sansi nian de taowang (Nineteen
thirty-four escapes) and Qiqie chengqun (Wives and concubines) which
adroitly deal with historical events and interrogate our understanding of
the past,28 while, on the other hand, he continually expresses his anxiety
about modern urban life in stories like ‘‘Pingjing ru shui’’ (As serene as
still water) and ‘‘Nihao, yangfengren’’ (Hello, my beekeeper). These last

. For an insightful discussion of Ge Fei’s oeuvre, see Zhang Xudong’s essay ‘‘Ge
Fei yu dangdai wenxue zhong de jige muti’’ (Ge Fei and some main themes in contem-
porary literature), Jintian (Today), no.  (): –. This essay’s expanded English
version appears in Xudong Zhang, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms: Cultural
Fever, Avant-Garde Fiction, and the New Chinese Cinema (Durham, N.C.: Duke Uni-
versity Press, ), –.
. Meng Yue’s essay ‘‘Su Tong de ‘jiashi’ yu ‘lishi’ xiezuo’’ (The writing of ‘family
genealogy’ and ‘history’ by Su Tong), in Today, no.  (): –, offers an excellent
analysis of this treatment of the past. See chap. , ‘‘The Mirror of History and History
as Spectacle.’’
 Residual Modernism 215

two stories are unmistakably set in a big city, and both are narratives told
in the first-person. In them, we find a clearer and more self-conscious
representation of the metropolitan space from the point of view of dis-
satisfied and rebellious youth. Here, one of the cultural forms of moder-
nity will receive critical examination, and residual modernism finally con-
fronts the space of the city. Once again, it becomes helpful to refer to
Raymond Williams, who, in a memorable passage, described the mod-
ernist as a hero in revolt against the new experience of mass media in
turn-of-the-century metropolitan cities:

The experience of visual and linguistic strangeness, the broken narrative

of the journey and its inevitable accompaniment of transient encounters
with characters whose self-presentation was bafflingly unfamiliar, raised to
the level of universal myth this intense, singular narrative of unsettlement,
homelessness, solitude and impoverished independence: the lonely writer
gazing down on the unknowable city from his shabby apartment.29

Narrating the Modern

Williams’s depiction of an ideal-type modernist writer in either Paris or

New York seems to be a perfect summary of the ethos in Su Tong’s stories
about the city. The subject matter of his ‘‘Hello, My Beekeeper’’ is youth
and its conflict with the outside world, just as was the case in ‘‘On the
Road at Age Eighteen.’’ Different from the landscape of open nature in Yu
Hua’s short story (although it is a nature radically transformed through
violence), the space in which Su Tong’s young hero has his adventures is
the city. But between these two stories there are striking structural simi-
larities and narrational continuities. At the beginning of both stories is
the moment of ‘‘me’’ entering a new space. The ‘‘I’’ that now moves, ‘‘just
like a fish,’’ into the city at a wintry dusk in Su Tong’s story can nearly
be taken as the ‘‘I’’ who left home and experienced a ‘‘catastrophe’’ on
the road at age eighteen. By the end of ‘‘Hello, My Beekeeper’’ there is
also a moment of relief when the young hero finds consolation in the fact
that he belongs nowhere in particular and that his existence is already a
purpose and a meaning in and of itself. In both narratives, mobility and

. Williams, ‘‘When Was Modernism?’’ .

216 Chinese Modern

interiority are in a sense put on trial and finally affirmed as valuable as-
pects of the experience of the modern. ‘‘Things are always like this. You
constantly have to leave one place for another. You can’t think of another
way of living. I have to determine my next destination while on the train.
I will never go home, because I’ve sworn not to.’’ 30
‘‘Hello, My Beekeeper’’ is about a young college dropout’s adventures
in a big, rapidly modernizing city. The fictive city Nanjin that he ap-
proaches at the beginning of the story is the ninth of a series of cities
that he has visited, intending to study each of them for his project in a
new discipline of ‘‘urban studies.’’ On his way to the city he encounters
a mysterious middle-aged beekeeper in a dreamlike field of wildflowers
who tells him to stay in a certain Peace Hotel in Nanjin and wait for the
beekeeper’s return. Preoccupied by the beekeeper’s promise, the young
man turns his stay in the city into a prolonged Kafkaesque search, during
which he experiences a wide spectrum of ‘‘transient encounters,’’ such as
a hapless sexual incident, prostitution, the criminal underground, death,
even romance. The Peace Hotel provides a perfect site for novelistic nar-
ration, an ideal meeting place for all sorts of characters (including a dis-
gruntled ‘‘old revolutionary’’ complaining of inadequate housing, a fund-
raiser for a literary journal whose business card bears four unrelated titles,
and a wealthy Cantonese caught with a prostitute who subsequently buys
himself out of trouble), while the city as a whole constitutes an enormous
impersonal space that the protagonist explores as a Baudelairian flâneur
(‘‘My profession was to ramble through all the fbing cities’’), which
he maps and remaps through his experience and movement. Life in the
city turns out to be such a disintegrative experience that he soon realizes
the need to constantly construct a new identity for himself. Yet his initial
fascination is a feeling of freedom.

I was now used to roaming the streets, which seemed to be a major method
of investigating the city. I put my hands in the warmth-deprived pockets
of my coat and strolled aimlessly along the streets, seeing myself reflected
in shop windows and transformed into a member of this city. My serious
face and leisurely pace had lost all the characteristics of my small home-
town. The result of this transformation I called urbanization, which meant
success in fleeing my family. ()

. ‘‘Nihao, yangfengren,’’ Beijing Literature (April ): . In the following dis-
cussion, references to page numbers are given in parentheses in the text.
 Residual Modernism 217

A major attraction of the city for this young drifter is its offering of
a different social landscape from the small town that he finds extremely
‘‘boring and eventless’’ and where his older brother suffers from severe
depression. The ‘‘silly-looking’’ small town is a part of the young man’s
identity that he desperately wants to shed, as if ‘‘out of habit.’’ The city
also frustrates him, even makes him lonely, but it is never boring, and it
always exceeds his expectations. Thus, his experience in the city becomes
preferable not because of all the pitiful individuals he encounters, but be-
cause of the very possibility of meeting them in the first place. This new
experience of the self—as a nameless observer of a big-city crowd—now
generates and defines the narrative and at the same time is critically ques-
tioned.
Here we see a significant wedge driven between the narrative form of
‘‘Hello, My Beekeeper’’ and its express content or plot. The plot of the
story is the young man’s persistent waiting and searching for the absent
beekeeper. The search constitutes a meaningful event for the young man,
because to some extent it organizes his experience of the city. The bee-
keeper, whose laughter reminds the narrator of his depressed brother and
who attracts him with a ‘‘weird superhuman aura’’ (), belongs neither
to the small town nor to the big city. He embodies harmony with Nature
(he travels to wherever the flowers are), and his unconventional lifestyle
expresses an aura of authenticity that is absent from life in both the small
town and the city. He is referred to simply as ‘‘Beekeeper,’’ which in Chi-
nese sounds like ‘‘One who cultivates craziness.’’ If we take the small town
as the place of traditional, premodern repetitiveness and drudgery (where
the hero’s father manually stirs a huge vat of green-blue dye day after day)
and the city as a disorienting field of modern dynamism and disconti-
nuity, the beekeeper’s world of naturalness then exposes either space as
an impossible site for authentic and integrated experience.
Yet the space inhabited by the beekeeper is an imagined one that is in-
voked as a critique of both stifling stagnation and rapid urbanization.
It is again an interiorized space where the self is able to enjoy its fulfill-
ment, just as Nature is still imagined to possess a utopian wholesomeness.
Obviously, the traceless beekeeper and his fantasy land belong to a form
of experience that is valuable because it is already recognized as absent.
Just as with the discourse of subjectivity, the utopian impulse embodied
by the beekeeper reveals the ideological engagement of residual modern-
ism in a historical moment of incomplete modernization. (In this light, I
218 Chinese Modern

would think it misleading to accentuate a ‘‘postmodernist’’ profile in Su

Tong.) 31 The young hero’s search for the beekeeper, therefore, becomes
a symbolic act of escape that, nevertheless, constitutes his identity. His
obsession with the search, shared by the young first-person narrator of
Nineteen Thirty-four Escapes, finally leads to a dramatic episode in which a
fast-talking girl expresses her love and tells him that he himself is a roman-
tic beekeeper. Afterward, he has a dream that can be read as an expression
of the utopian longing of residual modernism.

I dreamt the beekeeper was walking forward and I was following him. We
were crossing a field of purple flowers in the spring, while an ox-drawn cart
loaded with bee hives was creaking by on the dirt road. . . . I found the
place the beekeeper led me through very familiar, but I had no way to tell
where it was. It looked like the outskirts of the town of Nijiang, or my
small hometown. It also looked like nowhere but a distant new world of
mystery. (–)

When the protagonist voices his conflicting feelings about the country-
side, he articulates an essential ambivalence in residual modernism. As
an ideologized discourse about the condensed experience of modernity,
residual modernism is profoundly ambivalent about the process of mod-
ernization because it is recognized as at the same time necessary and re-
pressive, emancipatory and dystopian. Residual modernism is a discourse
that is acutely aware of its contradictory impulses. ‘‘You cannot imagine
how intensely I felt both ambivalent and empty. You cannot understand
the contradiction I felt because I hated the country village [xiangcun] as
much as I was moved by pastoral scenery [xiangye]’’ ().
If, however, the hero’s search for identity is the explicit purpose and
organizing plot of ‘‘Hello, My Beekeeper,’’ the process of the search,
namely his experience in the city, assumes a narrative form that reveals
further ambiguities. The process becomes significant and even enjoyable
insofar as it is a form of experience that generates incessant narration. The
whole sequence of events in the story is organized not so much by a tem-
poral progression as by the young man’s continuous spatial movement
across the city. Along a horizontal plane of juxtaposition are numerous

. See Wang Zheng and Xiao Hua, ‘‘Complementary Youth Consciousness,’’ .
Here they raise the concept of ‘‘postmodernism’’ as a possible category for under-
standing this group of young writers.
 Residual Modernism 219

episodes and mini-narratives that are independent and discontinuous of

each other. So the three inserted subtitles for three different series of nar-
ratives in the text (Peace Hotel Guests Number , , and ) serve to break
as much as produce the illusion of a coherent narration. Each series, in
addition, begins with the same question, supposedly addressed to the
new hotel guest by the narrator: ‘‘Have you seen a beekeeper?’’ Each
time the narrator ‘‘I’’ is either misunderstood or simply ignored. What
follows is invariably digression and interruption, fragmented experience
that refuses to lend itself to any focused communication or storytelling.
Here we can view the thematic plot of the story, namely the hero’s deter-
mined search for identity, as what Benjamin described as the ‘‘shock de-
fense’’ that strenuously tries to fend off various stimuli from life in the city
and keeps the integrity of a narratable experience. It is, however, those
stimuli, those uncontrollable and fleeting digressions and interruptions,
that move the narrative forward and become what is lived through. The
form of the narrative reflects the impossibility of achieving meaningful
experience, together with all its linkages and complexities.
Thus, the narrative form assumed by the young man’s futile search cor-
responds to the structure of his consciousness to the extent that it repeats
the frustrated effort to organize his experiences in a modern metropolis.
Since city life turns out to be most susceptible to narration—in Balzac’s
Paris of early capitalism, there was an irrepressible need for what Franco
Moretti calls ‘‘sheer narration’’ 32—the narrator feels his self-identity at
once threatened by and given a certain form in this explosive narrativity.
On the one hand, he has to contain this sheer narration by subjecting it
to a framework of intelligibility, but on the other it is through narration,
through recounting other guests’ stories, that he realizes his own value
and identity—his difference from others. In a sense, narration now occurs
not so much to communicate experience as to present itself as a diver-
gent form of experience that still needs further organizing. It becomes
a self-propelled mechanism that the narrator as a subject has to halt in
order to form not merely a possible relation with the world but also a
self-definition. Thus, the narrative form of ‘‘Hello, My Beekeeper’’ has its
own historical significance because its irresistible and disruptive energy
is symptomatic of the difficult situation that the agitated modern subject
confronts.

. Moretti, The Way of the World, .

220 Chinese Modern

The sheer narration that the young man wishes to contain and resist is
best represented by newspapers, in which he finds not only an overabun-
dance of unrelated happenings, but also a devaluation of experience itself.
Coincidentally, the mysterious beekeeper inscribes his directions for the
young man on a piece of newspaper (the Nanjin Evening News), thus forc-
ing the young man to read the clipping over and over again in the hope
of finding some revelation. There he finds a fragmented sentence about a
court decision in a theft case, a fatal accident, and a report about an 
patient (–). This newspaper clipping appears early in the narrative,
preceding the young man’s actual encounter with the city. Thus, the three
unrelated events that are juxtaposed randomly (in the format of a news-
paper) predetermine the form of his experience in the city and have a
paradigmatic value for his own narrative. The dominant pattern of urban
life, in other words, is revealed in the story to be that of a torn newspaper,
with fragmented narratives that have neither beginnings nor endings. (In
Su Tong’s ‘‘As Serene as Still Water,’’ we find an episode composed en-
tirely of newspaper headlines, ranging from complaints about unequal
opportunities for young people, to secrets of longevity to the arrest of
a certain burglar-murderer.) Toward the end, another clipping from the
Nanjin Evening News is mysteriously delivered to the young man’s hotel
room with a message from the beekeeper. It is an indecipherable message
consisting of a drawing and a poem, neither of them making much sense.
But still it is a message in the beekeeper’s familiar tadpole-shaped hand-
writing, and it is determinedly not narration. The message negates the
newspaper and gathers its force from the fact that it is inscribed over the
narration that saturates modern urban life. The significance of these two
messages handwritten on a piece of newspaper is parallel to that of the
beekeeper himself. Together, they call forth an imaginative eccentricity
that comments on the shrinkage of experience in modernity.
While the strategy with which to confront this new explosive narra-
tivity is to stubbornly pose the same question, ‘‘Have you seen a bee-
keeper?’’ the embattled subject also has to imagine a gratifying ‘‘new
world of mystery’’ to transcend the immediate environment. On two
separate but related levels, the first-person narrator experiences these two
critical impulses: on the level of the narrative, he organizes his stories to
show their irrelevance to his thematic inquiry (or rather the very rele-
vancy of his search for meaning), and on the level of content he depicts
 Residual Modernism 221

the city as a dystopian space devoid of genuine experience. The mod-

ernizing city is shown to generate narration but not genuine narrative.
The ‘‘sensation of the modern age may be had,’’ Benjamin concludes his
discussion of Baudelaire’s vision of Paris in the nineteenth century, at a
dear price: ‘‘the disintegration of the aura in the experience of the shock.’’
Baudelaire is the first poet to have understood and portrayed modernity
in his poetic imagination, because he has given ‘‘the weight of an experi-
ence’’ to something lived through from moment to moment, thus con-
senting to the disintegration of the aura.33 For Baudelaire, a narratable
and potentially complete experience was irreparably disconnected from
the immediate and often involuntary sensation that one continuously had
when mingling with the city crowd. In Su Tong’s narratives of the city
we also find such a disconnection. The sensation of the modern age, as in
Baudelaire, is enjoyed with great apprehension, and the aura that breathes
historical authenticity remains a utopian vision rather than a complete
dissipation. The utopian moment in residual modernism, in other words,
is a historical necessity precisely because the incompleteness of a historical
process is fully grasped, and, more importantly, its inevitable completion
is perceived as being in need of critical demystification.
This brings us back to the question of history, which directs our at-
tention to the content of the narrative. ‘‘Content’’ here should not be
regarded as an enfeebled category; rather, it corresponds to the histori-
cal significance of the narrative form. In a sense the content even at-
tempts to explain and narrativize the emergence of sheer narration itself.
At first glance, the modernizing city seems to have blotted out history
completely. Absent from both the urban space and its symbol—the news-
paper world of shock value—is any trace of the previous revolutionary
era, except for one moment when the young hero, upon first entering the
city, comes across a used shoe lying on the road at an intersection. It is
a Liberation shoe that was popular in the early s, now all by itself,
yet not without some arrogance (). After that, the lonely shoe never re-
appears. Its subsequent disappearance suggests the extent to which mem-
ory of a revolutionary past has been successfully erased. It also dramatizes
the bankruptcy of a revolutionary heritage that the young hero finds use-
less and impossible to identify with. Yet its presence as a spectral reality

. Benjamin, ‘‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’’ Illuminations, .

222 Chinese Modern

greatly arouses the young man’s curiosity, and he decides to study the
abandoned shoe as the first ‘‘strange phenomenon’’ of the city.
Each of the three Peace Hotel guests whom the protagonist meets sub-
sequently represents a distinct historical moment, and together they con-
tribute to a narrative continuity. The ‘‘old revolutionary,’’ who fought
both the Japanese and the Nationalists, still carries wounds from war-
time but now finds himself unfairly ignored. He travels to the city to file
complaints and seek justice. His presence, although nearly anachronistic,
bitterly accuses a revolutionary tradition of shamelessly betraying its indi-
vidual participants. The fund-raiser, on the other hand, carries a business
portfolio laden with six different identification cards and is desperately
searching for a new profession. Not having physical wounds from a war,
he is also without any real identity because he is one of those functionar-
ies of the previous regime who are now dislocated by a new social reality.
In contrast to this meticulous and timid cadre-turned-businessman, the
parvenu Cantonese understands how money works and takes pride in
his new wealth. A conspicuous consumer of new status-symbol goods
(Pepsi, Kent cigarettes, and French perfume), he is a contemporary of the
narrator and represents the emergent organizing principle of city life—
monetary exchange. He is most disagreeable to the young hero because
of his mercantile vulgarity and hedonistic self-indulgence. He also carica-
tures a moment that has completely suppressed the revolutionary past.
These three Peace Hotel guests, with none of whom the young hero can
readily identify, combine to announce the ineluctable arrival of a post-
revolutionary age, in which both memory and forgetting appear equally
disturbing, because both enable the narrator to recognize a tremendous
discontinuity. Thus, his only strategy, or his search for self-identity, has
to be an act of escape, an affirmation of his freedom not to be engaged,
a solitary freedom from. Therefore, we see him constantly on the run.
He runs from a friendship that becomes exploitative, from an institution
that helps people find jobs, and even from possible romance. Finally, the
young man has to run from the city itself.
‘‘Hello, My Beekeeper’’ is one of the first and most successful narra-
tives in Chinese literature of the s to approach the city as a growing
field of cultural and experiential disconnections. The tension between the
narrative form and the ideological content suggests the intensity of that
discontinuity. The experience of restless youth and its final escape seem
 Residual Modernism 223

to imply a suspicion of the emerging urban culture. The young hero in

the end finds it necessary to keep moving. But there is no nostalgia for
either the revolutionary past or life in a boring small town, even though
we may detect some disquieting resemblance between the deserted Lib-
eration shoe at the beginning and the lonely young man who stands by
the street watching people hurrying home. ‘‘It was the last winter day of
, on a street in one city’’ (). This one-line paragraph describes an
oppositional loneliness that is interiorized and remains self-consciously
on the margin. Both the young man who is determined not to reconcile
himself to the city and the recalcitrant Liberation shoe are suddenly re-
vealed to be symbols of separate residual moments. But it is impossible to
invoke the Liberation shoe and what it stands for as a demystifying force
precisely because of its lack of interiority. In the increasingly oppressive
modernizing urban landscape, youth has to be in possession of both mo-
bility and interiority in order not to vanish or be consumed altogether.
Here we find the relevance of the concept of ‘‘residual modernism.’’ Yu
Hua and Su Tong are representative residual modernists because for them
incomplete modernization demands a creative recycling of the ideology
of modernism in order for this historical moment to be representable and
represented critically. Through the lenses of modernism, they reexamine
the renewed onset of the modern, both its myths and demystifications.
This resorting to modernism as canonized techniques and codified ideol-
ogy hardly suggests an impoverished imagination or inadequate histori-
cal consciousness on the part of the practitioners of residual modernism.
On the contrary, by means of a resituated recycling, residual modernists
show an even firmer grasp of the enduring dilemmas and contradictions
that underlie the condition of modernity. They also succeed in retro-
actively revealing that European modernism itself was a discourse of spec-
trality in the first place. In other words, modernism became an available
ideology precisely at the moment when historical experience in Europe
was fraught with residual forms and possibilities (even the Future uncan-
nily appeared reminiscent of a past imagination). Residual modernism
therefore is a more intense and, if possible, purer modernism. This greater
intensity that defines residual modernism does not necessarily mean that
it will surpass modernism in its ingenuity or achievement. Rather, it in-
dicates the persistence of an agonizing incompleteness. It also highlights
the contradiction of a historical moment in which modernity, while still
224 Chinese Modern

struggling to emerge, is already perceived to be a positively residual, if

not archaic, form of experience. At a time when postmodernism is be-
lieved to have bidden a final farewell to the anxiety of the modern, the
vitality of residual modernism forces us to again confront modernity and
all its unresolved complexities.
7
The Mirror of History and History as Spectacle:
Reflections on Xiao Ye and Su Tong

Thus the life of someone whose existence has somewhat preceded our
own encloses in its particularity the very tension of History, its division.
History is hysterical: it is constituted only if we consider it, only if we
look at it—and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it.
—Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

The two novellas I wish to discuss here—Xiao Ye’s Ganlan zhen  (The
town of Olive in ) () 1 and Su Tong’s Yijiu sansi nian de tao-
wang (Nineteen thirty-four escapes) () 2—share something in com-
mon more than is suggested by their two similar titles. In both, a specific
year locates a historical moment in the past, and the two different mo-
ments of history invoked here both precede the experience of the two re-
spective authors. For Xiao Ye (Hsiao Yeh) (- ), the prolific and popu-
lar Taiwan novelist and scriptwriter (Kongbu fenzi [The terrorizer], ),
the year  is just as remote and unapproachable as the year  is to
Su Tong (- ), who began publishing in the late s in China and has
produced a series of stories about the bygone generation of his parents
and grandparents. As the first-person narrator in Xiao Ye’s story tells us,
‘‘ was the Republican year . I was not yet born then; my parents
had not even met each other’’ (). The same awareness of the unbridge-

. Xiao Ye, Ganlan zhen , collected in his Wudi haixing (Legless starfish) (Taipei:
Yuanliu, ), –.
. Su Tong, Yijiu sansi nian de taowang, collected in his Qiqie chengqun (Wives and
concubines) (Taipei: Yuanliu, ), –. Translations of passages in this chapter are
my own. For a complete English translation, which I consulted, see Michael Duke,
trans., Raise the Red Lantern (New York: William Morrow, ), –. In the fol-
lowing discussion, references to page numbers are given in parentheses, with the first
number referring to the Chinese edition and the second to Duke’s translation.
226 Chinese Modern

able distance from a particular historical moment is articulated with equal

force by Su Tong’s first-person narrator in Nineteen Thirty-four Escapes:
‘‘For a period of time my history book was covered with the year .
The year  radiated strong shafts of purple light that circumscribed my
thinking. It was a remote past moment that did not exist anymore, and it
remained true for me like the circles of an ancient tree. I could sit upon it
and regard the events and changes that took place in ’’ (; ).
The affinity between these two stories goes beyond their similar titles.
Both stories have a first-person narrator who contemplates history with
determination and looks back at the past hoping to recapture or even
relive what took place before his own arrival. Both narrators express a
strong nostalgia that is only mitigated by the constant invocation of dis-
tinct, almost filmic, images of past events. In fact, visual images here seem
to be the dominant mode of knowing, and the spectacle of history the
central means by which the narrator satisfies his longing for meaning and
self-identity. To visualize history, to imagine it as if gazing at a spectacle—
this is the precise starting point of Xiao Ye’s The Town of Olive in .
It is of interest to observe at the outset that Xiao Ye wrote the story
under discussion in the emotionally agitating summer of . It was a
time when, in the author’s words, ‘‘everyone was involved in a historical
torrent without knowing it.’’ The only thing he found feasible and ap-
propriate to do was to write short stories frantically so as to gain some
distance and put things in perspective. That summer proved to be very
productive for him. As the author comments in his preface to the col-
lection of stories that came out in , The Town of Olive in  is
‘‘about all of one writer’s possible imaginations of a single remote Chi-
nese town in a time before his birth, and the subsequent bankruptcy of
those imaginations’’ (). The story tells of how one Taiwanese script-
writer, Gao Tian, is invited to collaborate with one well-known Japanese
filmmaker, Mr. Suzuki, in a joint film project about the Sino-Japanese
conflict in southwestern China during World War II. While writing the
script for such a film, which is expected to satisfy both the Taiwanese and
Japanese markets, the writer runs into tremendous difficulties. The stress-
ful situation in which he finds himself not only indicates the complexity
of factors involved in the process of film production, such as commercial
concerns and ideological constraints, but also points to the impossibility
of reliving history as it was actually lived, or, to put it otherwise, of repre-
senting history as such.
 The Mirror of History 227

The main plot of the story is a search for historical truth, an effort to
re-create historical reality. While the Japanese director has personal ex-
perience of the Sino-Japanese war, the Taiwan-born Chinese scriptwriter,
who is the ‘‘I’’ narrator of the story, is far removed from the war, both
in terms of time and space. ‘‘For me, the town of Olive is merely a geo-
graphical name one finds on a Chinese map, and I am using this name
totally out of convenience. Since I have no knowledge whatsoever of this
town, its population, size, or customs, the town appears to me just as re-
mote and unfamiliar as any other nameless towns in Europe or Africa’’
(). Yet it is in this town that the writer decides to stage his story and
imagine what the war was like back in . The very obscurity of the
town gives him much more freedom and space in imagining and repro-
ducing the past. ‘‘The reason I chose the town of Olive, which is close to
Tengchong, as the locus for my story was that there were very few records
available about it. I could have the most space for fiction, elaboration,
and imagination’’ ().
The marginal space occupied by the town of Olive provides an ideal site
for Gao Tian the writer to retrieve a marginal history, a different memory
and representation of a major war in the past. The original conception of
the film is geared more toward commercial success, with a star-studded
cast and a big budget. Some very weak pacifism also is pumped into
the script, less to raise serious questions about the war than to be ideo-
logically fashionable. Because it is initially proposed by the Japanese, the
first draft presents the story from a Japanese perspective, depicting how
a platoon of Japanese soldiers heroically defended one of the last mili-
tary strongholds to the very end. Although the Japanese director Suzuki
(whose continual eating throughout the story makes the reader suspect
a morbid and compulsive appetite for whatever is consumable) claims to
be a pacifist, the Taiwanese scriptwriter finds it uninteresting to tell yet
another all-too-familiar war story. His immediate objection is that the
plot too much resembles conventional Chinese films in which one sees
similar depictions of the heroic deaths of Chinese soldiers. What he now
wishes to resist is the master narrative of either victory or defeat. Instead,
he wants to tell the story of the war from a different perspective. ‘‘I de-
cided to put aside the original story. . . . I found another perspective,
another standpoint, not that of the Japanese, nor that of the Chinese,
but instead the viewpoint of the ethnic minorities who live in the bor-
der area of Yunnan. I wanted to look at the war from their perspective’’
228 Chinese Modern

(). From this viewpoint, which allows him to combine spatial margin-
ality and ethnic minorities, he will more effectively reexamine historical
experience as well as its representation. This strategy for ideological cri-
tique readily reminds us of the Fifth Generation films in China, such as
Daoma zei (The horse thief), Liechang Zhasa (On the hunting ground),
and, to a certain extent, Huang tudi (The yellow earth). Gao Tian’s desire
to evoke such a historical possibility goes beyond aesthetic estrangement
and directly mirrors a growing indigenous consciousness in Taiwan since
the mid-s. The nativist drive for self-determination in Taiwan, as in
all national myths of origins, consists in retrieving a local history that
gives the present a differentiated and unique identity.
So ‘‘looking at the war’’ in this context acquires two distinct but re-
lated meanings: one is to try to experience or remember the war differ-
ently; another is to represent the war from this particular angle, to create
new images and spectacles; for, after all, the joint project is to make a
movie, to produce a visual representation of the war. ‘‘To look at the war’’
now demands that this part of history be examined from a distance and
yet in a creative engagement. Only through this active look or gaze will
a piece of past history be recovered and brought back to memory with
any relevance to present concerns and desires. In other words, history is
indeed invoked as a mirror, but it is a mirror that does not necessarily
reflect or verify certain truth, as traditional historical writings and wis-
dom would try to suggest. On the contrary, it is a mirror in the sense
that every person who looks at history will invariably also see his or her
own image and self. Representation of the past always mirrors present
engagement, anxiety, and longings. Thus, the scriptwriter’s decision to
approach the war from the perspective of ethnic minorities serves at least
two purposes simultaneously. It is a challenge to the commercialized film
industry and a critique of the ideology of chauvinistic nationalism. At
this point, it is all the more relevant that this story is about the making
of a film. It becomes clear how much ideological weight the production
of visual imagery carries, especially in our scopophiliac modern culture
where a carefully constructed image often provokes critical reflection as
much as it may pass as the enduring truth of a past moment. The script-
writer’s self-imposed critical mission, therefore, is to revolt against those
predetermined and preprocessed images, to make visible a history that
has been either obscured or underrepresented. To see history this way
has yet another significance. It is not only to show a part of history that
 The Mirror of History 229

has not been represented so far, that is, to see history differently, but
also to see concrete images, to restore its facticity to the historical mo-
ment in all of its details and contingencies, in all of its visual richness and
depth.
The story then proceeds to tell how Gao Tian the hardworking writer
tries to ‘‘see’’ the war from his particular viewpoint. This heroic endeavor
excites him and causes his final disappointment, because what he strives
for is precisely the impossible, namely, reliving instead of representing
a forgotten history. Yet it is the impossible prospect of reliving history
that greatly attracts the writer and inspires his imagination. After much
research into the customs and rituals of the ethnic minorities with whom
he is now genuinely fascinated, the writer forms a story line and can see
that ‘‘one after another the characters begin surfacing.’’ In rapid succes-
sion, a whole cast of characters present themselves, almost surreally, in
the writer’s vision, most of them defined by their function in the movie:
a pacifist Japanese medical lieutenant, a returned Chinese student with
his Japanese wife, an unyielding village master, a traitor, etc. But with all
these characters, the writer still does not know how to unfold the story
because he has not found the right image or the right moment that speaks
to him. This frustration marks the first stage of Gao Tian’s effort at re-
trieving a different history, at which point he is still very much within
the narrative’s framework. Narrative itself now becomes a debilitating
device because something about the war defies narration. The writer is
so obsessed with thinking up some interesting story that he has night-
mares which mostly consist of haunting images of emptiness and silence.
One way or another, narration falls into the given pattern, and the writer
finds this susceptibility to an easy and unchallenged story line deeply
unsettling.
Narrative, or rather the seduction of narration, now blocks rather than
leads to the writer’s grasp of history. The need to tell a coherent story
becomes an obstacle to his approaching history or even communicating
with it. As long as he cares about telling a story, Gao Tian finds him-
self far removed from the historical moment that he wants to experi-
ence and endow with an image. One way or another, he realizes, he is
brought back to speak to the market and satisfy the consumers’ appetite
for either sensation or comfort. At this point, the writer decides to make
a trip to Japan and eventually to Hiroshima. While in the still disturb-
ingly barren Hiroshima, he finds nothing, he nonetheless is constantly
230 Chinese Modern

haunted by the famous filmic image from Hiroshima, mon amour: a naked
couple silently making love against the background of the debris of the
first atomic bomb. This image, together with the calm and flat male voice
of the film (‘‘Tu n’ai rien vu à Hiroshima. Rien’’), suddenly reveals to the
writer something uncanny about the war and the impossibility of tell-
ing a true story about it. ‘‘I finally understood this line, because I came
to Hiroshima’’ (). An intense visual image illustrates an up-till-now
enigmatic utterance regarding the impossibility of seeing anything. This
connection comes as a profound revelation, and Gao Tian decides to turn
away from narration and let himself really see and imagine.
Visual imagination thus seems to be the only way to approach the
totality of historical experience, or at least to metonymically make ap-
parent the irretrievable and unrepresentable whole. The real, in other
words, is made conceivable through the intervention of a critical imagi-
nary. Historical consciousness becomes more a space-oriented vision
than a time-oriented narrative. Conjured images of the town of Olive
and reconstructed scenes from a certain past moment now bear much
more revelation than does a narrative that has to organize time and the
sequences of events. ‘‘What is the town of Olive like? It is close by the
River of Longchuan, but then do people living there have to depend on
the river for their livelihood? Can one sail a boat on the river? I try to
make this town become active and alive, without necessarily being true
to reality’’ ().
In his effort to revive the town of Olive, so as to approach truth rather
than reality, the scriptwriter turns to filmic images and presents life in
the town as if it were watched through a horizontally moving camera.
What we have, then, is a colorful picture of everyday life and a sense of
uncontrollable simultaneity. All the things that the writer now makes us
see happen at the same time, and we feel that instead of observing life
in this small town from a remote historical distance, all of a sudden we
are brought face-to-face with those who are walking down the streets
and through the boisterous and pleasantly distracting street fair. Here,
we have a description that is no longer the same as what Lukács once de-
nounced as naturalistic and devoid of any critical judgment. Rather, liter-
ary description, carried out here in the mode of cinematography, suggests
a drive to go beyond the linguistic medium and invites us to visualize,
even when its content appears to be incoherent and disorienting. Images
 The Mirror of History 231

now become a preferred method by which the vitality and truthfulness of

a historical moment are brought back.
It is interesting to observe how this filmic representation is realized in
the text. In order to evoke visual images or a cinematic vision, the text
has to call into place the subject of a viewer. ‘‘If you happen to be at a
street fair, you will see. . . .’’ The ‘‘you’’ here is the observer, either the
reader or, more probably, a potential moviegoer. What you will see is not
a complete action or a contrivedly revealing dramatic situation. On the
contrary, you will see concrete objects and colors that make up the reality
of everyday life in this remote frontier town. ‘‘. . . You will see, in the glar-
ing sunshine, those shining steel knives, silver jewelry for women, tap-
estry and embroidered silk. Some Chinese merchants sell matches, salt,
cosmetics, imported goods, snow peas, and green peppers; Baiyi peddlers
sell rice, homemade cloth, bamboo products, sweet potatoes, and mung
beans; finally some Gawas sell herb medicine, pumpkins, areca nuts, and
even firewood’’ (). This detailed listing of goods on sale at the fair
does not exactly recall a Balzacian moment of almost breathtakingly close
and relevatory description or, for that matter, any realistic representa-
tion in the classical sense. Rather, in this one brief paragraph, we move
rapidly and are forced to see an abundance of objects, glittering details
that swarm up and fill our vision, each demanding some attention. In
other words, it is like following a camera and steadily glancing over a
panoramic shot of the site. We see the process, and we see ourselves ap-
proaching a specific moment in history with all its irreducible reality, even
though this reality might be imaginary.
Then, in a series of sentences, our overview of the situation assumes a
different pace, and it becomes more like watching a movie. The camera,
after rolling over the fair as background, now further zooms in on two
kids playing in the marketplace.

Kala and Luosi are also in the crowd. Kala is just reaching to catch a
dragonfly that is resting on a decoration made from a cow horn when the
dragonfly appears to be startled and takes off.
It turns out that a jeep and a military truck with a full load of Japanese
soldiers are speeding by. Inside the jeep sits a Japanese officer.
With the villagers running in all directions, the guards hasten to salute
the jeep and the truck.
232 Chinese Modern

Outside a Buddhist temple somewhere in the town hangs a sign that

reads ‘‘Headquarters of Military Guard in the Town of Olive.’’
At this point we get to see better the temple and some other architecture.
(–)

Instead of a narrative sequence, visuality now dominates and introduces

a different mode of experience. Visual representation provides a much
more immediate access to a past context of lived experience, the totality
of which is at once presumed and broken into multiple continuous and
discontinuous moments. As a result, Gao Tian feels much more confi-
dent and at home with his project. ‘‘The town of Olive acquired a much
better image in my imagination. . . . Olive was no longer a geographi-
cal term, nor a black dot one finds on the map. The entire town became
active in my imagination. There were people living in town, there were
things happening, and the war was going to reach it’’ (–).
Not surprisingly, we witness a nostalgia expressing itself in the writer’s
effort to imagine the past. But this is a cult of image that has a different
significance than what Fredric Jameson once described as ‘‘the cult of the
glossy image’’ that one usually encounters in so-called ‘‘nostalgia films
and texts.’’ The ‘‘unimaginably intense delicacy of hue’’ to which the audi-
ence is exposed in contemporary Hollywood film, according to Jameson,
is precisely what makes the filmic image inauthentic and pastiche. ‘‘From
time to time such sheer beauty can seem obscene, the ultimate form of
the consumption of streamlined commodities—a transformation of our
senses into the mail-order houses of the spirit, some ultimate packaging
of Nature in cellophane of a type that any elegant shop might well wish to
carry in its window.’’ 3 What Jameson points to is the insatiable consump-
tion of images in the postmodernist ‘‘society of the spectacle.’’ In such a
culture, content, an enfeebled category, is often confused with form—or,
rather, it is superseded by form. Image means and becomes everything.
However, the predominance of or even obsession with images is not
exactly an escape from history in the case of the Taiwanese scriptwriter,
who only wishes to write about a past war differently. Even though he
can vividly imagine a past moment and is indeed writing for a film pro-
duction, images alone are not enough; or, conversely, they contain too
much and appear too overwhelming and unfathomable. The content of

. Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible (New York: Routledge, ), .
 The Mirror of History 233

his images is purposely charged and made much more complex. At least
they are not prepackaged enough to make the censors happy. After a pre-
liminary review, the censors and some critics insist that the content of the
film, as Gao Tian presents it, is not quite correct and therefore ideologi-
cally unacceptable. They do not see how a Chinese can write such a de-
tached and neutral film script about that bloody war. Their final conclu-
sion leads them to question the identity of the scriptwriter: ‘‘This script
does not read like it was written by a Chinese, but rather by a person from
a third, neutral country, outside both China and Japan. After all, aren’t
you a Chinese? A Chinese has to have a Chinese position and perspec-
tive . . .’’ ().
Gao Tian’s effort to see and imagine history finally leads to a fundamen-
tal question about his own self-identity. Those pointed questions about
his national allegiance underscore his growing awareness of himself as
a Taiwanese freed from an obsession with China. The mirror of history
once again turns out to be indispensable for any conception of self or sub-
jectivity. This theme seems to have a parallel development in Su Tong,
especially in the story we will explore in a moment. But first, we need to
comment further on the intriguing relationship between images and nar-
rative or content. In The Town of Olive in , vivid and concrete images
are charged with the difficult, if not impossible, task of retrieving the lost
dimensions of history. Images not only suddenly expose the reduction
and violence that an apparently coherent and consistent narrative might
do to history; they also acquire a life of their own, an aesthetic energy as
well as historical vitality. To wipe out or suppress these images, therefore,
is the same as to deny that history was once actually lived and experi-
enced, not as part of some meaningful grand narrative, but precisely as
that contingent and precarious process of life. Also, images of the past
are shown to be able to reveal the distance between past and present. The
unbridgeable gap between a past moment and the present is repeatedly
underscored through these images, because unlike a narrative ready for
consumption, a real and tangible image of a particular history will in the
final analysis remind us of nothing but the removedness or pastness of
that moment.4 Images by their very reality or truthfulness tell the truth of

. In talking about photography, Roland Barthes also emphasizes the unbridgeable

distance between an image and its referent: ‘‘What the Photograph reproduces to in-
finity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never
234 Chinese Modern

their radical otherness. To see, in this context, to indulge in visual imagi-

nation, is then to recognize history as difference and at the same time to
pose a question about the viewer, the subject who imagines and gazes at
history. Thus, the final frustrated utterance of the writer: ‘‘What on earth
was the town of Olive like? What on earth took place in the year ?’’
(). The whole process of his trying to imagine the town of Olive has
to be at the same time a journey of self-discovery and a confrontation
with a different other.
This frustration may bring in the notion of the sublime, the felt pres-
ence of the unrepresentable. Gao Tian’s anguished utterance reveals that
history is indeed that sublime moment of human experience because its
presence is everywhere, although it can never be retrieved either experien-
tially or even representationally. The ideological function of seeing there-
fore becomes clear insofar as the immanent presence of history is brought
home and highlighted. The historical vision here is not reminiscent of
the certainty and lack of ambiguity that a contemplative Cartesian sub-
ject is supposed to have enjoyed in one of the ‘‘scopic regimes of moder-
nity.’’ 5 On the contrary, it articulates the frustration of a time when, with
an overabundance of images and photographic reproductions, history is
still grasped as that which surrounds us without being representable. No
wonder, then, that the first-person narrator in Su Tong’s novella Nineteen
Thirty-four Escapes should have uttered a similar question with the same
anxiety: ‘‘Nineteen thirty-four. Do you know? Nineteen thirty-four was
a year of disaster’’ (; ).
Since Xiao Ye’s story is about the production of images—namely, the
germination of a regional imagination in excess of nationalist discourse
in writing the script for a film—the primacy of visuality in his narrative
should hardly come as a surprise. But in Su Tong’s narrative of a fictional
familial genealogy we also find the same drive for a concrete, almost tan-
gible image of the past. As critic Meng Yue points out, in Su Tong’s
writings, especially in his historical narratives, there is very nearly an im-
perative for the reader to see, to visualize the past. Between empty year
numbers and the fictive world that the writer creates there is a constant

be repeated existentially.’’ See his Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New

York: Hill and Wang, ), .
. See Martin Jay, ‘‘Scopic Regimes of Modernity’’ in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal
Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, ), –.
 The Mirror of History 235

gaze that is requested by the narrator and which makes a meaningful con-
nection between these two different realms. ‘‘As a result, phrases like ‘I
see,’ ‘you see,’ ‘he sees,’ and other imperatives in the text demanding you
to look become a unique narrative mechanism in his series about the
‘Maple-poplar Village.’ They also constitute an unusual narrative strategy
in contemporary fiction.’’ 6 Meng Yue calls our attention to a key feature
of Su Tong’s writings and links this feature with an ideological commit-
ment on the writer’s part. The very gaze of the narrator, or the action of
looking back at history, is more often staged for the purpose of getting
people’s attention so that the observer himself can be looked at as such.
The gaze is directed so as to be looked at and gazed upon. ‘‘[The narra-
tor] tells not only of ‘the story of his ancestors,’ but also of his own gaze,
other people’s gaze, and his gaze at other people’s gaze.’’ 7
The historicizing gaze that Meng Yue finds fascinating in Su Tong is
particularly relevant and instrumental in Nineteen Thirty-four Escapes. A
complex and seminal story, this novella can be studied from a great va-
riety of critical readings and approaches, but it is indeed revealing to ex-
amine the evocation of vision and visuality in the narrative. What we will
find is perhaps more than a confrontation with history, even a rethink-
ing of the ultimate meaning or possibility of knowing history. As Meng
Yue suggests, the seeing of history represented in Su Tong’s stories in
fact points to the very unknowability of the past, and at the same time it
arouses our desire to see and know.
In Nineteen Thirty-four Escapes, Su Tong tells a story of the gradual but
no less violent disintegration and dispersal of a family in rural southeast-
ern China in the s. It is also a story about the difficult and painful
transition from country to city, from the values of traditional community
to the energy as well as fluidity of urban life. A prodigiously reproductive
Grandmother Jiang, six of whose seven children die off during the course
of the story, is the heroine. She is also the object of the narrator’s gaze
at the beginning of the narrative. The narrator is unmistakably identi-
fied as a young man in late twentieth-century China who seems obsessed
with the past of his father and grandfather. A young man who grows in-
creasingly uncomfortable in the city, the narrator ‘‘I’’ is more and more

. Meng Yue, ‘‘Su Tong de ‘jiashi’ yu ‘lishi’ xiezuo’’ (The writing of ‘‘family geneal-
ogy’’ and ‘‘history’’ by Su Tong), Jintian (Today), no.  (): –.
. Ibid., .
236 Chinese Modern

convinced that his rural family, or the generation of his grandparents, had
lived a glorious life in history. In comparison with their life experience,
he finds his own existence shamefully pale and trivial. His desire to re-
call the past, to see how his relatives had lived and loved, therefore, is
first aroused by his dissatisfaction with his own life in the present. His
anxiety to escape from the normalcy of the present expresses a sense of
loss and dislocation that one will find in some of Su Tong’s other stories,
notably his stories about contemporary cities in China, such as ‘‘As Serene
as Water’’ and ‘‘Hello, My Beekeeper.’’ 8 In this sense, Su Tong’s narrator
here represents a generation that grew up during the traumatic Cultural
Revolution, without necessarily experiencing the trauma, and which now
finds itself at a loss in a monstrous and rapidly modernizing urban land-
scape.
Thus, history is invoked first as a fantasy that somehow unflatteringly
mirrors an uneventful and routinized present. For this reason, whenever
the past is represented, Su Tong’s narrative always describes it with the
richest color and imagination possible. ‘‘The year  radiated strong
shafts of purple light that circumscribed my thinking.’’ At the same time
that Su Tong and his generation feel they have been denied access to the
past, they also realize that history may well be their only means of chal-
lenging the dominant ideology of everyday life. The contrast between
a rich history and a monotonous present is most persistent throughout
Su Tong’s historical narratives. His nostalgia is so self-indulgent and ori-
ented toward sensuous details that critics have even noticed, with appro-
bation, an ‘‘effeminate sensibility’’ in Su Tong’s perpetual regard of the
past.9 (The same nostalgic longing for a past glory is also apparent in the
Taiwan writer Lin Yaode’s epic-spirited novel —Gaosha baihe [—
Lilium formosanum],10 where we can find almost the same fascination
with condensed and striking images that are treated as if retrieved from
the collective unconscious.)
A retrospective gaze with such intellectual and libidinal investment in-
variably produces a central image or spectacle that captures the subject’s
fantasy about the past. In The Town of Olive in , we have seen a dra-

. See chap. , ‘‘Residual Modernism: Narratives of the Self in the s.’’

. See Wang Zheng and Xiao Hua, ‘‘Hubu de qingnian yishi: yu Su Tong you-
guan de huo wuguan de’’ (Complementary youth consciousness: things having or not
having to do with Su Tong), Dushu (Reading) (July-August ): –.
. Lin Yaode (Lin Yao-te),  Gaosha baihe (Taipei: Unitas, ).
 The Mirror of History 237

matic moment when a historical past ‘‘surfaces’’ just as if from a deep

body of water. In Nineteen Thirty-four Escapes, we once again encounter
the same ‘‘surfacing.’’ First regarding the year  as an ancient tree and
then assimilating himself as part of it, the narrator succeeds in seeing
‘‘Grandmother Jiang surface from history’’ (; ). Such a surfacing, a
coming into being, demands an image of its own:

The Woman Jiang stands motionless on her lanky legs, as if nailed to a

patch of chilly and muddy rice field. That is a picture of early spring and a
country woman. Her cheekbones protruding, Jiang’s face is covered with
mud. She lowers her head to listen to the sound made by the baby in her
belly. She feels herself as a barren hill, where men cut down everything and
then plant sons and daughters like trees, one after another. She listens to
the baby’s sound as if listening to the wind blowing against her, blowing
against a barren hill. (; –)

The entire history of that diaspora in  is encoded in and derived from
this image of Grandmother Jiang standing in the rice paddy listening to
her unborn baby. It is first a projection, a spectacular image called forth
by the narrator, through his intense gazing at the year  as an enig-
matic object. In this spectacle we are told not only that Grandmother
Jiang is once again pregnant, but subsequently we also are brought to
see this country woman from another angle, namely, through the bin-
oculars of the rich farmer Chen Wenzhi. A perverse voyeur, Chen Wenzhi
hides on top of his black-bricked mansion and observes men and women
toiling and copulating in the open field. ‘‘The background remains the
brownish yellow hill in the northeastern part of Maple-poplar Village,
with the black-bricked mansion on the hill. Grandmother Jiang and my
father thus stood against the historical spectacle of fifty-odd years ago’’
(; ).
This spectacle is only one stimulant that excites the narrator’s ‘‘fantas-
tically beautiful imagination.’’ In contrast to this primal moment of ‘‘sur-
facing,’’ other things have ‘‘sunk’’ into the bottomless pit of history, one
of which being the wooden house in the city where Grandfather Chen
Baonian ran his bamboo shop and determinedly uprooted himself from
the rural country for good (; ). Indeed, only images of people seem
to remain accessible. ‘‘Among my relatives of the past, the First Dog-brat
of the Chen family, with the image of a young boy who collects ani-
mal droppings, attracts my attention in the familial genealogy’’ (; ).
238 Chinese Modern

Almost every character that appears in the story, or, rather, every mem-
ber of the family now recalled, has a distinct image. Phoenix, ‘‘the most
beautiful woman’’ of the Chen family, for instance, is now remembered
as a ‘‘spot of purple light.’’ Fifty years after her mysterious death, ‘‘I try
to capture that spot of purple light in my familial genealogy that was
my grand-aunt. Even if Phoenix were a beautiful firefly that hurriedly
passed in front of me, how could I capture the purple light she emits?’’
(; ). Another woman, Huanzi, whose presence in this reconstructed
family history is as indelible as her once fashionable blue cotton over-
coat, also possesses her own particular image. A lover and concubine of
Grandfather Chen Baonian, the petite Huanzi was pregnant in the win-
ter of  and was taken back to the village to give birth. We are pre-
sented with the moment of the tense encounter between Grandmother
Jiang and Huanzi on a chilly winter morning. ‘‘My Grandmother Jiang
stood by the door and watched the little woman Huanzi walking on the
snow and approaching the ancestral home of the Chen family. The blue
cotton overcoat of Huanzi radiated a strong blue light against the snow
on the ground, and it hurt Jiang’s eyes. The first conversation between
these two women fifty years ago now distinctly comes to me and into my
ears’’ (; ). Here we first get a chance to see the situation, from the
perspective of Grandmother Jiang, who receives the woman from the city
with an understandable hostility. Only after a luminous image that makes
the characters identifiable and distinct do we have a chance to hear their
greetings and conversation. Visual images of the past precede any other
memories, as well as our understanding and interpretation.
This predominance of visual spectacle in fact constitutes the basic nar-
rative structure of the story Nineteen Thirty-four Escapes. Again and again
we are brought to see rich and concrete ‘‘spectacles’’ of a past moment. At
the very beginning, we are told, ‘‘if you now go and push open the door
of my father’s house, you will only see my father and my mother. My
other six relatives are not at home now. They are still wandering around
like black fish out there’’ (; ). They are absent, and the entire en-
deavor of telling the story of the ‘‘diaspora’’ is to bring them back home,
to make them the narrator’s companions, imaginary yet most satisfying.
Thus, to see is not only to overcome their absence; it also reveals this
very absence and recognizes it as that which makes narration both nec-
essary and possible. The retrieved images we see or are brought to see
 The Mirror of History 239

point to a lack that constitutes our own experience. Again, history and
images of history are constructed as a mirror in which the narrator has a
chance to see himself as if seen by others and regarded from the other end
of history.
The desire to see that underlies and organizes the entire narrative forces
us to ask questions about the narrator as an engaged and transformed
subject. We are constantly made aware that the narrator is in fact seeing
and imagining with us. He makes us see things as he imagines them. He
also reminds us continually that neither he nor we know that particular
year, , at all.

To me the winter of  appears to be so strange. I have no idea how to

describe my forefathers who were active in my family history in that winter.
I was told that my grandfather Chen Baonian also carried his son Dog-brat
outdoors for some sunshine. Then he would be watching, together with
Dog-brat, the small woman Huanzi putting up clothes to dry. What was it
like for these three people to look at each other with her blue dress hang-
ing between them? What was it like for the sun of the  winter to shine
over these three people? Do I know? (; )

What is unknowable and irretrievable is the immediate lived experience

of a past moment. Although the narrator knows the ending to the scene
he depicts here—that Dog-brat was going to die and Huanzi would be
sent off to the country to give birth to her illegitimate child—he no
longer can know how it was at that particular moment in the winter of
 with all of its experiential irreducibility. Throughout the story he
continually expresses his anxiety over the impossibility of reliving the
past, of actually seeing and feeling the same as his forefathers once did.
Indeed, the fascination with history that now possesses the young man
in the s is precisely this awareness of an unbridgeable gap between
his own present and the history that has led up to it. His desire to see and
imagine the past is not at all dampened by his knowledge of the gap be-
tween him and that past. On the contrary, this very unknowability gives
him more space for imagination and a chance for him to confront the
past. It is through this seeing, this rich imagination, that he will have a
chance both to (re)possess a history for himself and to find his own iden-
tity. The seeing here is as much a projection as an introjection, through
which the narrator fashions an image of himself and implicates himself
240 Chinese Modern

into the historical narrative. What the narrator of Nineteen Thirty-four

Escapes faces is a mirror of history that does not necessarily reveal some
truth about or message from the past. Rather, it is a mirror in which
the narrator wishes to find his self-identity and construct his own subjec-
tivity. The mirror of history, once again, is the mirror in which he finds a
self-image, a distanced but full reflection of and on his own existence.
The mirror of history in his narrative constitutes the narrator’s own
self-consciousness in that it looks back and reflects. The exchange of gazes
between the narrator and what he narrates is the most striking feature of
the story. We not only have a first-person narrator, an ‘‘I’’ who recounts
his effort at retrieving his family history, but we also have the reader ad-
dressed directly as ‘‘you.’’ Characters in the story are imagined with such
intensity that they constantly look back at both the reader and the nar-
rator, and silently but with eloquence they address a collective ‘‘we/us’’
of the present. Between this looking back and forth, between a vividly
colored vision of the past and the pale and empty present, the narrator
asserts himself and proclaims a new image and identity. At one moment
of his search for the past, he comes to the town that used to be known for
its bamboo products. His ‘‘gaze’’ grows like an ‘‘extended ivy’’ that em-
braces the road and passers-by (; –). However, at the same time,
he feels watched.

I fancy that I see the small attic of the Chen bamboo shop in the old
town known for its bamboo products, where Dog-brat and his friend Little
Blind used to live. The window of the attic would give out a weak red glow
at night; it was a red light from their eyes. You will be touched when you
look up at the attic, you will see people on top of people. They are peeping
at us from an attic that no longer exists; they are floating in the empty sky
of . (; –)

The tension between the past and the present is here transformed into an
exchange of gazes. In this imaginary exchange, the narrator realizes that
he is at once an observer of history and a participant in it. He no longer
possesses a complete identity; on the contrary, he needs to look back and
confront the past. This exchange establishes his identity and at the same
time challenges the reality of his own moment. History, in other words,
is here invoked to create a Brechtian estrangement that historicizes the
present and reveals its boundedness or incompleteness. The imaginary
gaze from the past functions as the mirror that is indispensable for the
 The Mirror of History 241

formation of the subject. In this reflecting mirror of history, ‘‘the subject

finds or recognizes itself through an image which simultaneously alien-
ates it, and hence, potentially, confronts it.’’ 11
The subplot of the story is, then, a tale of search, the narrator’s search
for a history of his family and for a self-identity. In the beginning there
is a moment when he realizes that his shadow at night in the city looks
weird. He is disturbed because he is reminded of a person on the run. By
the end, when he has told the story of diaspora, he turns around to have
another look at his shadow and believes he is now ready to walk through
the city at night. ‘‘If you open the window, you will see my shadow pro-
jected onto the city, floating and rising. But who will be able to tell what
a shadow that is?’’ (; ). The final question is about identity, the nar-
rator’s identity in the wake of the narrative. In the mirror of history, the
young man finds his own identity, or rather, finds his own identity prob-
lematized and complicated. And he seems satisfied.
Let us come back to the story one more time. The whole story de-
rives from the desire to see—to see how ‘‘my Grandmother Jiang’’ on
one spring day more than fifty years ago stood in the rice paddy and lis-
tened to the baby stirring in her body. Here is a cinematic structure of
implicated visual relations. First, we see her standing at the center of our
vision; then our view is elevated, and we see the background. On the
yellow hill is a black-bricked building. Its presence is constantly felt by
Grandmother Jiang because, we are told, the rich farmer Chen Wenzhi is
watching her with a pair of Japanese binoculars. Thus, a whole visual field
is introduced, and a power relationship is inscribed into the picture. So
is history injected into that almost idyllic picture of a pregnant country
woman planting rice in an open field. It would be interesting to exam-
ine the politics of vision in terms of sexual difference constructed and
represented here, but I would like to look further into the relationship
between visuality and narrative explored in the text.
The primacy of visuality that we witness in Su Tong’s narratives of his-
tory registers a different experience of images than what we would find
in a postmodern ‘‘society of the spectacle,’’ even different from the con-
text in which Xiao Ye ponders the meaning of seeing the past differently.
In a postmodern culture where images and visual experience become the

. Jacqueline Rose, ‘‘The Imaginary,’’ in her Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London:
Verso, ), .
242 Chinese Modern

dominant mode of knowledge and perception, the glossy and perfect

photographic images, either of a reconstructed past or of contemporary
life, in fact indicate a ‘‘crisis of historicity’’ because those hyperreal and
depthless images flatten and reduce, rather than reinforce, the historical
distance or ‘‘aura’’ that we need to sense about past events. What dis-
appears or becomes unimaginable is precisely that whole lived context of
past experience. A hyperreal image blocks and displaces rather than regis-
ters a moment of history.12 But in Su Tong’s narrative we find something
else. Here, our starting point is an imagined spectacle of the past, with
all its lived concreteness and rich coloration. But this will not be where
the narrator stops. First compelling the reader to see, to be reconciled
with this image, the narrator moves on to contextualize the spectacle and
charges it with raw human passion and innermost desires. In other words,
the spectacle now becomes both the starting point and the end product
of a historical imagination.
The purposes served by such a narrative strategy are multiple, as Meng
Yue in her essay has reminded us. But besides the determined function of
resisting an ideological suppression of history, the emphasis on visuality
is also symptomatic of a poverty of images in general, especially images of
the recent past, in post-Cultural Revolution China. Su Tong’s narrative is
effective and powerful because the images that he constructs of the past
are both different from the conventional and institutionalized perception
of the past (here it is the s) and, at the same time, fantastically realis-
tic and intimate. In a political culture that constantly erases differences in
history as well as images of the past, Su Tong’s story opens a new visual
field and gives rise to fresh imagination. Images or imaginations of a past
that is different become an enormously effective way to reappropriate his-
tory and revive that which threatens to disappear forever.
The reappropriation of history is the common theme shared by Nine-
teen Thirty-four Escapes and The Town of Olive in . The desire for
reappropriation stems from the realization that history is in constant
danger of being subjugated to one master narrative. The richness and im-

. For a critique of the postmodern consumption of depthless images, see Jame-
son’s ‘‘Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,’’ collected as the
first chapter in his book of the same name (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press,
), esp. –. Also, Jean Baudrillard’s discussion of ‘‘simulacra and simulations’’ is
helpful. See Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, ed. with introduction by Mark Poster
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, ).
 The Mirror of History 243

mediacy that an image promises seem to be the best reason to go back to

history. Thus, the history-hungry narrator in Su Tong’s story experiences
the hallucination of seeing his relatives continually emerge from the past.
‘‘I feel that I see Grandmother Jiang carry my father on her back and run
about in the bitter wind and rain of . The saw-shaped scar on her
forehead glowed. A picture of my grandmother, the pond of the dead,
and the lush purslane repeatedly flashes in front of my eyes, but I cannot
imagine the unusual suffering my grandmother experienced by the pond
of the dead’’ (; ). This image, just as many other images that the
narrator continues to see, is by itself, as the narrator realizes, ‘‘a specific
historical content’’ (; ). To retrace that historical meaning, he has
to reconstruct an entire story and make the spectacular image speak and
give forth all of its deeply embedded secrets and revelations. To see, to
understand the historical spectacle finally leads to a rewriting of history,
and, in this particular case, to a ‘‘spectacularization’’ of history.
Finally, as if by accident, this rich imagination of history that we wit-
ness is achieved without any photographic images. At one point, the nar-
rator expresses his ambivalent feelings toward the absence of any pictures
that would have allowed him better access to the past. ‘‘Huanzi and Phoe-
nix were the two most beautiful women in my family. It is a pity that
neither left behind a picture, and as a result I have no means to decide
whether they really looked like each other that much’’ (; ). The inter-
esting point here is that the regret felt by the young man is not that he
cannot tell whether they were really beautiful or how beautiful they were.
Instead, he is saddened because he cannot tell whether they were like each
other. It remains uncontested that they were beautiful, just as that par-
ticular history is always exciting and spectacular. Photographic images
could have helped not because they may determine truth or falsehood,
but because they would have let us see better.
The cultural significance of Su Tong’s narratives of spectacular history
is manifold. It first indicates a general cultural crisis in which official,
mainstream historiography is continually challenged. This effort at re-
writing and retrieving history is reflected in some other notable writers
such as Mo Yan and Liu Heng, in whose work we can find a shared fond-
ness for historical spectacle. The spectacularization of history also points
to a recognized need in postrevolutionary Chinese culture to search for
a new identity, a new self-consciousness that can claim a different history
than what has been instituted in the past forty years or so. In his Nineteen
244 Chinese Modern

Thirty-four Escapes, Su Tong best captures this critical impulse and opens
up new possibilities of looking into the mirror of history. In many as-
pects, Xiao Ye’s writings have a comparable function, especially his stories
about historical experience such as ‘‘Qiangbao’’ (Violence), and ‘‘Women
de Heilong jiang a’’ (Our Black Dragon River). In The Town of Olive in
, the search for a new self-identity is further complicated by the fact
that the novella is staged against a transnational and multicultural back-
ground. (Another perfect example of the same trend will be Lin Yaode’s
novel —Lilium formosanum, mentioned above.) Although Xiao Ye’s
narrative is structurally simpler, the ideological message appears to be
much more complex and self-conscious than that in Su Tong. This, of
course, is not a moment to make any value judgment, but one cannot
help but feel that Xiao Ye’s desperate attempt to find a minoritized per-
spective on a grand historical narrative has to reflect a new collective self-
consciousness and self-image that was coming of age in Taiwan in the last
quarter of the twentieth century, whereas Su Tong’s historical nostalgia
gathers its potency and relevancy precisely from an individualized gaze
that he stubbornly directs upon our past. Yet both writers find their inspi-
ration in conjuring up and letting themselves be absorbed in a fantastic
historical spectacle.
8
In Search of the Real City:
Cinematic Representations of Beijing and
the Politics of Vision

Potentially, the city is in itself the powerful symbol of a complex society.

If visually well set forth, it can also have strong expressive meaning.
—Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City

That the city of Beijing presents a perfect spatial embodiment of a tradi-

tional culture caught in the maelstrom of rapid and condensed modern-
ization is readily observable, even to a passing tourist. ‘‘Beijing is a micro-
cosm of China,’’ so an up-to-date pocket travel book informs its readers
and potential travelers. ‘‘It combines village and metropolis, Western-
style modernization and Chinese tradition, new-fashioned pomp with
old-fashioned modesty. It is a showcase of China’s policy for reform and
opening up to the West.’’ 1 Another contemporary guidebook (from the
‘‘Travel Survival Kit’’ series) gives more in-depth information: ‘‘All cities
in China are equal, but some are more equal than others. Beijing has
the best of everything in China bar the weather: the best food, the best
hotels, the best transport, the best temples. But its vast squares and boule-
vards, its cavernous monoliths and its huge numbers of tourists are likely
to leave you cold. It is a weird city—traces of its former character may
be found down the back alleys where things are a bit more to human
scale.’’ 2
Indeed, probably no visitor to Beijing in the s would fail to notice
the weird, sometimes mind-boggling character of this sprawling urban
center that is becoming increasingly similar to Los Angeles. It is one of
the oldest cities in the world, and yet compressed sites or islands of its

. Don J. Cohn, A Guide to Beijing (Lincolnwood, Ill.: Passport Books, ), .
. Joe Cummings et al., A Travel Survival Kit: China, rd ed. (Berkeley: Lonely
Planet, ), .
246 Chinese Modern

imperial past are now barely visible under the veil of brownish smog and
against the ragged backdrop of masses of prefabricated, international-
style apartment buildings or more recent all-glass high-rises. Its broad
and often dishearteningly straight, but increasingly jammed and bill-
boarded boulevards, while still stridently reminding you of the scale and
aspiration of a recent collective project and central planning, are con-
tinually humanized and made lively by an unstoppable flow of millions
of bicyclists. If you decide to move across the city, either on foot or
by any means of transportation, you will soon find yourself experienc-
ing starkly different sections and neighborhoods (in terms of the appear-
ance of their residents, architectural style, spatial arrangement, and noise
level), which, as in almost any other large city in the world, exist side-by-
side and form silent commentary on one another. This ‘‘synchronicity of
the nonsynchronous,’’ as Ernst Bloch’s useful phrase describes it, finds its
expression in another space-related human experience, namely, the mul-
tiple means of transportation on Beijing’s streets, from pedicabs, to over-
crowded buses, to the latest Lexus.
Of this uneven but changing cityscape, we find timely and fascinating
representations in Chinese cinema since the late s, for which the dy-
namics and social, if also libidinal, energy of the modern city have become
a much-explored theme and created a new film genre. The one particular
sequence of images and soundtrack I have in mind is the opening collage
in Wanzhu (Troubleshooters, dir. Mi Jiashan, ). The film’s location
is emphatically contemporary Beijing. Two enormous characters for the
title of the film are projected onto three re-created primitive masks; they
are accompanied by a soundtrack that captures a vocal fragment from
some traditional opera or storytelling, shifts to a shrill siren that drowns
out the narrating voice, and then records some boisterous marketplace
where voices shouting out the names of popular magazines can be dis-
tinguished. But this brief temporalized sequence of sound effects is only
the preface to an explosive juxtaposition of often fragmented but none-
theless spectacular images of the city. Through a zoom lens, the spec-
tacle of traffic congestion is brought much closer, and minimal depth of
field underscores a compressed urban spatiotemporal regime; unsteady
and fast-moving shots of glass buildings (unmistakable signs of contem-
poraneity), with twisted reflections of other high-rises and construction
cranes, suggest the spatial fragmentation with which an awestruck ob-
 In Search of the Real City 247

server is forced to become reconciled. Then, quickly, the camera is di-

rected back at the hustling and bustling streets where it presents a series
of incomplete, unrelated snapshots of crawling vehicles, expressionless
old women, hordes of bicyclists, country girls gathering at a labor mar-
ket, a frowning youth with a punk haircut—all horizontal images of an
expanding metropolis from the perspective of an apparently disoriented
subject. Over this collage of urban spectacles, contemporary Chinese rock
and roll (clearly reminiscent of early Bruce Springsteen) is introduced to
make direct commentary:

I once dreamed about life in a modern city,

But I don’t know how to express my present feeling;
Buildings here are getting taller and taller every day,
But my days here are not that great.3

In fact,  saw the production of a series of films on the subject of

contemporary city life, at least four of them based on novels or novellas
by the popular Beijing writer Wang Shuo. Hence,  has been dubbed
‘‘the year of Wang Shuo’’ in Chinese cinema.4 These films about the city,
mostly directed by members of the Fifth Generation,5 form a distinct
genre and indicate a different intellectual concern and cultural criticism
than in earlier Fifth Generation experiments or, indeed, in the tradition
of New China cinema. By New China cinema, I mean the state-supported
film industry that came into being with the founding of the People’s Re-
public in . Its brief and frequently interrupted course of development
notwithstanding, New China cinema is mass-oriented and generally iden-
tified with a formulaic socialist realist aesthetic, ‘‘a didactic fusion,’’ as
one critic puts it, ‘‘of classic Hollywood filmmaking and Soviet Stalin-

. The lyrics go on like this: With a friend I always kill some time in a bar, / While
the tape player repeats all the hit songs. / You think one way and you talk one way, /
Because everyone wears a toy-like mask. / What should I say?
. These four films are Wanzhu, Lunhui (dir. Huang Jianxin), Da chuanqi (dir. Ye
Daying), and Yiban shi haishui, yiban shi huoyan (dir. Xia Gang).
. Two other city films that came out in  are Yaogun qingnian and Fengkuang
de daijia, directed, respectively, by Tian Zhuangzhuang (Daoma zei, ) and Zhou
Xiaowen (Zuihou de fengkuang, ), two well-established Fifth Generation film-
makers. In , at least two films by directors of the Fifth Generation were also about
the contemporary cityscape: Gei kafei jiadian tang (dir. Sun Zhou) and Taiyang yu (dir.
Zhang Zeming).
248 Chinese Modern

ist style.’’ 6 The preferred subject matter for this determinedly revolu-
tionary popular cinema is collective heroism and socialist construction,
while its audience is often imagined to be a politically engaged nation in-
stead of sentimental urban dwellers. Consequently, the experiential city
fades as a pertinent cinematic theme or field, and the well-lit imagery of
contemporary life found in New China cinema invariably comes from
either an industrial construction site or the countryside undergoing pro-
found transformations. Even the revolutionary past, when it is projected
in New China cinema, is systematically romanticized and made to ad-
here to the current representational hierarchies. Against this staid tra-
dition of ‘‘revolutionary realism combined with revolutionary romanti-
cism,’’ the Fifth Generation of filmmakers introduced a fresh cinematic
language and vision in the mid-s by bringing into focus a remote
and obscure location, temporal as well as spatial, that bespeaks a differ-
ent and yet concrete reality of depth. What enabled their breakthrough
was clearly a modernist aesthetics and avant-gardist challenge against di-
dactic mass cinema.7 Hence, the initial defamiliarizing impact of Huang
tudi (The yellow earth, dir. Chen Kaige, ), Daoma zei (The horse
thief, dir. Tian Zhuangzhuang, ), and Hong gaoliang (Red sorghum,
dir. Zhang Yimou, ), all now considered classics of Fifth Generation
filmmaking.
In the new genre of city films that attracted members of the self-
consciously innovative Fifth Generation, a central symbiosis is suggested
between the experience of discontented youth and a vast, disorienting

. For analyses of some representative film texts from the New China cinema tradi-
tion, see Chris Berry, ‘‘Sexual Difference and the Viewing Subject in Li Shuangshuang
and The In-Laws,’’ in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, ed. Chris Berry (London: British
Film Institute, ), –; Ma Junxiang, ‘‘Shanghai guniang: geming nüxing ji ‘guan-
kan’ wenti’’ (The girl from Shanghai: revolutionary women and the question of ‘‘view-
ing’’), in Zai jiedu: dazhong wenyi yu yishi xingtai (Rereading: the people’s literature
and art movement and ideology), ed. Tang Xiaobing (Hong Kong: Oxford University
Press, ), –.
. For a genealogical account of the origin of the Fifth Generation and its modernist
politics, see Xudong Zhang, Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms: Cultural Fever,
Avant-Garde Fiction, and the New Chinese Cinema (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, ), –. See also, for instance, the statement by one of the leading mem-
bers of the Fifth Generation in the interview ‘‘A Director Who Is Trying to Change
the Audience: A Chat with Young Director Tian Zhuangzhuang,’’ conducted by Yang
Ping, in Perspectives on Chinese Cinema, –.
 In Search of the Real City 249

urban space that invariably provides a symbolic replication of the com-

plexity of contemporary sociopolitical life caught in the maelstrom of
modernization. Against the spatial complexity of the city, youth, while
celebrated as a concentrated expression of the cultural dynamics of mo-
dernity, is nonetheless frequently depicted on the screen as a disillusion-
ing experience of foreclosed mobility, repressed libidinal energy, and en-
trenched filial obligation and duties. For instance, in Troubleshooters, we
see how three young men struggle without much success to run their own
service company, whose daily operation and customers bring to the sur-
face the frustrations and crises deeply embedded in contemporary society.
A significant development in the film is that once the story line begins
and we are witnessing the nitty-gritty of the company’s business, the city
no longer appears as a spectacle to marvel at. Instead, the urban land-
scape recedes, as it were, into the distance and turns simultaneously into
an untranscendable historical condition and an experiential immediacy
that together smother any coherent perception. Put differently, the city
becomes both an all-encompassing cultural construct and an inescapable
natural environment, one reinforcing the other. By the end of the film,
it is clear that the filmmaker has persistently refused to present the city
as promising a possible perceptual totalization; contrary to the opening
collage, the final, slow-rolling shot of people lining up to seek help at the
revamped service company conveys a reconciliation, on the part of a be-
sieged and reflective subject, with ordinariness as well as situatedness. The
city by now irretrievably recedes into the distance and becomes a grandi-
ose myth no longer relevant to the daily lives of its inhabitants. It is now
a labyrinthine complex without a coherent pattern, or what Kevin Lynch
once promoted as the ‘‘legibility’’ and ‘‘imageability’’ of the cityscape.
However, this film genre, with its critical message about ‘‘the estrang-
ing city and a paralyzed subject,’’ 8 did not reach its thematic and cine-
matic perfection until , when Xie Fei completed Benming nian (Black
snow), a sober portrayal of ordinary life in Beijing executed with a film-
noir sensibility. It may appear coincidental that an outstanding member
of the Fourth Generation (here the term refers to the group of Chinese
filmmakers who were systematically trained from the late s to early

. Peng Wen, ‘‘Benming nian: mosheng de chengshi yu tanhuan de zhuti’’ (Black

snow: the estranging city and a paralyzed subject), Dianying yishu (Film art), no. 
(): .
250 Chinese Modern

s and reached their professional maturity only in the late s be-
cause of the disruption of the Cultural Revolution) had to come in to
realize the potential of the new genre, for the directors in this transitional
generation of directors are often viewed by critics as forever negotiating
for their own artistic identity. Compared to the more cosmopolitan Fifth
Generation, they appear as ‘‘reluctant, awkward pursuers of the novel
and embarrassing believers in cheap humanism and historicism.’’ 9 As the
proud, however abused, offspring of New China cinema, they now find
themselves, by default, inheriting a battered establishment, and yet they
cannot afford to dissociate themselves either emotionally or intellectually
from what shapes and defines them. This character profile of the Fourth
Generation is closely borne out by another intriguing city film, Beijing
nizao (Good morning, Beijing, ), directed by Zhang Nuanxin (Sha
Ou [Sha Ou], ; Qingchun ji [Sacrificed youth], ). Given their pro-
fessional training and familiarity with socialist realism, Fourth Genera-
tion directors have a strong sense of social responsibility and usually feel
more at home dealing with the rural landscape or the contrast between
the city and the countryside. Indeed, members of this generation are the
ones who made some of the most successful and realistic films about rural
China in the s, such as Rensheng (Life, ) and Laojing (Old well,
) by Wu Tianming, and Yeshan (In the wild mountains, ) by Yan
Xueshu.
Fully accepting his identity as a Fourth Generation director, Xie Fei
nevertheless from the beginning exhibited a spiritual affinity with the
younger generation. From his earlier, emotionally charged Women de
tianye (Our wide fields, ) to Xiangnü Xiaoxiao (The girl from Hu-
nan, ), which echoed the ethos of critical cultural root-seeking, Xie
Fei established himself as the most sensitive filmmaker of his generation.
In Black Snow, he not only redirects his own philosophical thinking, but
also introduces a new intellectual tension into the city-film genre. As the
film critic Peng Wen observes, while city films by the Fifth Generation
express a hidden desire to identify with and belong to the new urban
culture, ‘‘in Black Snow, ‘the city’ is obviously presented as an estranging
and hostile space, to cope with which the filmmaker recommends resis-
tance and disengagement.’’ 10 Still, there is enough continuity to read Xie

. Xudong Zhang, Chinese Modernism, .

. Peng Wen, ‘‘Black Snow,’’ .
 In Search of the Real City 251

Fei’s intervention as an extension of the general interest in the city. It is

mostly a thematic continuity, an increasingly critical examination of an
emergent urban culture. ‘‘From Troubleshooters to Black Snow,’’ as another
film critic remarks, ‘‘Chinese cinema has reached a universal subject mat-
ter in world cinema, namely, the experience of anomie and disorientation
in a commodity society, also known as the age of market economy.’’ 11 In
this light, Black Snow deserves a closer look, especially from the perspec-
tive of how the city now figures in the everyday experience of unfulfilled
youth.12

Depth and Social Criticism

While reviewing films about Rome by Vittorio De Sica in postwar Italy,

Pierre Sorlin sees the filmmaker as someone who experimented with two
different groups of images of the city. In the neorealist cinema of the
s, filmmakers ‘‘were aware of the blossoming of urban areas and tried
to express, cinematically, the complex relationships between old town
centers and new outskirts. After  or so, other cinematographers were
no longer able to tell, or see, what towns were, and [they] created a
blurred image of cities.’’ 13 This blurred vision, according to Sorlin, was
first articulated in De Sica’s The Roof (), in which ‘‘the strong system
which associated the center and outskirts, presented as complementary
entities, vanished, and the picture of towns began to lose focus.’’ 14 Subse-
quently, images of open and formless shantytowns came in to diffuse the
neorealist effort that, through cinematic projection, had sought to make

. Wei Xiaolin, ‘‘Benming nian de renzhi jiazhi’’ (The cognitive value of Black snow),
Film Art, no.  (): .
. In a  essay, Xie Fei emphasized the importance of representing daily life.
Commenting on Raizman’s A Personal Life (), Xie Fei wrote: ‘‘No significant
events, heated dramatic conflicts, and unusual techniques are used. On the contrary,
it vividly depicts a variety of characters, touches profound social problems and phi-
losophies, and is obviously a contemporary product.’’ See Xie Fei, ‘‘My View of the
Concept of Film,’’ trans. Hou Jianping, in Chinese Film Theory: A Guide to the New Era,
ed. George S. Semsel et al., trans. Hou Jianping et al. (New York: Praeger, ), .
. Pierre Sorlin, European Cinemas, European Societies, – (London: Rout-
ledge, ), .
. Ibid., –.
252 Chinese Modern

sense of an expanding urban landscape and the intricate human lives em-
bedded in it. One classic moment of such neorealist clarity can be found
in De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (), where ‘‘extreme depth of field shots
accentuate Ricci’s isolation: when he searches the thief ’s home for traces
of his stolen bicycle, for example, we see in the background most clearly
a neighbor closing her window, as if to cut off all possibility of commu-
nication between Ricci and the thief ’s neighbors.’’ 15
The loss of such all-encompassing visual clarity in the wake of neoreal-
ist cinema, suggests Sorlin, registered a new perception of the European
city, a historical moment in which ‘‘filmmakers ceased to view cities as
potential works of art.’’ 16 Thus, the gradual disappearance of neorealism
may point to a general disavowal of allegorical totalization on the one
hand and of active social engagement on the other. It may even signal
the arrival of a postmodern urban life, for which the source of excite-
ment is no longer the visionary modern city or a neorealist ‘‘aspiration to
change the world.’’ 17 If this fundamentally moral commitment underlies
all forms of the realist ideology, one crucial difference between neoreal-
ism and socialist realism may be no other than the former’s fascination
with, and critical exploration of, the anonymous and multidimensional
modernizing city. Socialist realist cinema, at least its Chinese variant, is
identifiable insofar as the city on a human scale is disallowed. ‘‘The Chi-
nese version of what the Italians called ‘neorealism’ had been a feature
of the ‘golden age’ of Chinese cinema in the late s,’’ remarks Paul
Clark, but it was superseded by socialist realism in the s. As a result,
‘‘the urban tragicomedies and social melodramas of the late s were
replaced by socialist melodramas set in either urban workplaces or the
countryside.’’ 18 In the s, with socialist realism falling into disrepute,
the city and its cinematic possibilities returned to the Chinese screen with
considerable vengeance.
. Bondanella, Italian Cinema from Neorealism to the Present (New York: Unger,
), .
. Sorlin, European Cinemas, .
. After making clear the relationship between the classical realist ideology of the
nineteenth century and neorealism, Millicent Marcus, in his Italian Film in the Light of
Neorealism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ) observes that neoreal-
ism in Italian cinema expressed an ‘‘immediate postwar optimism about the attempt
to shape political reality according to a moral idea’’ ().
. Paul Clark, ‘‘Two Hundred Flowers on China’s Screens,’’ in Perspectives on Chinese
Cinema, –.
 In Search of the Real City 253

What I wish to accomplish through a close reading of Black Snow and

Good Morning, Beijing, is to show that the return of the city in late twen-
tieth-century Chinese cinema once again highlights questions of realism
and social engagement. These two starkly different cinematic representa-
tions of the city of Beijing articulate separate visions of reality and poli-
tics. While in Black Snow our view is constantly immobilized by close-
ups and focal lighting, Good Morning, Beijing moves us with a gratifying
story and fluid cinematography. The city in Good Morning, Beijing, which
may be provisionally described as ‘‘neorealist’’ in style, is amply narrat-
able and eventually comes together as an allegorical social space. In Black
Snow, however, through the prevalent use of limited field-depth cinema-
tography, Xie Fei focuses our gaze on an embattled individual by keeping
his surroundings in a shadowy blur that effectively blocks the city from
ever emerging as a graspable totality.
The dramatic tracking shot at the beginning of Black Snow immediately
sets the chromatic tone and visual structure of the film and establishes
itself as an exemplary moment in a conceivable Beijing noir. Hearing first
a passing train and then solitary but heavy footsteps, we realize that we
are in a dimly lit subway station and following someone, presumably
toward the exit. Then the credits begin to roll, and the hand-held camera
films to the rhythm of someone walking. Soon we see stairways leading
to the ground and a street scene. The person in front of us and at the cen-
ter of the screen, in the light of the exit, shoulders a stuffed knapsack and
wears a bulky coat. Yet the looming, open space is hardly inspiring be-
cause the narrow strip of a wintry sky is an impenetrable gray, and a few
ghostly bystanders all appear to be uniformly blue or of a nondescript
monochrome. As the man (we can assume that by now, judging from his
build and the gender-specific hat he is wearing) is about to fully emerge
from the subway, the camera quickly shifts, and we see him again, from
a slightly downward angle, in some narrow and tortuous lane, which is
hopelessly cut short by another train hissing by at the top of the screen.
It is a virtual shantytown, void of any human presence at the moment.
Then the man walks through a gate, and the camera is noticeably lowered
so that the lane becomes even more oppressive and suffocating. There are
still no human beings in sight, and the overcrowded space is dominated
by an official radio voice announcing first some prohibitive policy and
then a train disaster. The impersonal voice fades away as we turn a cor-
ner, and an old man’s sickly cough, together with a baby’s impatient cry,
254 Chinese Modern

becomes more irrepressible, punctuated only by the sound of flowing tap

water. After yet another unexpected turn, we hear a fragment of softened
pop rock that seems to float listlessly, and when we are sufficiently lost
in this directionless space, the man is suddenly stopped by a fence, and at
the same time the camera comes to a standstill.
But the man quickly pushes open the fence and walks up to a shanty
that shows no signs of life. While he struggles with his key in the lock and
eventually has to break through the door, a compassionate female voice,
probably from a radio next door, gradually replaces the news broadcast
and, in the elegant style of the traditional art of storytelling (pingshu),
either narrates a distant event or proffers a reflective commentary. In fact,
this formulaic but mysteriously soothing voice will remain as the pre-
dominant background sound, as if supplying a slightly sorrowful histori-
cal commentary on present conditions, during the sequence in which the
man enters the room, bumps into a few ill-placed objects, examines the
disorderly surroundings, and finally takes off his hat and gloves. Only
at this moment do we get our first frontal view of him, a sturdy young
man in his mid-twenties. Apparently he knows this place, for very soon
he finds himself a cigarette buried in a drawer and, while searching for
matches, catches sight of a framed picture. He picks up the frame, gazes
into it, and blows hard at the dust gathered on it. At this moment, the
alarmed voice of an old woman comes from off the screen: ‘‘Who is it? Is
it Quanzi?’’
Li Huiquan is the name of the young man, the hero of the film. He has
just returned home after spending about a year in prison, during which
time his mother has died. Now he finds himself back in a desolate room,
all alone, jobless, and facing the task of starting his life anew. Based on
a psychological novel by Liu Heng, the plot of the film is about how
hard, and eventually impossible, it is for Li Huiquan the ex-convict to
assimilate himself back into society and lead a normal life. Unable to
get a job at the factory where his mother used to work, which is now
officially declared bankrupt, Li Huiquan decides to rely on himself and
sets up a stall at a street market to sell shoes and clothes. After a slow
start, his business grows steadily; in the meanwhile, he gets to know
Zhao Yaqiu, an aspiring singer performing part-time in a bar. At the bar,
he also meets Cui Yongli, a shrewd, self-made broker who profits from
clandestine and apparently illegal business deals. While Cui Yongli sup-
plies quantities of popular fashion goods (mostly lingerie), Li Huiquan
 In Search of the Real City 255

occasionally escorts Zhao Yaqiu home after her work. With her charming
innocence she seems to restore in him a sense of being respected and even
needed. Subsequently, she becomes the object of his libidinal desire. Yet
he cannot bring himself to express his tender feelings toward the trusting
young girl; instead, he resorts to masturbation at night. At the same time,
partly thanks to Cui Yongli’s brokering, Zhao Yaqiu becomes relatively
successful and grows increasingly indifferent to the young man whom
she once obviously admired. Then Li Huiquan’s former accomplice and
prison mate, Chazi, descends one night from the skylight window, hun-
gry as a wolf after being on the run from the law for about two weeks.
Chazi’s sudden return devastatingly reminds Huiquan of his own solitary
existence, which makes his advice that Chazi turn himself in ring hollow.
Finally, the fact that Chazi, ruthlessly disowned by his own family, has
to run away from him and for his life, together with the knowledge that
Zhao Yaqiu has become her agent’s mistress, crushes Li Huiquan’s fragile
world. He badly beats up Cui Yongli, and, in a desperate last effort, he
presents the now glamorous Zhao Yaqiu with a gold necklace. His offer
is politely turned down, and after aimlessly roaming into a park at night
Li Huiquan is robbed and then fatally stabbed by two teenagers. In the
film’s last shot, we are given a prolonged look downward at his bent body
lying among waste paper and garbage on the floor of a deserted open-
air theater, which, according to director Xie Fei, constitutes his authorial
comment on the vacuity of a purposeless existence.19
The senseless death at the end certainly appears to attach an anticlimac-
tic conclusion to the narrative. Yet it symbolically brings to completion
the film’s critical reflection on the limits and anxieties of city life. A full
circle of hermeneutical meaning is thus achieved in terms of both nar-
rative and cinematography. As Peng Wen remarks, the unfolding of the
story adopts the pattern of a classical linear narrative, and from Li Hui-
quan’s return (new life) to his death there is a ‘‘complete closure.’’ 20 This
narrative closure is reinforced by a visual as well as auditory imagery that
at the very end recalls the film’s beginning. Here is again a prolonged
and uninterrupted tracking shot of the young man, his back turned to us
and his footsteps echoing hollowly. The movement of the camera sug-
gests unsteady steps, while the muffled and unreal background noise and
. Xie Fei, ‘‘ ‘Di sidai’ de zhengming’’ (The proof of the ‘‘fourth generation’’), Film
Art, no.  (): –.
. Peng Wen, ‘‘Black Snow,’’ .
256 Chinese Modern

laughter of a dispersing theater crowd do not divert our attention from

the dying hero. The image of the public and the public space itself both
fall out of focus and become a grotesque blur. Li Huiquan finally col-
lapses in the empty theater. Through such structural symmetry, this last
moment of arriving at his death and his return in the film’s beginning
powerfully complement each other, the result being a disturbing trans-
gression of given categories and myths about city life. If, at the begin-
ning, Li Huiquan’s coming home can be viewed as returning to an in-
terior hopelessly under surveillance (suggested by the harsh radio voice),
the ending represents a final disconnection between the public and the
private, the environment and its perception by the individual. Only at the
moment of his random death, in a deserted public space, does Li Hui-
quan voicelessly and yet in vain express his individuality and with des-
peration expose the underlying current of loneliness.
Both critics and the filmmaker himself have remarked on the strong
tendency of intellectualizing, obviously in the humanist tradition,
throughout Black Snow.21 The whole style of the film, from its predomi-
nant melancholy, grayish-blue tone to the virtual absence of external
music, reflects the meditative commentary of a sympathetic intellectual. I
wish to argue, however, that it is this philosophical interest in the existen-
tial condition of an individual in the modern city that leads to the blur-
ring of the city itself, which has the cinematographic effect of keeping the
viewer and, by extension, the subject on the screen from gaining a com-
manding perspective on the urban environment and its relationships. The
concerned gaze that the film directs upon the subject and his immediate
surroundings is so intense that the rest of the city has to be kept at a dis-
tance and as an incomprehensible background. In other words, for the
anxiety of the individual subject to be experienced as such, the connec-
tion between him and the city must be revealed as nonexistent, and his
anguish shown as that of one incapable of identifying himself with the

. See, for instance, Chen Xiaoming, ‘‘Daode zijiu: lishi zhouxin de duanlie’’
(Moral self-salvation: the breaking of a historical axis), Film Art, no.  (): .
While describing the difference between Black Snow and his earlier films, Xie Fei em-
phasizes his philosophical beliefs. ‘‘Surely there was some change in my conception,
but in my artistic creation, I as always held dear my ideals, and stayed with my value
judgment as far as the true, the good, and the beautiful versus the false, the evil, and
the ugly in our life experiences are concerned.’’ See Xie, ‘‘The Proof of the ‘Fourth
Generation,’ ’’ .
 In Search of the Real City 257

environment from which he nonetheless cannot escape. ‘‘But let the mis-
hap of disorientation once occur,’’ Kevin Lynch writes when emphasizing
the importance of keeping the city an imageable environment, ‘‘and the
sense of anxiety and even terror that accompanies it reveals to us how
closely it is linked to our sense of balance and well-being.’’ 22
At this point, we may identify a modernist aesthetics of depth in
the film Black Snow. Such an aesthetics is usually articulated with a self-
conscious, if not ideological, exploration of favorite high modernist
themes of interiority, anxiety, experiential authenticity, and frustrated
desire. This ‘‘inward turn’’ that we will discuss in relation to Li Huiquan’s
experience, however, does not carry the same ‘‘politicality’’ or utopian
desire that Fredric Jameson sees underlying the alleged subjectivism in
the classics of Western modernism. ‘‘Modernism’s introspective probing
of the deeper impulses of consciousness, and even of the unconscious
itself,’’ proposes Jameson, ‘‘was always accompanied by a Utopian sense
of the impending transformation or transfiguration of the ‘self ’ in ques-
tion.’’ 23 The anxiety that Xie Fei portrays in his film, while clearly echoing
a modernist introspective probing, is generated less by a blocked utopian
excitement about transforming the self or society than by a profound
uncertainty over the very content of such a transformation. It is a post-
utopian anxiety, in that the interiority explored here resides not so much
in some meaningful transitional linkage between tradition and moder-
nity as in a nonspace rejected by, and excluded from, both the past and
the future. In the interior space encircling Li Huiquan, while memory or
nostalgia offers hardly any comfort, the future is disclaimed with equal
dismay. It is the grim reality of a cagelike present that renders anxiety as
the experience of inescapability and claustrophobia.
Let us return again to the opening shot to further examine the aesthet-
ics of depth in the film as a whole. One reading of that seemingly endless
walk along a tortuous lane in a shantytown is that it suggests the diffi-
cult path through which one arrives at the present. It is a metaphor of
living through twisted history itself. ‘‘If the gray experience of walking
belongs to history,’’ the literary critic Chen Xiaoming comments, ‘‘then
the shabby house as the ‘present tense’ of the narrative is joined with the

. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, Mass.: Technology Press,
), .
. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Dur-
ham, N.C.: Duke University Press, ), .
258 Chinese Modern

‘now’ of the character. This small house therefore becomes the starting
point for Li Huiquan’s self-renewal; it also indicates the end of past his-
tory. As a closed space of existence for an individual and a ‘present’ that
must separate itself from its own history, this house has to resist the out-
side world as much as society.’’ 24 Indeed, what Li Huiquan does here is
walk away from the city, from any form of collectivity, and into his own
interior space. As he moves into the depths of the shantytown, the camera
begins to descend from an encompassing view of the site down to a close
tracking shot of the hero. Very soon, we are brought so close to the per-
son walking in front of us that we can no longer have the initial, although
momentary, coherent perception of the environs. Our understanding of
the situation becomes firmly meshed with Li Huiquan’s vision, which
quickly turns out to be partial and unmediated.25 While the sorry images
of an overcrowded shantytown evoke poverty as the poignant critique
of a failed social project, the failure of the current situation is ultimately
presented—by means of camera angles and an evocative soundtrack—as
a dead-end entrapment. The only escape seems to be Li Huiquan’s home
or his private room, but this much-needed interior holds for the young
man a memory both too painful and too broken to be of any redemptive
value for the present.
This spatial tension, in which depth is embraced out of despair, gives
rise to an existential anxiety and at the same time endows that anxiety
with social criticism. It also generates two related kinds of visual imagery.
The city, when it appears at all, is reduced to fleeting images of empty
streets, noisy traffic, dimly lit back alleys, and pale, cold streetlights. All
of these images irrepressibly suggest Li Huiquan’s unease with the pub-
lic dimension of the city and even his fear of it. In contrast, the interior
into which the individual subject now retreats is continually interrupted
and revealed to be vulnerable. Within this second group of images, we

. Chen Xiaoming, ‘‘Moral Self-Salvation,’’ .

. The ‘‘inward turn’’ or psychologization of experience that I relate here with the
aesthetics of depth can also be observed in the original novel, which opens with Li
Huiquan’s return to his home and a wintry present. Here is Howard Goldblatt’s trans-
lation of the first sentences: ‘‘A fat white guy was squatting in the yard. Li Huiquan, his
knapsack slung over his shoulder, noticed the frosty grin as soon as he walked through
the gate, so he walked over and wiped it off. Chunks of coal for eyes, a chili-pepper
nose, a wastebasket hat—the same stuff he used as a kid.’’ Liu Heng, Black Snow, trans.
Howard Goldblatt (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, ), .
 In Search of the Real City 259

. Film poster, Benming nian (Black snow) (). Courtesy of Zhongguo

dianying ziliao guan, Beijing.

can further distinguish two distinct clusters. One consists of those mid-
range shots of Li Huiquan in his home. Here, the camera always remains
at the hero’s eye level, and, through a zoom lens, as the director Xie Fei
later reminds us, the character is shown in much sharper focus than his
surroundings so as to intensify his psychological isolation.26 Also, invari-
ably, a top light intrudes, which, like the neighbor’s loud radio and TV,
reinforces a sense of both antisociality and voyeuristic surveillance.27
The other cluster of representations of the interior occurs in the bar
(another favorite symbol of modern city life that I comment on below)
where close-ups of a pensive Li Huiquan, usually in the dark but some-
times under a direct top light, are frequently crosscut with luminous and
intensely colorful images of the singer Zhao Yaqiu (figure ). The interi-

. Xie Fie, ‘‘The Proof of the ‘Fourth Generation,’ ’’ .

. See Liu Shuyong, ‘‘Zaoxing zuowei yuyan: qianlun Benming nian de yongguang
chuli’’ (Imaging as language: on the lighting technique in Black snow), Dangdai dian-
ying (Contemporary cinema), no.  (April ): –.
260 Chinese Modern

ority experienced in this situation is of a more emotional nature and is

contrasted to the fluidity and vacuity of popular music as a pliable form.
The visual proximity of a desiring subject to the object of desire actually
underlines the unbridgeable gap between them and forms a disturbing
imagery of an emotional and communicational blockage. The profound
irony is that commodified art now supplies the expression and appropri-
ates the content of the subject’s inmost memory and desire.
If Li Huiquan’s ultimate despair is partly attributable to his inability or
unwillingness to accept the cruel fact that Zhao Yaqiu is, after all, a popu-
lar performer who has to prostitute style for marketability, truthfulness
for a universally appropriable external form, his own political identity—
or, rather, a blatant lack thereof—constitutes his tragic character. An ex-
convict for the crime of aggravated assault, and now the owner of a fash-
ion stall, Li Huiquan finds himself an automatic misfit in a society where
a highly moralistic political culture still dominates, while economic ac-
tivity outside the public sector inevitably smacks of (or rather thrives on)
amorality and even illegality (as embodied by the broker Cui Yongli). One
defining feature of the dominant political culture is its refusal to recog-
nize the complexity of everyday life, in particular its quotidian ordinari-
ness and mundane needs and passions. Because the crime he committed
and the punishment he consequently received appear to be so utterly
‘‘petty’’ in the sense that neither can be explained away by some political
misfortune or injustice and thereby rehabilitated and turned into a source
of honor, Li Huiquan is at once identified as a dismissable outsider and an
invisible member of society. His explosive anger at Chazi’s parents, who
disown their criminal son so as to be accepted by society at large, directly
articulates his frustrated protest against a tightly knit and dehumanizing
social fabric. A stunning representation of Li Huiquan’s social invisibility
comes at the end, when, in that fateful evening in the park, he drags his
wounded body through a complacently indifferent crowd. By now a the-
matic connection is established between Li Huiquan’s ambiguous politi-
cal identity, or the difficulty of narrating his life story, and the blurring
or perceived illegibility of the city on which I commented. The unap-
proachable city, from which Li Huiquan wishes desperately to disengage
himself, becomes the gigantic symbol of a social failure.
 In Search of the Real City 261

Urban Relationships Reconnected

The historical significance of Black Snow in contemporary Chinese cinema

lies in the fact that, better and more focally than other films of the same
genre, it presents the city as a social issue and makes visible the deep
anxiety it simultaneously generates and suppresses. Private interior space
is masterfully shown to be both a necessary shelter and an inescapable
entrapment, while realistic images of stark poverty and disrepair quietly
depict a demoralized collective imagination. The psychological depth,
together with the libidinal frustration, of the individual is sympatheti-
cally explored and turned into a metaphor for the anxious, embattled sub-
ject of a peculiar historical moment—before a repressive political order
ceases to demand homogeneity from members of society, a vibrant mar-
ket economy sets in to instill anonymity and indifference. If the politi-
cal reality is embodied in the gloomy urban landscape (predominantly
the oppressive shantytown), new and rampant commercialism finds its
perfect figuration in the attractive but heartless singer Zhao Yaqiu. The
final death of the hero, therefore, while suggesting a strong social criti-
cism, also drives home the impossibility of dissipating individual anxiety
through any overarching myth or rationalization, which in recent Chi-
nese history has shifted from an egalitarian vision of socialist paradise to
the ideology of economic development and prosperity.
To further understand the politics of such a postutopian anxiety, we
should turn to Good Morning, Beijing, a noticeably different filmic repre-
sentation of contemporary life in that city. Here, in contrast to a blurred
image of the city, we see a continual mapping of the sprawling cityscape;
instead of an aesthetics of depth as social criticism, we find a persistent
temporalization of space, linking different parts of the city through nar-
ratable, individual experiences. In her preproduction exposition of the
film’s theme, director Zhang Nuanxin made it clear that Good Morning,
Beijing would pursue an ‘‘expressive, documentary’’ style to truthfully
reflect the flow of daily life, with a sense of humor and light comedy.
The soundtrack would be mostly live recording, and the color a shade
of pleasantly harmonious gray. Set in a contemporary Beijing awash in
the ‘‘great wave of the market economy,’’ this film would follow everyday
events in the life of a group of young people, but in reality mirror the
contemporary social theme of ‘‘reform and opening up.’’ It should also
262 Chinese Modern

convey a refreshing broadmindedness—‘‘everyone’s pursuit has its ratio-

nality and every attitude to life should be given its due understanding.’’
The director decided to use the title Good Morning, Beijing ‘‘because this
film will present a snapshot of millions of Beijing citizens, depicting the
life of those ordinary people quietly working in the most basic strata of
our society.’’ 28 Consciously or not, Zhang Nuanxin envisioned her movie
largely in terms of a neorealist style of filmmaking, central to which are
semidocumentary techniques and social concerns.29
This preproduction statement, however, should not limit our read-
ing of the film too much because it was a document intended to secure
the film its official approval and funding (in post- China). Still it
does strike the keynote for this public-oriented representation of life in
Beijing. The plot of Good Morning, Beijing may appear complex at first
glance. It centers on a young woman, Ai Hong, who works as a bus con-
ductor, and it follows her successive relationships with three young men:
first, her co-worker Wang Lang, then the bus driver Zou Yongqiang,
and finally the currently unemployed but new-fashioned and imaginative
Keke. She eventually marries Keke and with him starts a private business.
Because Wang Lang has no definable character of his own, Ai Hong’s de-
parture from him is relatively easy to explain, but her break with Zou
Yongqiang, a caring, honest young man who somehow lacks the cour-
age to imagine a different life for them, causes her much soul-searching
(figure ). Her liaisons with and movement among these three very differ-
ent young people have an obviously allegorical importance. They repeat,
as one critic suggests, a classic narrative format in which the female char-
acter, by her departure, either symbolizes negation of an outmoded or
objectionable way of life, or, through her acquiescence or eventual return,

. Zhang Nuanxin, ‘‘Beijing nizao de daoyan chanshu’’ (The director’s thematic ex-
position of Good morning, Beijing), Contemporary Cinema, no.  (December ):
–.
. Acknowledging the formidable difficulty in generalizing about neorealism, Mil-
licent Marcus nonetheless offers a useful description of what constitutes its basic style
and techniques. ‘‘The rules governing neorealist practice would include location
shooting, lengthy takes, unobtrusive editing, natural lighting, a predominance of
medium and long shots, respect for the continuity of time and space, use of contem-
porary, true-to-life subjects, an uncontrived, open-ended plot, working-class protago-
nists, a non-professional cast, dialogue in the vernacular, active viewer involvement,
and implied social criticism’’ (Marcus, Italian Cinema, ).
 In Search of the Real City 263

. Film still, Beijing nizao (Good morning, Beijing) (). Courtesy of

Zhongguo dianying ziliao guan, Beijing.

represents affirmation of a certain value system or accepted ideology.30

In such a narrative tradition, women are made to express rather than cre-
ate value. The value system to which Ai Hong subscribes in the end is
therefore an emergent one associated with the market, which specifically
calls for desirable character qualities such as energy, independence, and
adventurousness. In the film, Keke, who at first pretends to be an over-
seas Chinese and wears a Harvard T-shirt, personifies such a new spirit,
and his enthusiasm and modern lifestyle will help him win Ai Hong away
from a reticent and much-inhibited Zou Yongqiang.
Indeed, the economy of passion in Good Morning, Beijing makes it a
narrative that explicitly participates in an ongoing and large-scale cul-

. Zhang Wei, ‘‘Nüxing de guishu yu lishi qianyi: Beijing nizao de yuyanxing chan-
shi’’ (The position of the woman and historical transformation: an allegorical inter-
pretation of Good morning, Beijing), Contemporary Cinema, no.  (December ):
–. One needs to note here that this reading is heavily influenced by Laura Mulvey’s
critical analysis of classic Hollywood narrative cinema.
264 Chinese Modern

tural revolution through which habits, mentalities, and social structures

will all be systematically transformed so as to legitimate the market as
an important organizing principle of society. It is also a narrative about
social discontent and its mitigation through the introduction of desire.31
Desire becomes a positive social value in the film, not only in that it ex-
presses a putatively collective vision of a different Lebenswelt, but also,
perhaps more crucially, because it sets free the energies and imaginations
of individuals. The engendering of this emancipatory desire is narrated
and at the same time explained in Ai Hong’s departure from Zou Yong-
qiang and her subsequent fascination with Keke, who appears to move in
a more mobile space with unmistakable signs of modernity (taxis, night-
clubs, Western-style grocery stores, and general sociability). (The social
content of such a desire can be gauged from the fact that, although this
can be read as a conventional triangular love story, ‘‘love’’ is never pro-
nounced as of major significance in the plot’s unfolding. On the contrary,
Ai Hong’s affair and eventual marriage with Keke, an odd twist, are aux-
iliary means for her to discover and assert her own new identity.) As a
direct opposite to Keke, Zou Yongqiang belongs to a conformist world
in which filial duty and respect for his superior combine to demand from
him gratitude and, at the same time, provide him with a sense of secu-
rity. He lives with his parents in an overcrowded Beijing courtyard where
his mother has to continually cut short his only expression of individu-
ality (playing the traditional Chinese violin and later the guitar) out of
consideration for the neighbors. Unlike Keke, he shops in a featureless
department store, and he expresses his affection for Ai Hong by buying
her a practical skirt, whereas Keke enchants her with a Walkman and a
tape of American rock and roll.
Thus, these two rivals for Ai Hong’s affection are highly symbolic fig-
ures, each representing a separate social reality and cultural logic. Yet the
residual and the emergent conditions of existence, if we wish to so under-
stand the symbolism here, are engaged in a rhetoric of compromise and
tolerance. The ideological emphasis placed on compromise renders un-
tenable a facile dichotomy of tradition versus modernity that seems to
suggest itself here as an interpretative framework. On the contrary, this
rhetoric of compromise enables the film to sympathetically portray Zou

. It is interesting to note that in its subtitled English-language version, the film is
given a much more suggestive title, Budding Desires.
 In Search of the Real City 265

Yongqiang’s frustration, the grave social-historical (dis)content of which

is now effectively displaced as momentary personal misfortune. As direc-
tor Zhang Nuanxin puts it, even though he cannot, primarily emotion-
ally, identify with the dominant Zeitgeist of the market, Zou Yongqiang
maintains his decency and worthiness and continues to work and con-
tribute to society.32 At the same time, Keke is transformed in the process
from a conspicuous consumer of urban culture back into a productive
member of society. The film’s concluding sequence brings together all
the major characters in a dramatic moment when Ai Hong, now an ap-
parently successful self-employed businesswoman, and her husband get
onto the bus that Zou Yongqiang still drives and on which Wang Lang
still works as a conductor. After a brief and polite exchange of greetings,
Zou Yongqiang turns around and starts the bus. Slowly, the camera pulls
back to show all four very different young people aboard the same bus
peacefully moving along a sunny street in Beijing.
This comforting moment of rapprochement, we are told by a subtitle
on the screen, arrives one year after the main action of the film. In this
rich final image, the element of time is as important as the central message
about the ineluctable coexistence of different modes of production. Time
here signifies change, progress, and a healing process as well. Time also
becomes identified with the future, or rather with some utopian projec-
tions from the present. Actually, even at the beginning of the film, where
we are shown Ai Hong still in bed one early morning, time as a major fac-
tor is introduced emphatically when the ticking alarm clock goes off. It is
time for the young bus conductor to go to work, and the whole interior
space is thus redefined and forced open by a universal clock time. Un-
like Black Snow, where time is subjectivized and locked into a depressing
present, Good Morning, Beijing is a film about the multiple and contradic-
tory temporal flows in the space of the enormous city. Spatial structures,
locations, and relations now acquire a temporal, historical significance to
the extent that we can speak of a socially produced ‘‘spatiality’’ which,
according to Edward Soja, ‘‘like society itself, exists in both substantial
forms (concrete spatialities) and as a set of relations between individuals
and groups, an ‘embodiment’ and medium of social life itself.’’ 33 Through

. Zhang Nuanxin, ‘‘The Director’s Thematic Exposition,’’ .

. Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social
Theory (London: Verso, ), .
266 Chinese Modern

the narrative of the film, the uneven and multidimensional spatial rela-
tions are mapped and reconnected, and the city of Beijing is brought
together as an imaginable totality, as a fascinating collection of images of
various social realities that simultaneously exist and interact.
So a central plot in Good Morning, Beijing is the movement from the
initial spatiotemporal structure of a confining domestic interior (under-
lined by the close-up shot of a cage with an impatient bird chirping in it)
to an open cityscape that is emphatically contemporary and moderniz-
ing. Of particular interest in the opening sequence is a stark ‘‘crudeness’’
of the interior space—crude surfaces as well as crude conditions of exis-
tence. In this cramped room we realize that life has to be reduced to its
bare necessities; it is an enclosed space kept flat and public by the absence
of any refinement or the possibility of privacy. It becomes a most efficient
extension of the workplace because ‘‘home’’ now stands less for separa-
tion from work than for a direct reproduction of labor. When at home,
Ai Hong, as we see later, also has the task of taking care of her invalid
grandpa. She readies coal for heating, fixes the exhaust pipe with the help
of Zou Yongqiang, and, in the same room where her grandpa lies in bed
year round, she prepares porridge for him and washes her hands in a basin
next to the window. The same embarrassing experience of scarcity is even
more pointedly represented at Zou Yongqiang’s home, where, in his par-
ents’ makeshift bedroom, the whole family eats supper and watches 
while the father soaks his feet in a basin of warm water. At the end of din-
ner the son’s duty is to take the basin, walk through a dark hallway, and
drain the water into a public sink located in the courtyard.
In isolation, such images of impoverishment and severely constrained
conditions of existence would not necessarily mean social criticism or cul-
tural commentary. On the contrary, scarce and overcrowded domestic
space would only appear ‘‘natural’’ or ‘‘realistic’’ enough, since some pub-
lic places to which the camera brings us (such as the bus company head-
quarters, the police station, and the hospital) have surfaces and structures
no less shabby and perfunctory. A Third World condition—here the term
is used strictly to refer to generalized inadequate living conditions and a
preindustrial, underdeveloped socioeconomic infrastructure—can hardly
be grasped as such unless defamiliarized by images of, or references to, a
different, more advanced stage of modernization. In Good Morning, Bei-
jing, as we will see momentarily, the Third Worldness of the city is can-
didly acknowledged, together with its explicitly anticipated changeover.
 In Search of the Real City 267

It is extremely significant, however, that the Third World condition pre-

sented by the film carries with it not so much mere self-loathing (would
that be politically incorrect?) or self-glorification (would that be politi-
cally correct?) as an almost restless utopian desire for self-transformation.
In this sense, the film as a Third World production is also conscientiously
for a Third World audience, insofar as an undesirable present condition
of existence is both represented as an immediate collective reality and his-
toricized as some fast-vanishing remnant of a better future.34
Consequently, the series of images that reveals an impoverished every-
day life acquires its historical content when it is juxtaposed with a differ-
ent sequence, a different set of spatiotemporal structures. We may even
argue that history, or a historical understanding of contemporary Bei-
jing, becomes accessible precisely when this juxtaposition of different spa-
tial realities and relationships is employed as a strategy of characterizing
an incomplete, in-progress present condition. One way to describe this
spatial coexistence or simultaneity could be the architectural notion of
‘‘a collage city,’’ where ‘‘disparate objects (are) held together by various
means’’ to form a composite presence.35 In the film, the city of Beijing
does become fragmented into a collage of various sites, rhythms, and in-
tensities, but the movements through the city of the characters, in par-
ticular Ai Hong, reconnect all these obviously discontinuous moments.
Thus, there is still the possibility of narrating one’s story in the city, of
presenting a spatial experience in temporal terms. As an apt symbol of
collective practice, the moving bus, where much of the movie’s action
takes place, provides an ideal vehicle for linking up different parts and

. There is another group of films in contemporary Chinese cinema whose cul-
tural ‘‘Third Worldness’’ is marketed primarily to First World film audiences. Films by
Zhang Yimou ( Ju Dou, ; Raise the Red Lantern, ) seem to be favorite samples
of this group.
. Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
), –. I would like to point out that Rowe and Koetter’s vision of a ‘‘col-
lage city’’ expresses a typical postmodernist sensibility and ideology. ‘‘Collage city’’ is
offered as a solution to the anxiety generated by both utopia and tradition: ‘‘because
collage is a method deriving its virtue from its irony, because it seems to be a tech-
nique for using things and simultaneously disbelieving in them, it is also a strategy
which can allow utopia to be dealt with as image, to be dealt with in fragments with-
out our having to accept it in toto, which is further to suggest that collage could even
be a strategy which, by supporting the utopian illusion of changelessness and finality,
might even fuel a reality of change, motion, action and history’’ ().
268 Chinese Modern

functions of Beijing. From here we see images of Beijing as a political

center (Tiananmen Square), a rapidly modernizing metropolis (all-glass
high-rises), and an overpopulated Third World city (business districts
and shopping streets). In a sense, the moving bus serves as a clever self-
reflection on the rolling camera and our viewing experience.
It is, however, Ai Hong’s experiences as an individual subject who
strives to change her own historical situation that endow the city with a
humanizing narratability and a spatiotemporal coherence. We first see her
get up early in the morning, run through the empty lane of the neighbor-
hood, and hop onto Wang Lang’s bicycle to go to work. Working on the
bus is a demanding job, but she gets to meet and observe people. (Here,
the bus is also a substitute for modern city streets, bound to be occupied
by what Walter Benjamin once called an ‘‘amorphous crowd of passers-
by.’’) 36 One day her friend Ziyun comes onto the bus and proudly tells
her that she now works as a typist for a joint-venture company. At her
invitation, Ai Hong decides to pay her friend a visit and subsequently
finds herself inside a business office on the sixteenth floor of a guarded
building. This is one of those standardized, new international-style offices
(polyester carpet, air-conditioning, and low ceilings), equipped with
word processors, contemporary furniture, and a coffeemaker. The most
astonishing feature of this claustrophobic office, when we recall Ai
Hong’s home as well as her workplace, are the smooth white walls and
shiny objects. The glass coffee table quietly reflects, the sofa extends a
comfortably curvaceous line, and the steel sink gives forth a hygienic sil-
ver glare. This interior space is totally alien to Ai Hong, and at first she
appears intimidated. The polished surface not only outlines a new form
of labor no longer associated with bodily discomfort or endurance, but
it also suggests a simplification of social relationships to those of an im-
personal ‘‘cash nexus.’’ Rather fittingly, in this seemingly depthless space,
Ziyun, with her own experience, calmly illustrates to her awestruck friend
some fundamental aspects of modern urban life: contingency and mo-
bility.37
This modern office space can also be taken as an instance of the post-

. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken
Books, ), .
. While putting on makeup in the office lavatory, Ziyun tells Ai Hong that even
though her salary is handsome, she has no job security; then, when asked about her
boyfriend, she replies that they split up because ‘‘it was too demanding for both of us.’’
 In Search of the Real City 269

. Film still, Beijing nizao (Good morning, Beijing) (). Courtesy
of Zhongguo dianying ziliao guan, Beijing.

modern ‘‘relief ’’ that a world of smooth objects may promote.38 If it has a

shattering effect on Ai Hong because it exposes as ‘‘premodern’’ or ‘‘yet-
to-be-modernized’’ the shabbiness of her own world, it also initiates a
readjustment of her relation to the city. Her eyes are suddenly opened,
as it were, and she is able to experience and perceive the city as an enor-
mous spatiotemporal structure that energetically produces a wide range
of social realities and personal identities. In the following sequences, we
see Ai Hong enjoy Korean food at a fancy restaurant with Zou Yongqiang
and a friend of his; we see her wander into an upper-grade grocery store
and find herself followed by an admirer who introduces himself as Keke
(figure ). Soon, she and Keke go to a nightclub where he performs with
passionate emotion and dedicates a song to her. At the end of that eve-
ning, he takes her home in a taxi. Finally, as a high point of their romantic
affair, and also to divert Ai Hong from her work, Keke suggests that they
leave the city and go on a vacation. This series of concrete and very often
discontinuous spatialities demands that Ai Hong constantly map and re-

. See Jameson, Postmodernism, –.

270 Chinese Modern

map the city in order to achieve a coherent perception of both herself and
her environment. Indeed, instead of being incapacitated by this new spa-
tial multiplication, Ai Hong insists on keeping the city a legible human
space by heroically redesigning herself and rewriting her own story. Her
narrative therefore presupposes the possibility of becoming, and it is this
conviction that supports a profound optimism about social change and
self-transformation, personal as well as collective. In this light, the brief
trip that Ai Hong and Keke make to some historical site (now a popular
tourist attraction) away from Beijing becomes a significant move. It re-
introduces historical time as the untranscendable horizon of experience,
and it localizes—albeit in its absence—the city as a reality with reachable
limits.
Our reading therefore suggests that the spatiotemporal structure
underlying the narrative of Good Morning, Beijing remains resolutely ac-
cessible to representation, in spite of all apparent conflicts and disjunc-
tures. Ai Hong’s story can be read as a narrative of the birth of urban
individualism and self-consciousness, and her spatial movement in the
city at once reveals and reconnects the complexity of social structures and
relations, whether public or private, emergent or residual. Not surpris-
ingly, the cinematic images we witness here are eventually controlled and
organized by the subject, rather than the other way around. Unlike in
postmodern cinema, where representation, according to David Harvey’s
persuasive analysis, runs into crisis because of a pervasive ‘‘time-space
compression’’ engendered by a late capitalism of flexible accumulation,39
Good Morning, Beijing, as a visual representation, is still fascinated by the
seemingly infinite possibilities and frontiers promised by a modernizing
metropolis. If one dominant theme of postmodern cinema, as Harvey
shows through his readings of Blade Runner and Wings of Desire (respec-
tively about Los Angeles and Berlin), is an impossible conflict ‘‘between
people living on different time scales, and seeing and experiencing the
world very differently as a result,’’ 40 what we find in this particular Chi-
nese film is rather a ‘‘neorealist’’ arranging of urban relations and a uto-
pian resolution of conflicts arising from city life. By continually moving
its characters across the uneven urban landscape, Good Morning, Beijing
evokes the city itself as an intimate participant that quietly justifies their
. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural
Change (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, ), .
. Ibid., .
 In Search of the Real City 271

endeavors and aspirations. It is a film that refuses to let close-up images

of the city blur its organizational logic and multiple functions, or to allow
the city to disappear as a mappable totality. Its general visual clarity, en-
hanced by continual shots with great depth of field, mirrors the film-
maker’s effort to influence and shape our understanding of the changing
city.
By way of conclusion, I wish to bring together and compare the dif-
ferent political visions in Black Snow and Good Morning, Beijing. Both
films feature a pivotal scene in a lively nightclub. In Black Snow, Li Hui-
quan as a member of the audience is painstakingly separated from the solo
singer, both visually and emotionally. But when Ai Hong and Keke in
Good Morning, Beijing go to a bar with live music, Keke joins the band
and asks to participate. He sings and dedicates to Ai Hong a popular
song by rock star Cui Jian, which Ai Hong will also learn to sing, even
though she appears to be at a loss when hearing the song for the first
time. The interpretation that I would propose, if only too schematically,
is that these two different moments express two approaches to the city
that are at odds with each other. If we characterize the politics of Black
Snow as a refusal and contemplation by means of a modernist aesthetics
of depth, the rhetoric of compromise in Good Morning, Beijing necessarily
valorizes cultural and political participation, which in turn articulates the
legitimating ideology of a growing market economy. Whereas the market
economy arrives to present an open city to Ai Hong and her contempo-
raries, some deep (well-nigh instinctive) suspicion of the market triggers
Li Huiquan’s anxious, and to a large extent forced, retreat to interiority.
In one case, neorealist techniques are used to rationalize the moderniza-
tion project, while in the other a hypertrophy of modernist subjectivity
emits uncompromising social criticism. Herein lies the cognitive value of
Black Snow, which may be realized only with critical reflection on the part
of the viewer.
These two significantly contradistinct political visions and cinematic
languages hardly escaped the notice of the Chinese audience when Black
Snow and Good Morning, Beijing were released in  and , respec-
tively. They were quickly recognized as representative works of the rising
city cinema. While Black Snow enjoyed the rare distinction of winning
both domestic and international honors (Best Picture at the Thirteenth
National Hundred Flowers Awards and the Silver Bear Prize at the Berlin
Film Festival), Good Morning, Beijing was a remarkable box-office suc-
272 Chinese Modern

cess. Quoting Cesare Zavattini, the theorist of Italian neorealist cinema,

an enthusiastic commentator commended the second film for truthfully
capturing contemporary everyday life in the ancient capital city and in
the process revealing a deeper historical meaning.41 At the same time, the
critical recognition of Black Snow caused considerable uneasiness among
mainstream critics and media. A brief essay in Popular Cinema, appear-
ing next to Lei Da’s endorsement of Good Morning, Beijing, sought to
explain why the Hundred Flowers Award won by Black Snow did not
mean that the film is flawless. In fact, the essayist denounced the film as
deeply flawed because, in spite of its artistic achievements, ‘‘it does not
find (or does not want to find) a new worldview and a new character
that new social forces, who represent a new mode of social production,
ought to possess.’’ 42 It would be an involved task to unpack the loaded
discourse and ideological stances here. Suffice it to say that at stake are
some profoundly unresolved questions about artistic and social forms,
about representation and engagement, all of which these two films suc-
ceed in bringing to the fore by evoking separate intellectual and aesthetic
traditions. If our analysis of their indebtedness to either modernism or
neorealism shows both films to be an ideological intervention, it should
also be clear that we cannot dismiss one on the account of the other.
Rather, these two films should be viewed together, and perhaps between
them we will begin to approach the impossible urban reality signified by
Beijing.

. See Lei Da, ‘‘Dangda dushi fengjing xian: tan yingpian Beijing nizao’’ (Con-
temporary urban landscape: about the film Good morning, Beijing), Dazhong dianying
(Popular cinema), no.  (December ): –.
. See Zheng Shu, ‘‘Xie zai Benming nian huojiang zhihou’’ (Afterthoughts on
Black snow winning the award), Popular Cinema, no.  (December ): .
9
New Urban Culture and the Anxiety of Everyday
Life in Late-Twentieth-Century China

There is no question that in contemporary China a market economy is

finally prevailing, and with irresistible force is penetrating into every fiber
of social life, fueling an explosive capitalist Great Leap Forward thus far
unmatched in modern Chinese history. No question, either, that a post-
socialist consumerism has, as Theodor Adorno would say, turned the
commodity form into an ideology of its own and even skillfully capital-
ized on the bygone revolutionary age and its passionate utopianism. It is
not surprising at all, for instance, to see middle-aged ‘‘budding tycoons
. . . dining on peasant fare like cornmeal cakes and rice gruel in one
of several new Beijing restaurants serving Cultural Revolution () cui-
sine.’’ 1 Retro-Maoist cuisine aside, those ingenious ideas to cash in on the
one-hundredth anniversary of Mao Zedong’s birth, whether officially en-
dorsed or not, serve as yet another good case in point. When such robust
commercialism and entrepreneurialism eventually make inroads into the
traditionally ideological front of the socialist regime, namely, the realm
of centralized cultural production, we hear an almost audible sigh of re-
lief, a not-so-quiet celebration of the demise of overpoliticization and the
end of Ideology. The market is welcomed in general by writers and artists
alike as a liberating agency, and the implied personal autonomy, perhaps
more than artistic freedom, greatly excites the imagination of generations
of state-employed ‘‘cultural workers,’’ who have been frustrated by a ‘‘vel-
vet prison’’ for too long.2 Already, even from afar, we witness a ‘‘young

. See Newsweek,  January , . Zhu Kunnian, the owner of a husk-strewn -
style restaurant, is quoted here as saying: ‘‘We’re not nostalgic for Mao, per se. We’re
nostalgic for our youth.’’ See also Catherine Sampson, ‘‘Retro Maoist Cuisine Is a Hit
in China,’’ Wall Street Journal,  February , A.
. For instance, in an interview, Chen Jiangong, an established Beijing writer, ar-
gues that the speed at which literature and art enter the market has been unsatisfyingly
slow. ‘‘No doubt that the market is a strange thing to us, and writers and publishers
need to be more imaginative in this aspect.’’ See Yan Xinjiu, ‘‘Zhongguo zuojia kan shi-
274 Chinese Modern

and restless’’ literary production that bears only the faintest resemblance
to the moralism and heroism glossing the works from the age of socialist
realism.3 Instead, ‘‘shock value’’ is quickly recognized and cherished as an
effective marketing strategy. At the same time, the great divide between
so-called popular or mass culture and serious or elite culture is resurfac-
ing, and together they highlight features of a culture that, as a whole,
is openly entangled with the desires and frustrations provoked by rapid
modernization.
The complexity of the situation can hardly be understood simply in
terms of the marketization of a centrally planned economy in general and
ideologically controlled cultural production in particular. The staggering
demand for mass cultural products and kitsch also seems to stem from
more sources than the direct lure of consumerism. One way to gauge the
transformation is to realize the extent to which the city has arrived to
occupy the center stage in cultural orientation and the social imaginary.
The way for the current economic boom was first paved by the ‘‘house-
hold responsibility system’’ in agriculture (implemented in the late s)
and was boosted by large-scale absorption of foreign and transnational
investment capital in the ‘‘special economic zones’’ along the coastal area.
But it is the emergence and flourishing of what economists and social
engineers call ‘‘village and township enterprises’’ that have probably ef-
fected the most profound impact on the country’s social and geographical
landscape. Acting both as trading posts and locations of export-oriented
light industry, hundreds of thousands of such enterprises help to channel
an enormous surplus labor force from the countryside into the market as
well as into the industrial sector. As a result, ‘‘agricultural diversification
and rural enterprises have reduced the urban-rural gap,’’ even though, as

chang’’ (Chinese writers converse on the market), Zhongguo qingnian (Chinese youth)
(February ): . All ten writers interviewed, among them Liu Heng, Wang Zengqi,
and Wang Meng, believe that the market mechanism provides a new opportunity for
literature and art (–). The term ‘‘velvet prison’’ comes from the Hungarian writer
Miklós Haraszti, The Velvet Prison: Artists Under Socialism, trans. Katalin and Stephen
Landesmann, with the help of Steve Wasserman (New York: Basic Books, ).
. See Howard Goldblatt’s book review, ‘‘The Young and the Restless,’’ Los Angeles
Times, Sunday,  September . In these young writers, such as Liu Heng, Su Tong,
and Mo Yan, Goldblatt observes a ‘‘common thread of misanthropy’’ and an ‘‘emphasis
on skewed family relations and anti-Confucian behavior, which includes incest, rape,
murder, voyeurism and more.’’
 New Urban Culture 275

a bitter result, ‘‘total regional disparity throughout China has probably

widened.’’ 4
As one Chinese commentator has argued in favor of this development,
world historical experience has shown that the modernization project in-
variably involves marketization, industrialization, and urbanization; and
recent Chinese history has also demonstrated the necessity of making a
final transition from the country to the city, from the rural to the urban.5
Indeed, this new wave of massive urbanization comes as a direct rever-
sal of the official policies of the socialist period, the ethos of which in
hindsight appears to have been persistently resistant to the ‘‘dissocia-
tion of sensibility’’ accompanying modernization. During the s and
s the ideologically sanctioned method of overcoming the difference
between town and country, for instance, was to suppress nonfarm em-
ployment or deurbanize society as a whole. A deeply entrenched agrarian
tradition helped to justify an essentially antiurban policy of moderniza-
tion without urbanization, for urbanism was more often than not iden-
tified and condemned as the embodiment of evil modern capitalism.6
The alternative vision of a Third World modernity saw itself in terms of
self-reliance, strategic industrialization, and a negation of market forces,
international as well as domestic. The socialist cities, at least in theory,
‘‘should become Spartan and productive places with full employment,
secure jobs with a range of fringe benefits, minimal income and life style

. Sen-dou Chang and R. Yin-Wang Kwok, ‘‘The Urbanization of Rural China,’’ in

R. Yin-Wang Kwok et al., eds., Chinese Urban Reform: What Model Now? (Armonk,
N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, ), .
. For a semiofficial statement, see Gou Shi, ‘‘Jiakuai nongcun chengshihua jin-
cheng’’ (Speed up the urbanization of the countryside), Zhongguo jingji tizhi gaige
(China’s economic system reform), no.  (November ): . For a comprehensive
case study, see Yia-Ling Liu, ‘‘Reform from Below: The Private Economy and Local
Politics in the Rural Industrialization of Wenzhou,’’ China Quarterly  (June ):
–.
. See, for instance, essays collected in Victor F. S. Sit, ed., Chinese Cities: The
Growth of the Metropolis Since  (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ). In his
introduction, Sit lists a few articles of interest here: L. J. C. Ma, ‘‘Counterurbaniza-
tion and Rural Development: The Strategy of Hsia-Hsiang,’’ Current Scene :
(): –; A. Koshizawa, ‘‘China’s Urban Planning: Towards Development With-
out Urbanization,’’ Developing Economies (): –; C. P. Cell, ‘‘Deurbanization of
China: The Urban Contradiction,’’ Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars , no.  ():
–.
276 Chinese Modern

differences, an end to conspicuous consumption and lavish spending, and

with decent consumption standards for all.’’ 7 Consequently, postsocialist
urbanization means not merely a physical transformation of the previ-
ously rural landscape but also the institution of social values, such as mo-
bility, privacy, and diversity, that are associated with life in the modern
city. The consumer city, in place of the discredited model of producer
cities, reasserts itself as the dominant center of a new political economy
and should offer us a clue to the logic of Chinese culture in the age of
global capitalism.
This emergent urban culture, as can be expected, exhibits many recog-
nizable features, if not caricatures, of modern metropolises in the West.
In this sense, a sprawling city such as Guangzhou or Shanghai grows to
be more and more part of the global, standardized geography of mod-
ernization.8 As in many other parts of the world, high-rises have erupted
here, standing for financial capacity and stability, often with a transna-
tional connection, and beltways have been hastily extended to ease traffic
congestion and push the sound and the fury of the city beyond the given
boundary. With heavy smog hanging as a permanent backdrop, street-
side billboards and advertisements stylistically reminiscent of the Cultural
Revolution’s visual regime neatly block the view and aggressively demand
consumers’ attention; leisure time for the city dweller quickly turns into
a busy search for entertainment and diversion. As evening falls, loud and
color-splashing karaoke bars dutifully supply sentiment and expression
to the fashionable and adventurous, and the milling crowd, as in all big
cities, takes pride in being indifferent and anonymous. Nevertheless, a
faceless  or  talk-radio host will reach out to comfort lonely souls
and will assume, with enthusiasm, the time-honored role of a match-
maker in the middle of the night. McDonald’s or Pizza Hut may add a
welcome cosmopolitan flavor to daily staple food, whereas home-grown

. Martin King Whyte and William L. Parish, Urban Life in Contemporary China
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), . Whyte and Parish’s book is a com-
prehensive study of the structure and content of city life during the socialist period.
. I wish to emphasize that contemporary Chinese urban culture can and should be
subjected to the same classic scrutiny and creative analyses that we find in the writings
of Georg Simmel, Emile Durkheim, Walter Benjamin, Kevin Lynch, and Raymond
Williams. Their critical insights into the modern city and its culture will prove to be
an indispensable basis for any credible urban studies in contemporary China.
 New Urban Culture 277

 sitcoms—in ever-greater doses and punctuated by imposing commer-

cials—adroitly spice up an otherwise increasingly routine and eventless
life.
A more ominous view of such reckless urbanization, in the opinion of
a Newsweek reporter, is the arrival of ‘‘nightmare cities,’’ overstretched by
the growing number of ethnic peasant ghettos—‘‘virtual Chinatowns in
China.’’ With ‘‘tidal waves of humanity’’ rolling from the vast inland to
the more prosperous coastal cities, ‘‘China will be presented with vast
breeding grounds of urban unrest.’’ 9 This dark vision undoubtedly calls
our attention to the stark reality of city life in China, a brewing area for
new forms of class, gender, and ethnic conflicts. But the very monstrosity
of ‘‘nightmare cities’’ also bespeaks, even if negatively, the fact that the
city has moved onto the center stage of contemporary Chinese cultural
and political life. ‘‘A terrible beauty,’’ as William Butler Yeats would say,
is once again being born.
To all appearances, everyday urban life as normalcy now seems success-
fully instituted; for good reason, this is celebrated as a genuine cultural
revolution in late twentieth-century China. Interestingly enough, this
normalcy, which comes in the wake of a massive socialist experiment, can
be readily theorized as well as rationalized through Marxian terminology.
It is not at all difficult, for instance, for the general social discourse to
grasp that the market is the operating logic behind everyday urban life.
The Janus face of the market, both a liberating ‘‘angel’’ and a destruc-
tive ‘‘devil,’’ is very much accepted as a necessary reality principle. Thus,
an article that appropriately appears in the ‘‘Think Tank for the Coming
Century’’ section in Chinese Youth, a popular magazine published by the
League of Communist Youth, asserts: ‘‘The market economy is an ‘angel,’
because it transforms the world into a colorful place; it is also a ‘devil’
because it puts existing values and social order in complete disarray. In
the words of Karl Marx, this means a revolution in the realms of poli-
tics, consciousness, spirit, and morality.’’ 10 According to the article’s au-
thor, the market economy will introduce a complete renewal of Chinese
society in terms of its social organization. With the market as a leveling

. George Wehrfritz, ‘‘Nightmare Cities,’’ Newsweek,  December , –.

. Xu Weixin, ‘‘Shichang jingji jiang shi Zhongguo shehui quanmian gengxin’’
(The market economy will completely renew Chinese society), Chinese Youth (August
): .
278 Chinese Modern

mechanism, the individual will be freed from total dependence on and

control by the work unit, and the work unit in turn will itself be released
from the rigid bureaucratic hierarchy. Another desirable consequence is
that social life will be less politicized because society at large will become
pluralized and politics will cease to provide the only meaningful content.
Chinese society as a whole, concludes the author, is bidding farewell to a
past in which politics dominated all details of everyday life. The new era
of ‘‘open and plural development,’’ propelled by the market, will usher in
a younger, more energetic, and more colorful society.11
As optimistic an assessment as that may be, the article nonetheless
brings to our attention a central feature of twentieth-century Chinese
revolutionary culture, and, at the same time, it sheds light on the making
of contemporary urban culture. The author describes the social reality
that the new market economy will help to dismantle as either the ‘‘tra-
ditional socialist system’’ or simply the ‘‘traditional system.’’ This tradi-
tional social organization valorizes communality, hierarchy, and ideo-
logical homogeneity, all of which contribute to an impoverishment of
everyday life. This impoverishment takes the form of moralizing feelings,
social relations, and quotidian routines; it is thus an impoverishment
paradoxically sustained by an immense richness in political meanings and
consequentialities. The ultimate injunction of this mode of social life is
stated in a slogan popular during the radical s: ‘‘Make a revolution in
the depths of your soul.’’ 12 With such an imperative for ethical politics,
everyday life is not without its excitement or content; on the contrary,
it is nothing but ritualized content, and it can be full of pious passion
and longings. With ideology or political identity as its sole content or
depth, everyday life is organized, rendered meaningful, and effectively
reduced in form. This constitutes what Agnes Heller, following George
Lukács, has described as an ‘‘emergence’’ from everyday life through ho-
mogenization, more specifically a ‘‘moral homogenization,’’ the criteria
of which are ‘‘concentration on the given objective, subordination to it

. Ibid., –. Xu’s conclusion concurs with Gordon White’s well-documented
analysis that the spread of market relations has effectively ‘‘created the basis of, and
context for, new forms of sociopolitical participation and organization, to varying de-
grees independent of and/or in opposition to the Party/state.’’ See White, Riding the
Tiger: The Politics of Economic Reform in Post-Mao China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, ), .
. In Chinese, the slogan usually goes ‘‘Linghun shenchu nao geming.’’
 New Urban Culture 279

of everyday activities, even their partial or total suspension.’’ 13 Although

Heller acknowledges that ‘‘everyday life could not be reproduced with-
out the heterogeneous human activities,’’ she, as much as Lukács, empha-
sizes the process of homogenization as collective creation or re-creation
for the ‘‘objectivation’’ of human ‘‘species-essentiality.’’ 14 Put differently,
the heterogeneous forms of everyday life can be transcended or emerged
from only when they are endowed with the content of homogenized
social relations and pursuits.
A collective desire to resist the inertia of everyday life was an integral
part of the grand socialist movement in modern China. Moreover, the
same desire, which Agnes Heller characterizes as the ‘‘necessity of phi-
losophy’’ after religion, has been universally experienced in the age of
modernity. After all, modernization arrives only when instrumental rea-
son secures a desacralization of the human as well as the natural world
and when a secular ordinary life is affirmed to be equally providential
and indispensable to human identity. The humanist culture of moder-
nity, according to Charles Taylor, affirms the full human life ‘‘in terms
of labour and production, on one hand, and marriage and family life
on the other.’’ 15 Against such massive democratization or cultural level-
ing, various modernisms, conservative or radical, arise in protest and ‘‘in
the search for sources which can restore depth, richness, and meaning to
life.’’ 16 The modernist aspiration of writers like T. S. Eliot or D. H. Law-
rence, observes Taylor, ‘‘is usually made more urgent by the sense that
our modern fragmented, instrumentalist society has narrowed and im-
poverished our lives.’’ 17 To emerge from this secularized everyday life, to
transform the ordinary life into the good life, therefore, is as much a mod-
ernist desire as a critique of modernity. This antimodern and yet modern-
ist rejection of everyday life seems to be a deeply embedded impulse of
the revolutionary culture in modern China, which often expresses itself
in the Maoist utopian longing for a full and complete life. The success of

. Agnes Heller, Everyday Life, trans. G. L. Campbell (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, ), .
. See ibid., –.
. Charles Taylor, ‘‘Part III: The Affirmation of Ordinary Life,’’ in Sources of the
Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
), .
. Ibid., .
. Ibid., .
280 Chinese Modern

such a politics of utopia, however, can perhaps be measured only in its

failure, in its negation by late twentieth-century consumerism and mass
culture, which, I wish to argue, in fact helps to retroactively release the
utopian potency of a revolutionary tradition. ‘‘In terms of political posi-
tions and ideologies,’’ as Fredric Jameson comments on the failed radical
traditions in literature and culture, ‘‘all the radical positions of the past
are flawed, precisely because they failed. . . . What they achieved, how-
ever, was something rather different from achieved positivity; they dem-
onstrated, for their own time and culture, the impossibility of imagining
Utopia.’’ 18
To demonstrate that a deep utopian impulse of the Chinese revolution-
ary culture is to overcome ordinary everyday life would be a complex pro-
cess, and it probably could be achieved only negatively, namely, through
an examination of signifying absences. The four general developments that
Charles Taylor believes to have contributed to the culture of modernity,
for example, could be a useful point of departure in a cultural studies ap-
proach: the new valuation of commerce, the rise of the novel, the chang-
ing understanding of marriage and the family, and the new importance
of sentiment.19 We would likely find in the revolutionary tradition a sys-
tematic suppression or reorientation of these activities that would have
helped to affirm and define a secular everyday life. A persisting paradox
here is that the fuller life envisioned by Maoist social engineering reflects
both an essentially agrarian imagination and a fascination with modern
industrial power, both an egalitarian commitment to social harmony and
an almost aristocratic refusal of the mundane and the physical.
From such a vision of the good life, which valorizes completeness and
transcendence, is derived an aesthetics of scale rather than of detail, for
immediacy and particularity would only swamp any effort to overcome
the daily routine. This in part explains why artwork from the revolution-
ary period is dominantly perspectival and panoramic.20 In New Look of

. Fredric Jameson, ‘‘Immanence and Nominalism in Postmodern Theoretical Dis-

course,’’ in Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, ), –. See also in the same volume Jameson’s discus-
sion of artist Robert Gober’s work in ‘‘Utopianism After the End of Utopia,’’ –.
My line of reading here is deeply indebted to Jameson’s ‘‘Marxian positive hermeneu-
tic,’’ even though I may be simplifying some of his ideas.
. See Taylor, Sources of the Self, –.
. Ellen Johnston Laing, in her The Winking Owl: Art in the People’s Republic of
 New Urban Culture 281

. Peasant painting, New Look of a Village (). From Peasant

Paintings from Huhsien County (Peking: Foreign Languages
Press, ).

a Village () (figure ), a representative Huxian (Huhsien) County

peasant painting from the heyday of the socialist revolution, we see the
way that a politicized public space has endowed labor with global signifi-

China (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), traces the political history of
art during the radical s. ‘‘[Other] landscapes done during this period,’’ she ob-
serves, ‘‘are also vast panoramic vistas, and their subjects are usually, if not the already
established themes based on revolutionary history, then clearly delineated motifs of
socialist triumphs in public projects: bridges, busy ports, dams, reforestation’’ ().
282 Chinese Modern

. Peasant painting, The Whole Family Studies the Communiqué (). From
Peasant Paintings from Huhsien County (Peking: Foreign Languages Press,
).

cance. The continuity of spatial structure neatly defers gratification and

yet keeps in perspective the consummating promesse de bonheur (promise
of happiness). In a similar spirit, The Whole Family Studies the Commu-
niqué () (figure ) presents the extended family as a political unit
and projects a domestic interior that is open and public, simple but pro-
ductive, and ultimately centered on the communal as well as spiritual
act of reading. In these stylized images of happiness, the political econ-
omy of the sign forcefully distributes the socialist ideals of equality, use
value, self-reliance, and homogenized social relations. It is by no acci-
dent, moreover, that these socialist realist representations of rural life
were acclaimed as emblematic of ‘‘the socialist new culture’’ at the time.21
As mentioned, the ruralization policies, or the ‘‘development without

. In the foreword to the English edition of Peasant Paintings from Huhsien County
(Peking: Foreign Languages Press, ), the government compilers laud the peas-
ant artists as ‘‘masters of the socialist new culture.’’ Moreover, ‘‘they have set a pattern
for developing fine arts as a spare-time activity in rural areas and become a model for
professional artists.’’
 New Urban Culture 283

urbanization’’ model, of the s and s could be seen as a collective

effort to ensure an organic and connected life that threatens to unravel in
the urban landscape. These Huxian County peasant paintings, which en-
joyed considerable popularity and official sponsorship in the mid-s,
best capture an age for which la sociabilité villageoise (village harmony) was
the norm and the ideal form of life.22
In fact, we have to understand this particular art form, together with
many other signifying practices from that period (such as the ‘‘revolu-
tionary model theater,’’ public squares, and massive parades), as consti-
tuting a revolutionary mass culture. It is a mass culture that emphasizes
content over form, use value over exchange value, participatory commu-
nal action over heterogeneous everyday life. Hence, such a mass culture
is profoundly romantic in its form and utopian in its vision; it is neces-
sarily didactic rather than entertaining, production-oriented rather than
consumption-oriented. The historical relevance of this specific mass cul-
ture, especially its utopian vision, however, may become all the more
recognizable and even compelling only when it is negated as a hege-
monic, practiced social order. Only in absentia does this revolutionary
mass culture reveal itself to have been a heroic effort to overcome a deep
anxiety over everyday life, often at the cost of impoverishing it. When
everyday life is affirmed and accepted as the new hegemony, when com-
modification arrives to put a price tag on human relations and even on
private sentiments, participatory communal action may offer itself as an
oppositional discourse and expose a vacuity underlying the myriad of
commodity forms. The persistent nostalgia for Mao and his era in late
twentieth-century China is a good sign of the collective anxiety that the
market economy has given rise to.23 But it cannot be concluded that this
postrevolutionary culture is without its consolation or even its utopian
appeal. In fact, a direct function of the rising consumerism is to contain

. The phrase la sociabilité villageoise is from historian Jean-Pierre Gutton’s book
La sociabilité villageoise dans l’ancienne France: solidarités et voisinages du XIIe au XVIIIe
siècle (Paris: Hachette, ).
. Sociologist Wang Yanzhong also points out that ‘‘Mao Zedong fever’’ reflects a
popular longing for the charismatic leader in an age of growing institutionalization.
See Zhang Zhanbing and Song Yifu, Zhongguo: Mao Zedong re (China: Mao Zedong
fever) (Taiyuan: Beiyue wenyi, ), –, –. One of the good things about
this popular sentiment, according to the authors of the book, is that it will call atten-
tion to issues such as inflation, social security, justice, and a communal spirit (–).
284 Chinese Modern

and dissolve the anxiety of everyday life, to translate collective concerns

into consumer desires, by which means even the revolutionary past may
be made profitable.
Thus, the transitional quality of late twentieth-century Chinese culture
can be observed as two related social discourses: an anxious affirmation
of ordinary life and a continuous negotiation with the utopian impulse
to reject everyday life. This transition, part of the long revolution toward
modernity, is readily observable as the tension between the city and the
country. As has been pointed out, urbanization has certainly shifted the
focus of the social imaginary, but the country still refuses to disappear,
and frequently it flashes back, so to speak, to throw an unsettling light
on the urban landscape. While an apparently amorphous urban everyday
life becomes the norm and an alienating institution, rustic simplicity and
authenticity seem to possess a greater peculiar attraction. In this light,
just as there can be a revolutionary mass culture, so there is bound to be
another mass culture that observes the logic of the reproduction of every-
day life. Whereas the revolutionary mass culture needs to project a life
that is wholesome but abstract, the new urban culture has to present a
secular existence that, routine though it may be, is full of concrete expec-
tations and fulfillments.
At this juncture it is useful to examine some contemporary literary
works in order to appreciate the emergent and contested urban con-
sciousness, with the aim of determining whether the works in question
belong to mass culture or high literature. A good case in point is the 
novella Shenghuo wuzui (Life is not a crime) by a young writer, He Dun.
This story, a loosely organized first-person narrative about a young man’s
various efforts to make money on his own in the inland city of Changsha,
may be paradigmatic of the narratable experience of a whole genuinely
postrevolutionary generation of urban youth. The world in which the
young man finds himself is one of entrepreneurial adventure, prostitu-
tion, violence, organized crime, commodities, and quick money. As in his
other novella, Wo bu xiangshi (I don’t care), He Dun hurriedly narrates
in a factual, indifferent tone of understanding, but with no compassion,
moments and sensations in the hero’s busy, directionless life. The series
of events is barely coherent, and its multiplicity seems to be the only nar-
ratable content of the young man’s experience. The story begins with a
brief ritual of initiation, a moment at which the hero, He Fu, then an im-
poverished high school teacher, is invited to enter the symbolic space of
 New Urban Culture 285

the narrative—a domestic space pointedly exhibiting its contemporaneity

through an ostentatious display of objects, commodities, and details. One
afternoon in May, He Fu and his wife, Zhu Li, decide to pay a visit to an
old friend of his, who now runs a department store and self-consciously
belongs to the new managerial class.

When I, having made love with Zhu Li around noon, walked into Qu
Gang’s apartment and saw how luxuriously furnished it was, I felt rea-
sonably calm. Qu Gang owned an apartment with four rooms, one of
them used as the living room. The surrounding walls were decorated with
pink enameled tiles, a chandelier hung from the ceiling, and the floor was
covered with inlaid parquet. There was a nicely crafted, snow-white com-
posite dresser, on which stood an imposing " Toshiba color . Next
to it was a video machine; further down stood an American-made Sher-
wood stereo system. After my wife and I had settled down in the elegant
sheepskin sofa, my wife said: ‘‘Your sofa is so comfortable to sit in.’’ ‘‘Im-
ported from Italy,’’ Qu Gang replied, throwing over to me a ‘‘’’ cigarette.
‘‘Cost me about ten grand. It better be comfortable to sit in.’’ ‘‘That much
money?’’ Zhu Li felt the sofa. ‘‘That was too expensive.’’ Qu Gang smirked
without comment, ‘‘Do you guys want coffee or tea?’’ 24

This initial moment is pivotal to the story in that it introduces desire, or,
more exactly, it gives concrete, physical shape and expression to a desire
for self-transformation. The material world becomes a prominent index
not so much of vulgarity as of an enviable spiritual resilience. The same
moment also offers a redefinition of everyday life, of domestic existence
as graspable through various tangible forms—in this case, expensive con-
sumer goods. This stuffed showroom will not be entered again, but it
provides meaning and image to the space in which He Fu, the aspiring
consumer/entrepreneur, wishes to participate. (At this point, however, he
feels embarrassed to even talk about money because he has to save every
penny in order to purchase a color .)
Before rushing ahead to condemn this unabashed consumerism, we
need to realize that it probably has its origin in a not-so-distant past when
consumption was maximally suppressed from the reproduction of every-
day life. Almost directly, this commodity fetishism comes as a rebellion
. Shenghuo wuzui (Life is not a crime), in Shouhuo (Harvest), no.  (): ; Wo
bu xiangshi (I don’t care), in Shanghai wenxue (Shanghai literature), no.  (September
): –.
286 Chinese Modern

against, or an overcompensation for, the utopian life depicted in an art-

work such as The Whole Family Studies the Communiqué. In the wake of
such a clearly defined and community-oriented form of life, in which
spiritual elevation was the predominant need, there is a striking lack of
perspective in He Dun’s story about the bestirring life in late twentieth-
century Changsha. The narrator, moreover, consistently refuses to im-
pose moral judgment or even indicate indignation. As the story rapidly
unfolds, the day-to-day events, frustrations, and expectations that befall
him and fellow city dwellers keep his attention riveted, and the city in
which he moves never emerges as a totalizable spatiality. Only toward the
very end of the story do we find a pause and a moment of doubt. And this
occurs when another old friend, like a specter from the unspeakable past,
returns to question He Fu’s increasingly complacent daily life. Very tell-
ingly, this friend is an artist who lives in the distant frontier of Xinjiang
and finds himself not welcomed while visiting Hunan, his place of birth.
In the story, the artist serves to pose a fundamental question about value,
which He Fu, with a lot of sarcasm, dismisses as metaphysical and point-
less. But when the artist friend leaves in disappointment early the next
morning, the hero feels the warm flow of an old friendship and becomes
guilt-stricken. Then rain starts pouring down outside: ‘‘Several times I
made up my mind to go out, but lacked the courage to walk in a thunder-
storm. I gazed at the heavy rain that would possibly never stop and said
to myself: ‘This world really makes people suffer.’ As soon as I said this, it
dawned on me that all those things—about which I had been too excited
to fall asleep normally in the past few months, and which could be de-
scribed as forming a beautiful blueprint—had all of a sudden turned into
a pile of broken tiles.’’ 25 This is where the narrative ends, and we leave the
hero with the pouring rain, pondering over the transcendental meaning
of the world.
Despite a final, reflective moment like this one (perhaps an ‘‘epiph-
any’’?), Life Is Not a Crime resolutely subscribes to the urban space it de-
picts. It is a paradigmatic narrative of the city because it is motivated by
a fascination with the apparently infinite possibilities of form that a city
now allows. This ‘‘guilt-free life’’ is a fragmented but concrete existence,
the moral content of which is realized in action rather than in contem-
plation. The fact that the idealistic artist appears unexpectedly, only at

. He Dun, Life Is Not a Crime, .

 New Urban Culture 287

the end of the story, calls our attention to a spectrality about his being.
Perhaps he is a residual modernist bent on revealing the incompleteness
of life in modernity. Even though this artist figure disappears altogether
from He Dun’s later work, his fleeting presence here reveals a fundamen-
tal lack. His lonely departure also suggests that the pursuit of a full life is
now a personal commitment and has to be conducted at the margin, far
away from the crowded urban landscape.
If what He Dun chooses to depict is the heterogeneous ‘‘stuff ’’ of every-
day urban life, the satisfaction of which is frequently achieved through
objects and commodities, then Wang Anyi, an established and prolific
contemporary writer, presents an intriguing examination of urban sensi-
bility and emotional life. What I have in mind is her novella Xianggang
de qing yu ai (Love and sentiment in Hong Kong), a piece of writing that
bears an uncanny resemblance to Zhang Ailing’s (Eileen Chang’s) story
from roughly fifty years earlier, Qingcheng zhi lian (Love in a fallen city).
Critically acclaimed for having a strong ‘‘future look,’’ Wang Anyi’s con-
temporary story tells of an affair in Hong Kong between an aging but
wealthy Chinese-American businessman and his crass and practical mis-
tress, who is an immigrant from Shanghai and now desperately wants to
go to the United States. The tale begins as yet another affair based on
an exchange of favors, and it ends with the woman heading for Australia
several years later, leaving behind an older Lao Wei, who, in her absence,
finds himself more than ever attached to the city of Hong Kong. In an
associational and even nostalgic style, Wang Anyi patiently explores all
aspects of the question of ‘‘how the bustling and prosperous metropolis
participates in the emotional life of people.’’ 26 The story is equally a rich
and complex narrative about Hong Kong, the spectacular city that may
strike one at first as a ‘‘great encounter, a miraculous coming together,’’ 27
but eventually reveals its many depths and dimensions over time. For the
protagonists in the story, Hong Kong is a city of both past and future, a
transit stopover that nonetheless indiscriminately shelters homeless souls
and even nurtures attachment and love. The fact that Lao Wei and his
mistress, Fengjia, are no longer young and are perhaps much too prac-
tical also indicates a mature approach to the city, what Raymond Wil-

. See the ‘‘Editor’s Words’’ section at the front of Shanghai Literature, no. 
(August ), in which Wang’s story appears.
. Wang Anyi, Xianggang de qing he ai (Love and sentiment in Hong Kong), in
Shanghai Literature, no.  (August ): .
288 Chinese Modern

liams calls the perspective of ‘‘an adult experience.’’ 28 For the author of
the story, too, Hong Kong, as a completely urbanized space, presents an
enormous field of multiple new possibilities and expectations, a whole
new civilization that stands in need of comprehending, representing, and
probably evaluating.29
Yet, just as in Life Is Not a Crime, the narrative of Love and Sentiment
in Hong Kong is a careful withholding of moral judgment or criticism.
Instead, it continuously marvels at the protean shape possessed by the
contemporary city and the endless variations—in lived space as well as
in the human heart—that the city constantly provokes. With deliber-
ate slowness, the narrative moves us through a series of spatial struc-
tures that are emphatically urban: courteous service but impersonal hotel
rooms, private and yet uniform apartments in a twenty-story building,
and new but empty homes waiting to be furnished with a personal touch.
It assembles into a colorful picture such activities as shopping, dining,
riding the double-decker bus, pursuing domestic pleasures, and engag-
ing in small talk on the phone. In the eyes of the narrator, Hong Kong
is no less than the city of all cities. Just as every detail of leisurely urban
life offers instant satisfaction and is savored with deliberate pleasure, so
every moment is charged with ambiguities and open to interpretation.
For instance, taking a double-decker bus to go home, Lao Wei and Feng-
jia look out to enjoy the busy street scenes, in particular those apartment
windows seemingly within arm’s reach. ‘‘These windows reveal the most
sincere, most practical ways of sustaining life; these are ways that will re-
main unchanged forever, as permanently as rivers flowing and the sun and

. At the beginning of his The Country and the City (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, ), Williams writes in a personal tone: ‘‘I have felt also the chaos of the
metro and the traffic jam; the monotony of the ranks of houses; the aching press of
strange crowds. But this is not an experience at all, not an adult experience, until it
has come to include also the dynamic movement, in these centres of settled and often
magnificent achievement’’ ().
. This is not to say that the city has not appeared in Wang Anyi’s work until this
moment. Based in Shanghai,Wang Anyi is probably one of the very few contemporary
Chinese writers who take the city as a serious subject of their writings. In a short essay,
‘‘Nanren he nüren, nüren he chengshi’’ (Men and women, women and the city), writ-
ten in , she already theorized on the freedom and opportunity that the city may
present to women. For her, the city represented a welcome break with the agrarian
tradition in which only men could have excelled. See Wang Anyi, Huangshan zhi lian
(Love on a barren mountain) (Hong Kong: South China Press, ), –.
 New Urban Culture 289

the moon revolving. They belong in the same category as the sky and the
ocean beyond the lights in Hong Kong, as the rocks standing in the sea
water. They are the solid foundation of the marvelous spectacle of Hong
Kong. Here you find the most ordinary life, as ordinary as the intrigu-
ing spectacle of Hong Kong can be.’’ 30 Against this backdrop of hetero-
geneous coexistence, human experience is described as anything but un-
eventful. Here, the narrator is greatly fascinated by the new modality that
Hong Kong promises to human sensibility.

In such a hot and humid evening, you never know how many stories are
strolling along the streets, pausing and moving hesitantly. Some of them
just have a beginning, some of them are coming to an end, and some others
are right in the middle. This is why evenings in Hong Kong are full of turns
and suspense. These are the least quiet and peaceful evenings, with numer-
ous comedies and tragedies unfolding at the same time . . . . [The drama of
Hong Kong] offers you excitement that cannot be total, and despair that
will never be complete. It promises you a last ray of hope when everything turns
out to be a disappointment; it also adds a broken piece when you finally possess
everything. Yet no matter what, the story of Hong Kong will never come
to an end. There will always be instruments playing in the theater of Hong
Kong, and there will never be a dying out of the lights in Hong Kong.
(Emphasis added) 31

These observations by themselves may not be profound or original, and

some of them already have been made—for instance, in Zhang Ailing’s
stories about Hong Kong and Shanghai in the s 32—but in the con-
text of contemporary Chinese social discourse, the Hong Kong that
Wang Anyi narrates here is undoubtedly a purposeful metaphor for a
cultural choice. As a geographical embodiment of the social imaginary,
Hong Kong indeed stands as a city of the future. It offers itself as an ideal
instance of the heterotopian urban life that the Chinese postrevolution-
ary culture seems anxious to understand and eventually to acquire.
Most noticeably, therefore, the broken but concrete life stories that

. Wang, Love and Sentiment in Hong Kong, .

. Ibid., .
. For an insightful analysis of the sense of ‘‘incompleteness’’ and modernity in
Zhang Ailing’s fiction, see Meng Yue, ‘‘Zhongguo wenxue ‘xiandai xing’ yu Zhang Ai-
ling’’ (The modernity of Chinese literature and Zhang Ailing), Jintian (Today), no. 
(): –.
290 Chinese Modern

Wang Anyi tells us here are hardly affected by either collective conscious-
ness or political aspirations. There is barely any reference to recent his-
tory. However, this does not necessarily mean that there is no shared
vision of the future. The peculiarity of Hong Kong, as portrayed in Wang
Anyi’s narrative, is that it is completely postindustrial and urbanized.
This is perhaps where the writer sees the relevance of Hong Kong as a
paradigmatic space for an approaching future. On the one hand, the city
of Hong Kong appears to be an enormous postmodern shopping mall,
where everything is for sale and all anxieties can be shopped away; on
the other hand, the city is full of human drama because, ceaselessly, ‘‘it
throws an inclusive party by inviting all kinds of loneliness, and arranges
a grand reunion by bringing together all moments of solitude.’’ 33 The
story of Lao Wei and Fengjia and their use and understanding of each
other should ultimately be read as a defense of the richness of a mun-
dane urban life. In her novella, Wang Anyi anticipates a major cultural
transformation in contemporary China as much as He Dun does in his
fragmented stories about the city of Changsha. Both writers grasp the
city as central to a postrevolutionary reality, and, in doing so, they make
representable an age in which the emergent hegemony is no longer Ideol-
ogy or Collectivity, but rather everyday life. Also in this sense, they blend
mass culture and high literature and directly participate in the making of
a new urban culture, the historical function of which is to help absorb the
shock of urbanization and ultimately to legitimate modernity.
By way of conclusion, I would like to briefly discuss three very differ-
ent artworks to highlight some of the points made earlier. These three
paintings may be described in terms of genre: political poster, commer-
cial billboard, and autonomous art; they also can be defined in terms
of their style: socialist realism, capitalist realism,34 and neoimpression-
ism. By putting them together in a collage, however, I wish, first, to
visually demonstrate a historical development and second, to point to
three elements of late twentieth-century Chinese culture. Clearly, The
Motor’s Roar () (figure ) records an idealist era in which indus-
trial as well as agricultural productivity acquires an ideological value and
serves as a means of social homogenization. This pursuit of meaning is

. Wang, Love and Sentiment in Hong Kong, .

. Michael Schudson has used this term to describe the ideology of American ad-
vertising art. See his Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American
Society (New York: Basic Books, ), –.
 and . Peasant paintings,
(above) The Motor’s Roar
() and (left) Old Party
Secretary (). Both from
Peasant Paintings from
Huhsien County (Peking:
Foreign Languages Press,
).
 292 Chinese Modern

. Photograph, Bringing You the Colors of the World, Giordano, by Xiaobing Tang
().

strongly indicated by the conspicuous presence of a newspaper and a red

book, which endows this life form with a spiritual content and even-
tual transcendence (see figure ). The peasant of the Socialist New Era,
however, does not occupy center stage but happily embodies instrumen-
tality and directs our attention away from himself. This reification be-
comes more striking when we meet the warm and engaging gaze of the
urban consumer in Bringing You the Colors of the World, Giordano ()
(figure , color plate : following page ). The subject of the dramati-
cally fulfilling fantasy world must dominate our view because the mir-
ror image functions by infiltrating our self-conception and consciousness.
This world of the self-assured consumer is just as unreal and utopian as
that of the self-abnegating producer, even though they suggest very dif-
ferent means of transforming the world. In this light, both socialist real-
ism and capitalist realism are utopian art forms designed to alleviate the
anxiety of everyday life and to help their respective viewers cope with
the secular condition of modernity. The gray standardized office building
against which this billboard is erected first seems to justify the need for
such a fantasy and then quietly belies it.
 New Urban Culture 293

. Oil, Dream Girl, by Qiu Tao (). From

Beyond the Open Door: Contemporary Paintings
from the People’s Republic of China, ed.
Richard E. Strassberg and Waldemar A. Nielson
(Pasadena: Pacific Asia Museum, ).

Finally, Dream Girl () (figure , color plate : following page )
by Qiu Tao presents itself as a revelatory act of intervention as well as a
critique of the politics of utopia. One possible reading is to see a case of
‘‘sentimental confection which doubtless reflects westernized fantasies of
romance common to the younger urban generation.’’ 35 But when placed
next to the other two paintings, the sullen face and greenish skin of the
‘‘dream girl,’’ in sharp contrast to the bright and dancing red, seem to

. Richard E. Strassberg, ‘‘The Opening Door of Contemporary Chinese Paint-

ing,’’ in Beyond the Open Door: Contemporary Paintings from the People’s Republic of
China, ed. Richard E. Strassberg and Waldermar A. Nielsen (Pasadena, Calif.: Pacific
Asia Museum, ), –.
294 Chinese Modern

suggest a forced recognition, or acceptance, of some unromantic reality

or truth. The colorful dress can barely support or hold together a cold,
despondent body, and this is where the inertia of everyday life erupts. In-
stead of transferring or diverting the anxiety of everyday life, Dream Girl
exposes it to our view and presents no less than a dystopian reality. This
makes the painting a faithful extension of the critical spirit in Western
modernism and gives it a political thrust. Yet because of its autonomous
stance, it is fundamentally a deconstructive art form and remains opposed
to the mass cultures represented by the other two images.
The situation that needs careful consideration now, however, is that
the two uplifting images are more mass-oriented and positive precisely
because they contain a utopian element. Whereas one image points to a
moral being as the means to emerge from everyday life, the other, also as
a compensation, substitutes consumer needs for global desires. In both
images, the viewer is invited to participate in a promised good life, in one
out of a moral imperative, in the other through imaginary identification.
The fact that one of them was officially endorsed in , and the other
was publicly displayed in the streets of Guangzhou in , is a telling
indication of the extent of the cultural transformation in late twentieth-
century China. What is more interesting is to read these two images as
indices of two different cultural logics and visions of history: organic
and transcendence-immanent rural life vs. incomplete but detail-centered
urban existence. These two life forms are ultimately ideological efforts to
overcome the anxiety of everyday life—which is also the bottom line of
modernity.
Excursion II
Decorating Culture: Notes on Interior Design,
Interiority, and Interiorization

‘‘Inconspicuous consumption,’’ observes Pilar Viladas, the architecture

and home design critic for the New York Times Magazine, characterizes
a prevailing aesthetics of simplicity in American home furnishings and
decorations during the s. ‘‘Rather than putting their money on dis-
play, people seem to be investing in a quieter brand of luxury, based
on comfort and quality.’’ 1 As if disclosing a new discovery, the design
and style industry reveres as its motto ‘‘less is more,’’ and a far-reaching
movement away from the ‘‘overdesign’’ of the s toward the Ordi-
nary, according to Henry Urbach, a contributing editor at Interior Design
magazine, is driven by the yearning for a simple and familiar life. ‘‘The
Ordinary has gained momentum in recent years as a kind of compen-
sation for, or reaction against, the extraordinary changes affecting our
everyday lives. No place seems safe, least of all the home, where privacy
and tranquillity cannot be taken for granted.’’ 2
The current reaffirmation of a private and unpretentious home may be
an expected pendular swing of the fashion world; it may even have its
psychological origins, as Urbach suggests, in the American ambivalence
toward ‘‘showing off wealth’’; and it may be the eventual, gadget-weary
homecoming of a much publicized postmodernism, which has fully re-
vealed itself as an ideology of everyday life in the postindustrial sector
of global capitalism. Whatever the readings, interior design erects an in-
triguing sign system that indexes the individual psyche as well as the col-
lective one. In material forms and relations, it stages a certain conception
of home—a given notion of belonging and selfhood. Interior design—
even innocuously selecting and arranging furniture in an apartment—

. ‘‘Inconspicuous Consumption,’’ New York Times Magazine, Part , ‘‘Home De-

sign,’’  April , .
. ‘‘Hide the Money!’’ New York Times Magazine, Part , ‘‘Home Design,’’  April
, –.
296 Chinese Modern

bears witness to our personality and imagination. In short, it offers one

form for externalizing our inner life or interiority.
I examine in this excursion the transformative relationship between in-
terior design and interiority in the context of late twentieth-century Chi-
nese culture. The interior design promoted in the China of the s is
anything but inconspicuous, standing in spectacular contrast to and nega-
tion of the austere simplicity of the ‘‘socialist modern’’ during the s
and s. Through reading a seminal narrative intimately and contextu-
ally, I trace the mutations of interiority from an overdetermined concept
of protest to its co-optation by a nascent sign consciousness in the realm
of popular culture. The same literary text lets us examine the discursive
legitimation of and strategies for interiorization, a process that both in-
stills and answers psychic and institutional needs for a rapidly moderniz-
ing economy.

Deliberate Display and a Fast Life

Toward the end of his much acclaimed novella Didi nihao (Hello, my
younger brother, ),3 He Dun, an energetic literary newcomer based
in the provincial capital Changsha, arranges for the hero of his story to
enjoy a meaningful moment of peace and contentment. Throughout the
narrative, Deng Heping, his period-specific given name meaning ‘‘peace,’’
is referred to as ‘‘my younger brother’’ and is continuously cast in the
awkward role of a rebellious and estranged family member. Disrespect-
ful of his orthodox, revolutionary father and showing great ingenuity
in capitalist entrepreneurship, Heping embodies a post-Cultural Revolu-
tion generation that, reaching its adulthood in the early s, appears
both familiar and yet ominously uncontainable in Chinese society in the
s. The novella begins in , when Heping is twenty-six and defi-
nitely beyond his formative years. In that year, because of a series of
misdeeds, one of which is impregnating his nineteen-year-old girlfriend,
Heping finally manages to enrage ‘‘my father’’ to such a degree that he
is permanently barred from visiting his parents’ apartment. Incidentally,
as the narrator coolly comments, ‘‘my father,’’ at the same promising age

. Collected in He Dun, Shenghuo wuzui (Life is not a crime) (Beijing: Huayi, ),
–. Further page references to this story are given in parentheses in the text.
 Decorating Culture 297

of twenty-six, had expelled his own landowning father when he led a bri-
gade of Communist guerrillas and ransacked the estate in .
As the dense and fast-paced narrative winds to a sudden halt, we reach
the wet December of  and realize that ‘‘my younger brother’’ has ap-
parently ‘‘made it.’’ In hurriedly following the protagonist around, we
quickly get absorbed in, even fascinated by, his world of objects, desire,
money, and action. The novella, together with He Dun’s other fictional
narratives about contemporary Changsha, indeed offers a raw account
of the widespread capitalist drive that has become a concrete passion
for this generation of Chinese urban youth. Through all the rough and
often sordid ups-and-downs in his fortunes and emotional life, Heping
emerges as a self-made and self-confident hero, inspiring as much envy
as admiration from the narrator, his ambivalent but ultimately sympa-
thetic older brother. Even the young man’s physique undergoes a sig-
nificant metamorphosis in the process of assiduous self-fashioning. Gone
are the two diseases, fistula and hyperthyroidism, that put him at a dis-
advantage when he was also a constant annoyance to his parents and
superiors. Radiating a robust glow, he now proudly rides an expensive
Honda motorcycle and is preparing for a second marriage. The woman
he loves and whom he will marry on New Year’s day of  was the ne-
glected but beautiful wife of Heping’s one-time boss, a local Mafia leader
who made his wealth through heroin trafficking and was eventually ar-
rested and condemned. Since Dandan, a successful hairdresser, is now
visibly pregnant, they need to get the wedding ceremony out of the way
soon. Heping, however, is busier than ever, because he retails materials
for building decoration, and  happens to be a year when the entire
nation, the reserved narrator chronicles, is consumed by a craze in ‘‘real
estate, construction, gas and water-heater installation’’ (). To take full
advantage of the new fad in home improvement, Heping has to leave his
wife-to-be behind and shuttle nonstop, usually by truck, between Chang-
sha and Guangzhou, scrambling for supplies that are now in great short-
age. One afternoon, after another bumpy trip, he comes back exhausted,
only to find his one-bedroom apartment totally transformed.

Younger Brother languidly pushed open the door and was taken aback. The
living room was completely redecorated. What used to be soft green walls
were now covered with crimson red wallpaper with brick designs on it;
overhead a soft red drop-ceiling of plywood was added. The original panel-
298 Chinese Modern

ing of chestnut-colored plywood was now replaced with the same material
in pink. ‘‘She moved her Red Hair Salon here,’’ Younger Brother muttered
to himself. The four walls of the bedroom, from bottom to top, were all
covered with ash boards, and the floor was parqueted in a basket weave
pattern. The furniture was now a luxuriant deluxe set, of a pleasant maroon
color. The old white composite set was nowhere to be found. ‘‘She knows
how to spend money,’’ Younger Brother threw himself onto the bed and
marveled. ‘‘But this is pretty comfy.’’ (–)

This newly decorated interior space that Heping enters comes as both
a surprise and a reassurance. Everything he sees is new and unfamiliar,
but together they win his recognition, almost instantaneously, and are
accepted as his own possessions. He immediately claims this showroom
as his home by throwing himself onto the comfortable bed. Although
Dandan is not there to greet him, the meticulous design loudly bespeaks
her presence. In fact, her absence conveniently allows him to closely ex-
amine their new home and to absorb her anticipation for their future life
together. Through her choice of objects, materials, and design, Dandan
creates a private and concrete space that mirrors their private and concrete
desires. It is also at this moment that Heping, the intrepid small-business
owner, fully experiences, as if stepping outside himself, the seductive
power of consumption and translates the home interior surrounding him
into a sign of his social success. Hence, his appreciative comment to Dan-
dan when he wakes up hours later: ‘‘This feels just like staying in a four-
star hotel’’ ().
In fact, throughout the story, Heping is consistently studied as a con-
spicuous consumer, for whom consumption is more of a practiced ide-
ology than a satisfaction of whimsical needs. He readily embraces what
Jean Baudrillard describes as the ‘‘system of objects’’ and, with great pro-
ficiency, commands the sign language of commodities.4 He and his co-
horts demonstrate an instinctive grasp of the status symbolism associated
with brand names, foreign products, and luxury items. While the ciga-
rettes he smokes evolve from domestic to American brands, his footwear
also progresses from generic ‘‘pointy and shiny black shoes’’ to ‘‘Italian-
made crocodile skin shoes,’’ which he is quick to show off by putting his

. Jean Baudrillard, ‘‘Sign Function and Class Logic,’’ in his For a Critique of the
Political Economy of the Sign, trans. with introduction by Charles Levin (St. Louis:
Telos Press, ), .
 Decorating Culture 299

feet on a table as a means of convincing his friends of his ambition. When

the business of his Hongtai Decoration Materials store flourishes, bring-
ing in a net profit of , yuan (equivalent to US ,), he rewards
himself by upgrading his motorcycle from a Chinese-made Nanfang to
a Royal Honda, and he makes a point of visiting all of his friends and
acquaintances on this handsome machine equipped with twin tailpipes.
Yet nothing as deeply and completely gratifies him as the new domestic
setting that he finds at home. For this is effectively the first time that,
instead of demonstrating to others what he likes and can afford, he gets
to view his own wealth and accomplishment splendidly displayed for his
consumption alone. In a sense, he is now invited to read the sign of his
own success rather than parade it around as an invidious distinction.
Deliberate display is what this particular scene of interior renovation
brings to the foreground. It is also the intended effect of such detailed de-
scription. For both the character in the story and the related narrator, the
pleasure derived from registering those ornamental details is irrepress-
ible and functions as a driving force behind the narrative. An obsession
with the ornament, of which Heping is a professional promoter, pene-
trates the fictional world, both its form and content. Not only does the
story’s young hero gradually learn how to distinguish himself through
costly designer attire, but the narrator also continually relies on naming
various objects and spelling out prices in order to make his representa-
tion realistic. Meticulous care is taken in the narrative to specify, often
in an offhand fashion, whether a fountain pen is from the United States
or a bicycle is just an ordinary domestic Phoenix. The reality effect of
novelistic discourse now relies on recognizing the differentiating func-
tion that commodities are called upon to serve as everyday objects. All
commodities, indeed, participate in an ingenious ‘‘social discourse of ob-
jects’’ that contributes to what Baudrillard once described as a general
‘‘mechanism of discrimination and prestige.’’ 5 According to the French
sociologist, reflecting on the logic of rising consumerism in post-World
War II Euro-America, there always exists a ‘‘political economy of the
sign,’’ in which commodities or objects are consumed not so much for
their utility or use value, as for their explicit sign value. Parallel to the
signifying operation of all languages, the sign value of objects enforces a
logic of differentiation and establishes, through display and conspicuous

. Ibid., .
300 Chinese Modern

consumption, a distinctive hierarchy of taste, status, and identity. ‘‘Signs,

like commodities, are at once use value and exchange value. The social
hierarchies, the invidious differences, the privileges of caste and culture
which they support, are accounted as profit, as personal satisfaction, and
lived as ‘need’ (need of social value-generation to which corresponds the
‘utility’ of differential signs and their ‘consumption’).’’ 6 Human needs,
Baudrillard further observes, are never a natural experience or objective
perception, but they always have an ideological genesis from above and
in the privileged. In fact, needs are necessarily constructed to provide the
alibi or self-evident rationale for any given stage of ‘‘consummative mo-
bilization,’’ 7 which proves to be a central legitimizing process of the late
capitalist mode of production.
The extent of such a consummative mobilization is abundantly testified
to in He Dun’s city narratives. Moreover, the very mode of his story-
telling is obviously implicated in the commodification of literature, mir-
roring the reorganization of literary production and consumption by the
logic of the market. In his exposé-style depiction of an ill-defined zone
of emerging capitalism, a subtle legitimation of this desublimated reality
seems to be at work everywhere, either in a tale of individual success and
failure or through the discourse of desire and needs. This may explain
why He Dun’s writings are greeted with great enthusiasm by commen-
tators who see the vitality generated by materialist pursuits as a better
alternative to ideological coercion or purity. With the sudden arrival of
this literary black horse around , it became possible to announce a
new direction in literary development. For in his determined immersion
in contemporary life, He Dun has apparently rid himself of the compul-
sion to either negotiate with or poke fun at a formative revolutionary
prehistory and memory. No longer do we constantly run into the irrev-
erent deconstruction of the past that was once the main appeal of Wang
Shuo’s loquacious narratives based on a ‘‘hooligan culture.’’ 8 Also far re-
moved from He Dun’s creative concern is the imperative of experimen-

. Baudrillard, ‘‘For a General Theory,’’ in his For a Critique of the Political Economy
of the Sign, .
. See Baudrillard, ‘‘Beyond Use Value,’’ in his For a Critique of the Political Economy
of the Sign, –.
. See Geremie Barmé, ‘‘Wang Shuo and Liumang (‘Hooligan’) Culture,’’ Aus-
tralian Journal of Chinese Affairs, no.  (July ): –.
 Decorating Culture 301

tation, thematic as well as technical, that propelled a college-educated

group of young writers, such as Su Tong, Yu Hua, and Ge Fei, to inter-
national recognition in the second half of the s. What the bearded
writer from Changsha has to offer, if we adopt a useful phrase from the
editors at Shanghai Literature, a trendsetting journal that helped bring He
Dun onto the national scene, is xin shimin xiaoshuo, a ‘‘new fiction of city
dwellers,’’ or, better yet, a ‘‘fiction of the emerging urban bourgeoisie.’’ 9
For one critic, Chen Xiaoming, He Dun’s matter-of-fact narratives of
an uneven and pragmatic cityscape provide an apt metaphor for contem-
porary mainstream culture. In them there is a pulsing desire to ‘‘capture
the external shape of contemporary life, to plunge into this life on its own
terms, so as to be freed, in the process, from the Enlightenment night-
mare long bedeviling literature.’’ 10 Such hyperbolic approbation obvi-
ously reveals as much about Chen’s own agenda as the narratives he is
describing. While trying to give a historical profile to a ‘‘belated genera-
tion’’ that has come of age in the s, Chen Xiaoming has devoted many
of his recent writings to the cause of rejecting, with a markedly postmod-
ernist rhetoric of playfulness and populism, what he and his comrades
believe to be the elitist and moralistic tradition of modern Chinese liter-
ary discourse.11 In his view, the ‘‘Enlightenment nightmare,’’ a nightmare
that must be escaped, demands from the creative writer too rigid a moral
obligation to educate the masses and to participate in a collective cause.

. The notion of ‘‘xin shimin xiaoshuo’’ (new fiction of city dwellers) first appears
in ‘‘Bianzhe de hua’’ (Notes from the editors), Shanghai wenxue (Shanghai literature),
no.  (July ): . Two issues later, the same journal (no.  [September ]:
) announced a literary contest held by itself and Foshan wenyi (Foshan literature
and arts), based in Guangdong. ‘‘New fiction of city dwellers’’ was the theme of this
nationwide competition, although the focus fell on Shanghai and Guangdong. Ac-
cording to the editors, the ‘‘emergence of the city and an urban class is most concen-
trated and obvious’’ in these two areas, which now play a leading role in the devel-
opment of a market economy. This ‘‘new fiction of city dwellers’’ seems to point to
a newer literary interest than the ‘‘fiction with a cultural concern’’ (wenhua guanhuai
xiaoshuo) that Shanghai Literature was actively promoting earlier in .
. Chen Xiaoming, ‘‘Jianyao pingjie’’ (Brief commentary [on He Dun’s Life Is Not a
Crime]), in Zhongguo chengshi xiaoshuo jingxuan (Anthology of Chinese urban fiction),
ed. Chen Xiaoming (Lanzhou: Gansu renmin, ), .
. See, for instance, Chen Xiaoming’s preface to He Dun’s Life Is Not a Crime (Bei-
jing: Huayi, ), ‘‘Wanshengdai yu jiushi niandai wenxue liuxiang’’ (The belated
generation and the literary trends in the ’s), –.
302 Chinese Modern

In contemporary China, which Chen tactfully characterizes as still largely

at the stage of primitive accumulation in a ‘‘socialist market economy,’’
the role of the writer needs to be modified. The new writer is urged to
denounce, together with a heroic avant-garde pose and commitment, all
notions of depth, allegory, and originality. Instead of seeking access to
a great myth, a master language, or historical totality, the new writing
needs to fully explore existential immediacy, the world of ephemera, and
a centerless and fluid culture. It ought to be an externalized writing that
amounts to a pleasurable performance. He Dun’s fiction, according to
Chen Xiaoming, best represents this emerging literary sensibility in that,
by proffering ‘‘spectacles of desire’’ as both its content and form, his nar-
rative incidentally becomes a reassuring mirror for ‘‘an age without in-
teriority.’’ Evoking Roland Barthes’s notion of the pleasure of the text,
Chen even suggests that such desirous fiction actually fulfills a legitimate
purpose that should be served by adult reading materials.

Life in this age already has no interiority. People are obsessed with ele-
vating themselves from poverty, and are continually incited by the pros-
pect of instant riches. Writers of the ‘‘belated generation’’ have a firm grasp
on such tendencies of our time. Without any polishing or ornamentation,
they put in front of us the chaotic and vibrant conditions of such a life,
presenting a swift, indiscriminate flux of phenomena. Their method of di-
rectly representing the appearances of life serves to highlight the rawness
of a coarse and vulgar reality.12

The verdict that there is no longer interiority in an unreflective writing

and, by extension, urban culture comes into this context hardly as a nega-
tive assessment. On the contrary, Chen celebrates this absence as a form
of emancipation, as a generative break with ‘‘traditional or classical dis-
courses.’’ Such an assertion enables Chen to describe and embrace a his-
torical condition in which, as Marx would say, ‘‘all that is solid melts into
air.’’ The implicit logic of his post-Enlightenment vision is that only when
unhampered by moral scruples or concerns with values and truths can a
society allow itself to be truly secularized and absorbed in the ephem-
eral rather than the eternal or fundamental. Only when driven by desire
will the individual be enabled to act as an individual, and resolute action
will become a positive value in and of itself. By virtue of reproducing,

. Ibid., .
 Decorating Culture 303

through explosive narrativity, the rhythm and effect of such down-to-

earth bustling, He Dun’s fiction, suggests Chen, works as both a demon-
stration of and a testimony to the demise of an inhibiting interiority. In
other words, a new round of consummative mobilization has rendered
superfluous all notions of integrity, conscience, spirituality, and, finally,
self-reflection.

The Marketing of Interiority

It would be a rewarding project to reconstruct a genealogy of the con-

cept of ‘‘interiority’’ in the intellectual debates of contemporary China.
With its unmistakable Hegelian inflection, the idea of ‘‘interiority’’ was a
correlative to the much-contested notion of ‘‘subjectivity’’ that Liu Zaifu
determinedly advanced in the early s.13 One of the reasons for the
controversy over ‘‘subjectivity,’’ in addition to its potent political implica-
tions in a still harsh culture of collectivist uniformity, was the amorphous-
ness and subsequent theoretical versatility of the term itself. Even in ‘‘the
master grammarian of the subject’’ Liu Zaifu’s own writings,14 and his re-
markable efforts notwithstanding, the definition of ‘‘subjectivity’’ never
achieves a degree of clarity that is promised. The inevitable result is that
one vague term by default becomes the designator of a complex of ideas,
agendas, and intellectual sources. Nonetheless, Liu Zaifu does supply a
historical analysis to explain the necessity of subjectivity in literary dis-
course and, in the end, to justify the use of the term itself. His central
goal being to protest a political instrumentalization of literature and, ulti-
mately, of human subjects, Liu Zaifu repeatedly advocates ‘‘subjectivity’’
as ‘‘not only a function of subjective consciousness but also the entire

. See my ‘‘The Function of New Theory: What Does It Mean to Talk About
Postmodernism in China?’’ in Politics, Ideology, and Literary Discourse in Modern China:
Theoretical Interventions and Cultural Critique, ed. Liu Kang and Xiaobing Tang (Dur-
ham, N.C.: Duke University Press, ), –; Jing Wang, ‘‘Romancing the Sub-
ject: Utopian Moments in the Chinese Aesthetics of the s,’’ in her High Culture
Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, ), –; see also the Chinese collection of essays on the topic,
Wenxue zhutixing lunzheng ji (Collection of essays on literary subjectivity) (Beijing:
Hongqi, ).
. This honorific title comes from Jing Wang, ‘‘Romancing the Subject,’’ .
304 Chinese Modern

essence of the Subject’s existence.’’ Its higher level is ‘‘what has become
capable of resisting the forces of consciousness, symbols, and culture.’’ 15
The ‘‘transcendent character’’ of literature will not be revealed until liter-
ary creation becomes positively an exercise of subjectivity, because ‘‘on a
deeper, more fundamental level [the literary world] symbolizes the free
spirit of humans, rooted in the Subject’s formation of value based on its
own need.’’ 16 At this juncture, the ‘‘need’’ that the Subject experiences or
perceives obviously is more of a spiritual and intellectual nature than the
concrete consumer desires that bestir the characters in He Dun’s mapping
of Changsha. And the frequently impenetrable elaboration on ‘‘subjec-
tivity’’ is intended to erect a protective shield against a volatile and de-
humanizing force, often under the grandiose name of historical change
or progress.
If the discourse of subjectivity, inspired by belief in a humanist univer-
sality, once served as a veiled plea for positive creative as well as political
freedom, then interiority could be viewed as a defense of negative free-
dom, the right to resist by escaping and turning inward. Both concepts,
in agreement with the Enlightenment tradition of antidespotism, affirm
human liberty through the possibility of a reflective, critical conscious-
ness. The liberating impact of Wang Meng’s use of the interior mono-
logue device in the early s is a good case in point.17 This supposedly
modernistic literary technique reintroduced an inner voice and individual
consciousness that had been systematically disallowed in the socialist real-
ist tradition. It helped shift the focus of literary representation from an
omniscient view of collective action to a contemplative view of personal
experiences. For a later group of experimental writers, too, interiority
has been a favorite trope, and the exploration of a painful, almost mys-
tical sensitivity of the body and mind, such as we see in Yu Hua, often
constitutes the discovery of a site of resistance by a helpless individual
confronted with a sweeping catastrophe or violence.18 The Chinese post-
revolutionary tale of subjectivity, as Jing Wang comments pointedly, ‘‘is

. Liu Zaifu, ‘‘The Subjectivity of Literature Revisited,’’ trans. Mary Scoggin, in
Politics, Ideology, and Literary Discourse in Modern China, –.
. Ibid., .
. See William Tay, ‘‘Wang Meng, Stream-of-Consciousness, and the Controversy
Over Modernism,’’ Modern Chinese Literature . (Spring ): –.
. See chap. , ‘‘Residual Modernism: Narratives of the Self in the s.’’
 Decorating Culture 305

a story of resistance and conflict, a story about insurgent, albeit self-

deceptive, strategies of depoliticization and interiorization that theorists
and writers adopted to position themselves against the autocratic Father
at home.’’ 19 Only in hindsight and from afar, however, would such strate-
gies appear to be unbearably romantic and even self-deceptive. In its his-
torical context, the inward turn or withdrawal to the subjective interior
was rather a desperate effort at defeating total despair.
Is this the interiority that, evoked only a decade ago as an indispensable
humanizing experience of individual freedom and self-consciousness, is
now pronounced dead and buried? When the critic Chen Xiaoming mar-
vels at the vibrancy of a contemporary world that has allegedly shed its
interiority, is he also suggesting that the concept of interiority is part of
the ‘‘Enlightenment nightmare’’ and needs to be exorcised? The answer
seems to be obvious, given the almost delirious fascination that a portable
postmodern antihumanism excites in him. In his eagerness to latch onto
an intellectual trend, Chen readily surrenders to the compulsion to gen-
erate signs, following a Baudrillardian political economy, for their sign
exchange value. At the same time, he is perhaps blinded by the glare to
which he is attracted. The indiscriminate collection of terms and neolo-
gisms that stud his prose, from ‘‘postcolonial characteristics’’ to ‘‘post-
Oriental perspective’’ to ‘‘anti-allegorical strategy,’’ makes us wonder how
much he is describing his own writing technique when he exhorts young
authors: ‘‘One will have enough to support a fictive narrative as long as
one manufactures some spectacles of desire with a viewing value.’’ 20 It is
the oversight in his insight, however, that reveals Chen to be sadly limited
by his own absorption into appearances or arousing visions.
A central example is the discussion of interiority. The dialectical de-
velopment of such a concept seems to escape Chen when, in a sweeping
abandonment of all related notions such as depth and the contemplative
subject, interiority is declared to be not only unnecessary, but also im-
possible. The ‘‘swift, indiscriminate flux of phenomena’’ is so irresistible
that anyone who wishes to have access to the truth and reality of life
in the s cannot afford to step aside and reflect. Facing a contempo-

. Wang, ‘‘Romancing the Subject,’’ – (original emphasis).

. The same statement appears in his prefaces to Anthology of Chinese Urban Fic-
tion () and to Life Is Not a Crime (). The two pieces are dated  October  and
 March , although they contain many identical paragraphs.
306 Chinese Modern

rary world that happily ‘‘gallops forward,’’ ‘‘no one can grasp its essence,
or touch its spirit and soul.’’ 21 While hastiness is certainly the defining
style of He Dun’s narratives, in all his stories about restless young people
in Changsha, or what Chen calls ‘‘urban nomads without a job,’’ there
is always a deliberate pause, a ritualistic instance of entering an interior
space. In Life Is Not a Crime, this initiation takes place early in the plot
and serves to introduce desire and aspiration into the first-person nar-
rator. An old friend’s ostentatiously decorated living room, which the
hero visits for the first time and observes in quiet amazement, begins to
instill in him a deep dissatisfaction with his own life. A new self-image
emerges and is associated with a concrete interior space.22 At the very end
of another structurally similar novella, Wo bu xiangshi (I don’t care), the
central character, Damao, goes to visit his grieving girlfriend in her tiny
apartment. He comforts her gently and whispers into her ear what he en-
visions for their future together, until his words make ‘‘her entire body
as passionate as horses running wild in the grassland.’’ 23 Toward the end
of Hello, My Younger Brother, Heping returns home to find the interior
of his domicile transformed, as if miraculously. The significance of these
separate moments may point to an emergent form of interiority, which is
closely related to a new sense of private interior space and eventually to
the necessary mechanism of interiorization.We now turn to the historical
condition of such a connection.
It is no accident that Heping in Hello, My Younger Brother should end
up being a retailer of decoration materials and find this business enor-
mously profitable. Soon after he is banished from his parents’ home,
which consists of a modestly furnished four-bedroom apartment allotted
in accordance with the father’s official position, Heping voluntarily quits
his miserable job as a high school teacher and begins his illustrious busi-
ness career as a petty street peddler of smuggled cigarettes. At this stage,
transaction takes a primitive form and financial compensation is minus-
cule, but independence and purposefulness provide enough thrill for him
to persevere. Then, thanks to the connections that Dandan makes for
him, Heping becomes the manager of a nightclub and starts to mar-

. Chen, preface to Life Is Not a Crime, .

. See chap. , ‘‘New Urban Culture and the Anxiety of Everyday Life in Late
Twentieth-Century China.’’
. See He Dun, Wo bu xiangshi (I don’t care), in his Life Is Not a Crime, –.
 Decorating Culture 307

ket, with instinctive adroitness, popular entertainment that caters to a

new demand for culturally acceptable intimacy and private sentiments.
One failed marriage and some hostile situations later, Heping loses his
nightclub and, true to his resilient mind and body, quickly finds him-
self engaged in a more lucrative trade—supplying prefab materials for a
city that is suddenly possessed by the need for both exterior and interior
decoration.
‘‘Nineteen ninety-two was a year of decoration craze in the city of
Changsha,’’ the narrator of Hello, My Younger Brother describes with con-
siderable ambivalence. ‘‘Many shops were torn down beyond recogni-
tion, but overnight they would all be decorated absolutely anew. As if
caught in a fierce competition, one store after another rushed to have
itself remodeled. Some big department stores may just have had a face-
lift in the first half of the year, but soon they would break everything
into pieces and start all over’’ (). Such extensive and rapid restyling
no doubt affects the appearance of and life in the city; it helps set off a
new visual regime and sign system that directly contribute to the urban
spectacle of desire. Tellingly enough, the shops and department stores
are most ready to undergo such cosmetic renovation, to present them-
selves at the cutting edge of the latest fashion, and, ultimately, to package
their commodities with an external and ostentatious sign of modernity.
Heping’s flourishing business, therefore, can be taken as an index to a
culture that demonstrates a new sign-consciousness, one for which the
production of difference through sign exchange becomes an instrumental
operation. Sign exchange, suggests Baudrillard, is no less than the central
logic of a consumer society’s political economy.24
The enticing spectacle generated by a pervasive consummative mobi-
lization turns out to be, not unlike the neon signs in a busy shopping

. In ‘‘The Ideological Genesis of Needs,’’ Baudrillard argues that ‘‘consumption

does not arise from an objective need of the consumer, a final intention of the sub-
ject towards the object; rather, there is social production, in a system of exchange, of
a material of differences, a code of significations and invidious (statuaire) values. The
functionality of goods and individual needs only follows on this, adjusting itself to,
rationalizing, and in the same stroke repressing these fundamental structural mecha-
nisms.’’ See his For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, . For a lucid dis-
cussion of Baudrillard’s development of Marx’s analysis of the capitalist mode of pro-
duction, see Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and
Beyond (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, ), esp. –.
308 Chinese Modern

district, an illusion of differentiation that colorfully decorates the stark

reality of commodity exchange based on the principle of equivalence.
The art of design and decoration, therefore, is the quintessential enter-
prise that at once advertises and disguises the truth of a consumer culture.
It is mass production coupled with mass consumption, observes Penny
Sparke in her history of design and culture in the twentieth century, that
puts ‘‘design in the centre of the picture as it is design that provides
the variation that is so essential to modern society.’’ 25 With the alchemy
of design, an industrial product is transformed into a deliberate object
that signifies its invested difference and, consequently, systematic mean-
ing. It is Bauhaus, the pioneer school of modern industrial design in the
s, that, in the words of Baudrillard again, ‘‘institutes this universal
semantization of the environment in which everything becomes the ob-
ject of a calculus of function and of signification. Total functionality, total
semiurgy.’’ 26 When it penetrates into the domestic interior and incor-
porates personal space into sign exchange, design encounters a situation
where commodified difference is dramatized even further: the home in-
terior has to signify a private domain as such, both to its occupant(s) and
to a conceivable public. In comparison with the exterior decoration that
makes over shop windows, buildings, or the city as a whole, interior de-
sign is compelled to address an individual rather than a projected crowd,
to speak a more intimate parole with accented variations. It is only logi-
cal, then, to anticipate that interior design, as a business and generator
of sign value, will cash in on personal preferences, encourage hobbies
and idiosyncrasies, and profit from the notion of multiple identities. At
the same time, interior design, by instilling a sign-consciousness in our
most private and personal sphere, serves to acculturate us to the system
of sign-objects—namely, to interiorize the political economy of the sign.
At this point, the discourse of interiority gathers not only a legitimizing
impetus from the market but also a concreteness that promises to atom-
ize and undermine the metaphysical dimension of the interior. Instead of
articulating a spiritual or psychic structure of depth, interiority may now
describe a new frontier market for customized products of sorts.
This transmutation of a charged intellectual concept can be best exam-

. Penny Sparke, An Introduction to Design and Culture in the Twentieth Century
(London: Allen and Unwin, ), xxii.
. Baudrillard, ‘‘Design and Environment,’’ For a Critique of the Political Economy of
the Sign, .
 Decorating Culture 309

ined in the widespread interest in interior design in contemporary China.

Partly as the result of the new housing policy that requires residents to
purchase their apartments from their respective work units, and partly
because of the gradual opening of a real estate market, urban Chinese
now view their dwellings as their most significant investment. The idea of
owning your own ‘‘dream home,’’ as the New York Times reported, finally
catches on—at least in Shanghai, ‘‘the nation’s most affluent and modern-
minded city.’’ 27 After more than a quarter-century during which the idea
of a private home was systematically erased and interior design was an
alien concept, city dwellers now invest a great deal of money and time in
decorating and remodeling what they can claim as their own living space.
Privatization in this area necessarily gives rise to an awareness among
homeowners different from an aesthetics of austerity bred by publicly
subsidized, and therefore standard and communal, housing projects. In
Shanghai in , for instance, residents reportedly spent an average of
, yuan (about US ,) for modernizing the bathroom alone in a
given household, even though a typical bathroom is no larger than four
square meters. Zhan Musi in Shanghai Pictorial finds this new trend one
that is worth encouraging. ‘‘Being the most private space in everyday
life, bathrooms are where people can relax, examine and refresh them-
selves. We should create an elegant and pleasing atmosphere in a place
from which a good mood begins.’’ 28 Although in the initial stages of the
new housing policy, apartment owners, perhaps out of habit, may have
followed the same format in home improvement, very soon it became
clear that individuality and uniqueness were crucial elements of interior
design.
Another indicator of the popular interest in home improvement is
the growing demand for calendars that reproduce large and high-quality
glossy prints of ‘‘modern living,’’ a genre that came into vogue only in
the s. All of these imposingly gorgeous pictures appear to be taken
directly from either an Ethan Allen catalogue or Country Living magazine
(figures  and ). Alongside these fancy images are more specific and
better organized instruction manuals or catalogues that also sell in large

. Seth Faison, ‘‘For Sale at Last in China: Dream Homes, but No Sink,’’ New York
Times,  September , B, B.
. See Shanghai huabao (Shanghai pictorial), no.  (): –. Incidentally, the
reporter’s name, ‘‘Zhan Musi,’’ is the accepted Chinese transliteration of the English
first name ‘‘James.’’
. (above) Photograph, ‘‘Xiandai jushi’’ (Calendar: modern living) ().
Courtesy of Shanghai huabao chubanshe. . (below) Photograph, ‘‘Jia/Home’’
(Calendar) (). Courtesy of Jiansu meishu chubanshe.
 Decorating Culture 311

quantities. One book among numerous such publications, published by

China Trade Press, bears the suggestive title: Fengyu zhong de lüdao—
xiandai jiaju (Safe haven in a storm—modern living). Although its col-
lection of designs and styles is not at all outstanding, the editor’s com-
ments are offered in an embellished literary style, and his preface, titled
‘‘Home,’’ reads as a perfect example of how effortlessly a cluster of once
politically sensitive ideas, such as ‘‘individuality,’’ ‘‘self-expression,’’ ‘‘pri-
vacy,’’ and ‘‘interiority,’’ can be grafted onto a commercial advertisement
targeted at the new managerial class.

In modern society, the connotation of ‘‘home’’ can no longer be restricted

to a protective shelter. For people who are trying to adapt to the rapid
pace of contemporary life, it has become a pursuit and a desire to create a
cozy and sweet home, a home that also fully reveals their individual per-
sonality. Economic growth and the emergence of new cities now give you
the opportunity to approach or even arrive at such a goal. Once you hold in
your hand the key to your new home, you should turn your long-cherished
dreams into reality, as if you were painting on a pure white canvas, with
every stroke of the brush conveying your talent in design and your cultiva-
tion.
After a long day of hard work, when you leave far behind the madding
clamor of society, when you return to your own home and find there a
soothing environment with its refreshing and graceful design, you will feel
the gentle caress of such an elegant atmosphere. Without being aware of
it, you will be naturally relieved of all the anxiety pent up inside you. You
will achieve relaxation with your loved ones in the harmony of such a ‘‘love
nest.’’ . . .
Everyone can be a designer. How about you? 29

Collected in this brief text is such a miscellany of claims, assumptions,

and stylistic registers that to fully decode it we will have to embark on
an extensive cultural study, especially when we place such an articulation
back in its own historical moment. In the present context, this type of
writing is worth noting because of the sense of travesty it evokes. Only
a decade ago, the creative freedom of the human subject, together with
the depth of his or her inner world, was the enlightenment cause be-

. Lin Gang, ed., Fengyu zhong de lüdao—xiandai jiaju (Safe haven in a storm—
modern living) (Beijing: Zhongguo shangye, ), n.p.
312 Chinese Modern

hind Liu Zaifu’s famously abstract theory of subjectivity and his thesis
on the composite nature of characters. Now, acknowledgment of simi-
lar demands is aggressively made in an emerging consumer culture that
must regiment a work-versus-leisure division in order to jump-start and
sustain its economic development. If interiority, for the humanist dis-
course of the s, was a global concept with which to protest and resist
political repression and homogenization, then, in the consumer culture
of the s, all inner yearnings and visions are increasingly channeled to
their external expression in concrete sign-objects. The humanist fascina-
tion with interiority, in other words, secretly and only in failure aspires to
a wholesome existence, to an artistic transformation of the outside world;
its commercial parody, however, serves to substitute specific consumer
needs for any transcendental desire. It is therefore hardly ‘‘an age without
interiority,’’ but a time when people’s lives will have to be systematically
interiorized and interiority imaginatively engineered and expanded so as
to create more fantasies and more needs. On an even grimmer note, this
is hardly a moment where one can gleefully denounce the ‘‘Enlighten-
ment nightmare.’’ Rather, the contemporary development forms part of
the ‘‘dialectic of Enlightenment,’’ for a voracious consumer culture may
have been prepared—paradoxically and in the first place—by lofty, con-
templative humanist ideals.30

Toward an Injured Form of Interiority

Nonetheless, we may and probably have to regard Lin Gang’s brief pref-
ace as containing a faintly utopian vision and an implicit critique of ‘‘the
rapid pace of contemporary life’’ that exacts a tremendous human price.
The anxiety that needs release at the end of the day has everything to do

. This is, of course, the central argument of Max Horkheimer and Theodor
Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment. In a more immediate case, Liu Zaifu’s writings
in defense of economic reform, for example the volume Gaobie geming: huiwang er-
shi shiji Zhongguo (Farewell to revolution: review of twentieth-century China) (Hong
Kong: Cosmos, ), coauthored by Li Zehou and Liu, may suggest that the human-
ist cause of Enlightenment does not oppose general modernization. On the contrary,
it is part of the cultural revolution that heralds the arrival of a mass society, although
the gratification-oriented consumer hardly resembles the free and self-expressive Sub-
ject envisioned by the theoreticians of modern subjectivity.
 Decorating Culture 313

with reclaiming one’s own mind and body from normalized stress. In-
terior design, as it is advocated here, only dramatizes the discontinuity
between alienating work and creative freedom, and interiority, now
evoked in a specific form, persists to remind the individual subject of
how fragmented and limited his or her life may be. It is not surprising,
therefore, to see how closely the generic description in the preface corre-
sponds to the experience of Deng Heping, the successful owner of Hong-
tai Decoration Materials store in He Dun’s novella. Upon his return to ‘‘a
soothing environment with its refreshing and graceful design,’’ as we have
seen, Heping feels he is entitled to some relaxation with his beloved Dan-
dan ‘‘in the harmony of such a ‘love nest.’ ’’ The newly designed interior
not only expresses Dandan’s artistic nature but also awakens Heping’s
own imagination and creative impulse. When he finally notices the two
framed still lifes put up by Dandan, Heping decides that he will find a
poster of the sea to decorate the wall, because he likes the open ocean
better.
A consistent gender-based division of labor, as well as of value, de-
fines the role of Dandan, who appears to inspire a more spiritual need in
Heping. It is of great significance that while Heping is absorbed in run-
ning the store, Dandan chooses to re-create their own private home. This
plot arrangement reinforces the symbolic meaning in the story of Dan-
dan, whose complex character is first indicated by the soulful and melan-
choly cello that she plays. (By contrast, Heping’s failed first marriage was
with an up-and-coming movie actress.) What Heping returns to find, on
this happy occasion, is therefore more than a comfortable home; it also
promises a fulfilling private world that will only add depth and content to
his existence. A new experience of interiority, engendered by the expres-
sive interior design, seems to be within his grasp. This becomes the most
utopian moment in the narrative because it signals a final reconciliation, a
complementary union that will elevate the relationship between Heping
and Dandan to a new height.
What complicates the situation greatly, however, is that He Dun’s nar-
ratives refuse to stop at a triumphant moment where the hero may be
seduced into believing that the world of his creation answers to his as-
piration. A symbolic crumbling always follows. There is always a pause,
a suspension of normal goings-on, or even an absurd death, that puts
in disarray all splendid displays of success, material as well as spiritual.
Within his narratives of fast urban life, a specter of the unconsoled is cre-
314 Chinese Modern

ated to haunt the city landscape. In the particular story that we have been
examining, a traffic accident kills Dandan and the three-month-old fetus
inside her. This occurs the day following Heping’s coming home and, as
the narrative makes clear, before the night of passionate lovemaking that
she promises him. The much-anticipated evening would have made the
remodeled apartment really a part of his intimate being, an extension of
his interior world. As it is now, the new home interior stands only as a re-
minder of the porcelain fragility of the world of objects; more ominously,
the death of the unborn child hints at the impossibility for a potentially
gratifying everyday life or relationship to reproduce itself. The symbolism
of having Dandan thrown off Heping’s powerful motorcycle and crushed
to death is too strong to ignore. This scene of devastation reaffirms, in
a cruel fashion, the need for an interior space to cushion the impact of
the outside world. Until this instant, Heping shows little concern with
his world of fast and fragmented experience, and even less interest in the
generally unanswerable questions of causality and meaning. In her grue-
some death, Dandan is transformed, literally and figuratively, from an in-
spiring designer of home interiors into the announcer of an injured form
of interiority. The last sentence of the novella reverberates to the primal,
haunting scream uttered by Dandan, and it is her voice that penetrates
deep into Heping’s entire being. ‘‘It was no longer a human cry, but the
cracking sound of glass. For a long time, it hovered over the intersec-
tion, humming and parading like a phalanx of spotty-legged mosquitoes.
One of those mosquitoes quickly took hold of my younger brother’s ear,
and fastened itself, like a thumb nail, onto his eardrum, permanently . . .’’
().31
The productive question to be asked about He Dun’s fast-paced nar-
ratives, therefore, is not what alternative there is in an age of no interi-
ority, but what function interiority, now recommended as spiritual re-
silience at a moment of worldly crisis or breakdown, is called upon to

. This final scene of death and articulation brings to mind observations that Theo-
dor Adorno once made on the ‘‘dialectic of interiority’’ and the paradox of expression
in modern art in his Aesthetic Theory. ‘‘Authentic art is familiar with expressionless ex-
pression, a kind of crying without tears,’’ Adorno writes. ‘‘Granted, the subject cannot
and must not speak the language of immediacy. But it can and does continue to articu-
late itself through things in their alienated and disfigured form’’ (Trans. C. Lenhardt,
ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann [London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ]:
–.)
 Decorating Culture 315

serve. It is by far much thornier to determine, for instance, whether or

not those instances of putting one’s faith and strength to the test actu-
ally interrogate the interiorization of consumer needs. Do the evocations
of a transcendental longing at the end actually add to the legitimacy of
massive consummative mobilization? Put differently, the question may
have to be: What if interiority is served as an alibi in a culture that of
necessity decorates and accessorizes everything for recognition? Or, con-
versely, does the injured form of interiority that Dandan articulates in
her death reveal a fundamental structure of interiority—its success in fail-
ure? Of greater theoretical relevance could be a general question about
the astonishing speed in which ‘‘interiority,’’ as a central value and prac-
tice of Euro-American modernity, gets recycled and appropriated, for all
intents and purposes, in late twentieth-century Chinese culture. Is this a
necessary process before the notion becomes once again exhausted and
ripe for historical inquiry; what does the rapidity of its transmutation en-
tail insofar as a legitimating narrative of modern capitalist cultural logic is
concerned? Does it suggest that ours is still part of the moment when in-
teriority and its corollaries are conjured globally only to undermine their
pertinence?
10
Melancholy Against the Grain:
Approaching Postmodernity in Wang Anyi’s
Tales of Sorrow

A postmodern challenge, Julia Kristeva remarks at the end of her 

book, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, now confronts the ‘‘world of
unsettling, infectious ill-being’’ that Marguerite Duras so determinedly
creates in her fiction. Underlying the novelist’s imagination is a silence
or nothingness that insists on being spoken as the ultimate expression of
suffering and that often ‘‘carries us to the dangerous, furthermost bounds
of our psychic life.’’ Yet, what the irreverent postmodern abandon finds
in a Durasian malady of grief, Kristeva laments, is ‘‘only one moment
of the narrative synthesis capable of sweeping along in its complex whirl-
wind philosophical meditations as well as erotic protections or entertain-
ing pleasures. The postmodern is closer to the human comedy than to
the abyssal discontent.’’ Postmodernity erects an ‘‘artifice of seeming’’ and
offers the ‘‘heartrending distraction of parody,’’ both of which promise to
act as antidepressants for a literary obsession with the illness of moder-
nity.1
At this point, Kristeva, the renowned semiotician of desire, seems
to suggest that a modernist seriousness and a postmodernist parody
form successive phases of the ‘‘eternal return of historical and intellectual
cycles.’’ 2 This pattern of recurrence, however, is not so much a tempo-
ral process as a temperamental one, through which our experience in and
of historical time becomes affected and eventually representable. ‘‘Thus
moods are inscriptions,’’ she declares earlier in the book. ‘‘They lead us
toward a modality of significance that . . . insures the preconditions for
(or manifests the disintegration of) the imaginary and the symbolic.’’ 3

. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez
(New York: Columbia University Press, ), –.
. Ibid., .
. Ibid., .
 Melancholy Against the Grain 317

Relying on this thesis, Kristeva is able to conclude her somber study

of melancholia and literature on a reassuring note: ‘‘Does not the won-
derment of psychic life after all stem from those alternations of protec-
tions and downfalls, smiles and tears, sunshine and melancholia?’’ 4 The
challenge of the postmodern, therefore, lies not necessarily in the threat
that the malady of grief would be rendered passé and obsolete at one
stroke but rather in recognizing the dialectics, the dynamic alternations
that bring forth a postmodern lightheartedness in the first place. It is the
capacity of our inner emotional existence that is being put to the test.
In fact, this is the stated motivation for Kristeva’s journey into the dark
interior of depression and melancholia. At the beginning of Black Sun,
she writes, ‘‘For those who are racked by melancholia, writing about it
would have meaning only if writing sprang out of that very melancho-
lia. I am trying to address an abyss of sorrow, a noncommunicable grief.’’
Her first question is then a direct inquiry about the origins of her rav-
aging melancholia: ‘‘Where does this black sun come from?’’ 5 The main
body of the book, in which she reads not only clinical cases of feminine
depression but also literary texts by Dostoyevsky and Duras, therefore
registers a double movement. It records Kristeva’s broad effort to reinter-
pret melancholia from a psycholinguistic perspective; yet it is also a text
that answers her own ‘‘glaring and inescapable’’ depression. Her writing
about melancholia combats her devitalized existence by helping her name
and dissect the abyssal and unnamable suffering that overpowers her. In
other words, hers is a self-reflective text, produced with a narrator’s full
knowledge of the postmodern challenge to come at the end.

‘‘The easily spotted triggers of my despair’’

The immediate reason why the Kristeva of Black Sun is introduced here
in a chapter purportedly about Wang Anyi, the prominent contemporary
Chinese writer, is that both writers at one point describe a similar onset of
unspeakable sorrow. The accounts of their encounters with melancholy
reveal a shared logic, although Kristeva’s musings have the appearance
of either psychoanalysis or literary theory, and Wang Anyi’s narration is

. Ibid., .
. Ibid., .
318 Chinese Modern

strictly fictional. In addition, while what Kristeva studies includes clini-

cal melancholia, Wang Anyi’s literary works deal mostly with melancholy
as a subjective mood.6 Nonetheless, more substantive reasons for making
this initial comparison will become obvious in this discussion of some of
Wang Anyi’s more recent stories, which may be called ‘‘tales of sorrow,’’
as suggested by the writer herself in Shangxin Taipingyang (Sadness for
the Pacific). The most vital linkage, on an abstract level, may lie in the
similar response that both writers choose to mount to the postmodern
challenge, namely, a melancholy subjectivity.
To begin answering her own question about the origins of melancho-
lia, Kristeva ponders a series of possibilities. ‘‘The wound I have just suf-
fered, some setback or other in my love life or my profession, some sor-
row or bereavement affecting my relationship with close relatives—such
are often the easily spotted triggers of my despair.’’ As if this list is not
enough, she goes on to enumerate a second, more severe group of likely
causes: ‘‘a betrayal, a fatal illness, some accident or handicap that abruptly
wrests me away from what seemed to me the normal category of normal
people. . . . What more could I mention? An infinite number of misfor-
tunes weighs us down every day.’’ 7
When the confessional, presumably male, first-person narrator in Wang
Anyi’s  novella, Our Uncle’s Story, announces his decision to tell a
story, he apparently suffers from a setback in his love life and experiences
the consequent interruption of everyday normalcy. His sudden discov-
ery, which comes to him one day as a result of some ‘‘extremely personal
incident,’’ is an unsettling insight about himself: ‘‘I’ve always thought that
I was a happy child, but now I realize I am actually not.’’ This new realiza-
tion dawns on him as an ‘‘elegant sadness,’’ which prompts his desire to
tell a story.8 Yet this young writer-narrator does not wish to disclose the
personal affair that triggers his new self-conception because it has some-
thing to do with love and sentiment. His therapeutic device, then, is to

. For a discussion of the changing implications of these related terms, see Jennifer
Radden, ‘‘Melancholy and Melancholia,’’ in Pathologies of the Modern Self: Postmodern
Studies on Narcissism, Schizophrenia, and Depression, ed. David Michael Levin (New
York: New York University Press, ), –.
. Kristeva, Black Sun, –.
. Wang Anyi, Shushu de gushi (Our uncle’s story), collected in her Xianggang de
qing yu ai (Love and sentiment in Hong Kong) (Beijing: Zuojia, ), . Page refer-
ences to this work are given in the text as Shushu.
 Melancholy Against the Grain 319

tell a story about another, more established writer, whom the narrator
refers to as ‘‘our uncle’’ and whose awkward fate in the whirlwind of con-
temporary life gives rise to great ambivalence on the part of the narrator.
This ambivalence is so intense that, toward the end, the storyteller con-
cedes that this is the first story that has ever had such a personal impact on
him. All of his previous stories deal solely with other people and involve
less investment. The uncle’s life story, however, parallels the narrator’s
own ‘‘personal incident,’’ which appears utterly trivial and frivolous when
compared to the grand drama of the uncle’s life tale. Nevertheless, the
narrator feels that his recent experience allows him a better psychological
interpretation of the events in the uncle’s life. Therefore, he is compelled
to tell this story, and his conclusions are: ‘‘The outcome of our uncle’s
story is that he will no longer be happy. After I finish telling the story of
our uncle, I will never tell a happy story again’’ (Shushu, ).
In the end, we never find out what the ‘‘extremely personal incident’’ is
that causes the narration of an unhappy story, although numerous hints
are planted that ‘‘an individual inflicted an acutely painful experience’’
on the narrator (Shushu, ). Nor do we get a closer look at the narrator
himself, except for a broad-brush, intellectual portrait of a young, fash-
ionable, self-confident writer (of the same age as Wang Anyi herself) who
is now stricken by an elegant sadness and absorbed in sober introspec-
tion. Yet the narrator’s temperament, poignant comments, and reflec-
tions frame the entire story, which proves to be as much a narrative about
the political and erotic vicissitudes in the uncle’s life as it is an analytical
account of the historical constitution of the narrator’s own melancholic
mood. His altered perspective on reality and on his profession affects him
to such a degree that he has no other story to tell but this fateful one. ‘‘Put
differently, if I do not finish telling this story, I will not be able to tell any
other stories. What’s more, I am astonished by the fact that I should have
already told so many stories before this one; all of those stories would
have a different appearance if they were to be told after this one’’ (Shushu,
–).
What we see emerging from the beginning of his narrative is the almost
standard structure of metafiction, in which a potentially infinite mirror
game of writing a story about story writing is set to unfold. Yet the
refreshing spin of Our Uncle’s Story, according to literary critics, comes
from the productive tension that Wang Anyi maintains between the two
levels of narration. Instead of ossifying the metafictional operation into
320 Chinese Modern

a stiff technique or purpose, she adroitly keeps the encasing narration

itself open to interpretation. For this reason, Wang Anyi’s story is con-
sidered more successful than other works in contemporary experimental
fiction.9 For the critic Li Jiefei, the writing of Our Uncle’s Story marks a
definite turning point in the novelist’s conception of the art of storytell-
ing. It ushers in a new logic of literary creation, the premise of which is
no longer referential experience or reality but the independent technique
of crafting fiction. This transformation makes Wang Anyi a pioneering
‘‘novelistic technician,’’ whose later stories should therefore be taken as
part of a larger myth-creating project.10
While it is highly debatable whether, in the s, one could label Wang
Anyi as a freshly converted and purist ‘‘technician’’ bent on conjuring up
a mythic world of her own, there is little doubt that Our Uncle’s Story
initiated a new mode of writing for the writer herself. It is a narrative,
in the writer’s own words, that contains her ‘‘most fully developed emo-
tions and thoughts in a long time.’’ The writing of this story brought
Wang Anyi back into her ‘‘own personal experiential world’’ and com-
pelled her to dissect something that is deep in her and painful to look
at. Yet she had to compose this story because, in hope of lessening her
‘‘solitude and loneliness,’’ she needed to share the pain of confronting the
most sensitive and also the most sacred part of her world and her being.11
After the critical success of Our Uncle’s Story, Wang Anyi continued her
well-known productivity and still excelled at putting together intriguing
stories buttressed by realistic character sketches.12 More and more, how-

. See the comments made by Zhang Xinying and Gao Yuanbao in Chen Sihe,
Wang Anyi, Gao Yuanbao, Zhang Xinying, and Yan Feng, ‘‘Dangjin wenxue chuang-
zuo zhong de ‘qing’ yu ‘zhong’—wenxue duihua lu’’ (The ‘‘light’’ and ‘‘heavy’’ in con-
temporary literary works: dialogues on literature), Dangdai zuojia pinglun (Review of
contemporary writers), no.  (): –, esp. –.
. Li Jiefei, ‘‘Wang Anyi de xin shenhua—yige lilun tantao’’ (Wang Anyi’s new
mythology: a theoretical investigation), Review of Contemporary Writers, no.  ():
–.
. Quoted in Chen Sihe, ‘‘Bijin shijimo de xiaoshuo’’ (Fiction close to the fin de
siècle), collected in Wang Xiaoming, ed. Ershi shiji Zhongguo wenxue shilun (Essays on
twentieth-century Chinese literary history) (Shanghai: Dongfang chuban zhongxin,
), :–.
. Of this group of Wang Anyi’s narratives collected in Love and Sentiment in Hong
Kong, ‘‘ ‘Wenge’ yishi’’ (Anecdotes from the ‘‘Cultural revolution’’) and ‘‘Beitong zhi
di’’ (The land of sorrow) are perhaps the most representative, –, –.
 Melancholy Against the Grain 321

ever, her writings seem concentrated on capturing and gauging a mood,

a persistent sentiment or emotional state that, because of its profoundly
ambivalent nature, becomes intensified rather than diffused through nar-
ration. A central pathos is maintained and developed into an expressive
affect, such as longing, sorrow, and nostalgia. Wutuobang shipian (The
utopian chapters, ), for example, is an evidently autobiographical nar-
rative about longing as itself an authentic passion that promises a perfect
happiness, and that is in itself a comfort and an ideal.13 In Xianggang
de qing yu ai (Love and sentiment in Hong Kong, ), Wang Anyi’s
novella about the possibilities for emotional attachment in a consumer-
ist metropolis, constant grief for the present as already past underlies an
uneventful world.14 Readily observable in these narratives is a reflective
sorrow and mournfulness.
In retrospect, the narrator of Our Uncle’s Story is telling a prophetic
truth about Wang Anyi’s writings when he declares that no more happy
narratives will follow it. Or he happens to be the mouthpiece through
which the author verbalizes her own melancholic mood. More revealing
is the writer-narrator’s observation that many of his earlier stories would
have a different outlook if they were told now. This proves to be the case
with Wang Anyi’s critically acclaimed novella Sadness for the Pacific (),
which is an imaginative rewriting of an earlier, much simpler short story.
What motivates the rewriting, as the new title indicates, is an irresolv-
able sadness, a global desolation that, as I will show, lies at the heart of
Wang Anyi’s melancholy imagination. But before we examine Sadness for
the Pacific, let us return to Our Uncle’s Story for clues about the origins
of a disconsolate period. The trigger of ensuing unhappiness may well be
the sudden crumbling of a presumed reality.

‘‘And yet we have no courage to live a deep life’’

All things considered, Our Uncle’s Story is among the few truly complex
and challenging works in late twentieth-century Chinese literature. It is
a profoundly unsettling story in which the author methodically under-

. See Wang Anyi, Wutuobang shipian (The utopian chapters), collected in Love and
Sentiment in Hong Kong, –.
. See my discussion of this novella in chap. .
322 Chinese Modern

mines established narrative paradigms, mocks aesthetic pretensions, and

offers biting criticisms of ideological constructs. An occasional satirical
tone aside, it is also a full-fledged allegory about the inescapable burden
of one’s own past, about suffering as constitutive of an individual’s self-
consciousness. Its circular structure of a double narrative, moreover, en-
ables a parodic commentary on a society that rapidly outpaces itself and,
in the process, yields little legitimacy to any hyperextended narratives
of historical progress. We can even say this felicitous, irony-driven form
effects the same ‘‘heartrending distraction of parody’’ that Julia Kristeva
detects in a postmodern playfulness.15 What comes through is indeed a
heartbreaking ambivalence, directed toward a disorienting age that dis-
avows genuine passion or heroic possibilities. Largely for this reason, the
critic Chen Sihe believes that Our Uncle’s Story ushered in a new reflec-
tive mode of writing for Chinese fiction of the s, which, at the end of
a long and turbulent century, exhibits both general despair and spiritual
resilience.16
The story of ‘‘our uncle’’ is a tragicomic one, inextricably interwoven
with the course of political and cultural life in China during the second
half of the twentieth century. The nameless uncle, explains the narrator, is
not a relative or even a friend, but rather a representative of the older gen-
eration whose members were put into political exile as subversive ‘‘right-
ists’’ in the late s, only to return to center stage as triumphant heroes
of society some twenty years later. This generation’s wasted youth and
talents have been the subject of numerous movies, memoirs, and stories,
including the uncle’s own successful writings, widely assumed to be auto-
biographical. As a result of his story about the suffering of a young right-
ist, the uncle wins instant fame, becomes a full-time writer employed by
the state, and is relocated from the remote village where he has lived in
exile to the provincial capital. This is where we find the uncle at the be-
ginning of the narrative. In a matter-of-fact tone, the narrator undoes the
popular image of rightists as romantic young men who invariably bade
tearful farewells to their loves and, in eternal darkness, embarked on cold,

. According to Linda Hutcheon, the theoretician of postmodern poetics, parody

is a central trope of postmodern fiction and art, because, ‘‘through a double process of
installing and ironizing, parody signals how present representations come from past
ones and what ideological consequences derive from both continuity and difference.’’
See her Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, ), –.
. See Chen Sihe, ‘‘Fiction Close to the Fin de Siècle,’’ .
 Melancholy Against the Grain 323

snowy journeys to the forsaken western frontier. The truth is that the
uncle was too young to fall in love then and was quietly sent home to his
obscure native town rather than to remote Qinghai. He was first assigned
to menial labor at the local school and later started teaching. Only after
he had developed a following as a writer, quips the narrator, did tales of
his trek to Qinghai get concocted and circulated.
From the outset, the uncle’s story is told to debunk recent cultural
myths and to reveal the gap between representation and lived experi-
ences. When he describes the uncle’s marriage to one of his students, for
instance, the narrator realizes that a wide range of narrative conventions
for romances exist for such an event.

Many inspiring tales can be spun about a female student from a small
town falling in love with her teacher, who happens to be from the city
and an ex-rightist. There is the love relationship between a simple person
of nature and a cultured person of society; there is the attachment be-
tween a free person and an exile, just as in the story of a Decembrist of old
Russia and his wife; there is also the attraction between a person from an
entrenched family and a rootless stranger. With these three relationships
blended together, one can probe deep into human nature and capture a
broad social background, bringing together a specific reality and a perma-
nent humanity. Such a story our uncle did write, in fact more than once.
(Shushu, )

Eventually, all of these elements seem to find their way into the uncle’s
stories and combine to make the misery of his youth appear soulful, hero-
ically tragic, even sublime, a suffering that becomes an object of envy to
the younger generation. The task of demythologization that the narrator
sets himself, therefore, has to start with recounting the uncle’s life in the
small town. It is, in fact, an uneventful life, although two key events take
place during the spring following the uncle’s marriage. The first event is
the birth of their son, Dabao, which disappoints the uncle deeply because
he wishes them to have a daughter. The second incident, rather ‘‘petty
and frivolous,’’ happens one spring evening. Accused of frolicking with
one of his current students and subjected to brutal communal humilia-
tion, the uncle has to be rescued by his wife, who then turns the tables by
verbally attacking the younger woman in public for three long days and
nights.
This demoralizing incident, according to the narrator, provides a cred-
324 Chinese Modern

ible motive for the development of the uncle’s story, even though it may
be altogether fabrication. Perhaps the uncle never talks or writes about
what actually happened, the narrator further speculates, because the inci-
dent would compromise the heroic narratives of his noble suffering. But
this sordid affair has the effect of ‘‘nailing suffering into one’s body,’’ of
rendering anguish into a memory of complicity (Shushu, ). It does not
help the husband love his wife any better either, for that would be yet
another hackneyed story. Instead, the narrator sees the growing resent-
ment that the uncle harbors against his protective wife and the binding
institution of marriage. ‘‘He felt that marriage did not lessen the humilia-
tion and misery inflicted upon him, as it was supposed to. On the con-
trary, it intensified the humiliation and misery by giving it a lasting shell,
now impossible to forget’’ (Shushu, ). To numb his faculty of memory,
the uncle indulges in sensual pleasures, starts drinking and smoking, beats
his wife during the day, and demands sexual favors at night. He readily
banishes his own soul and perseveres in an instinctual existence ‘‘like an
animal’’ (Shushu, ). Suicide as protest or for the sake of personal integ-
rity is the remotest idea from his deadened mind.
Through his testimonial narratives in the wake of the discredited Cul-
tural Revolution, however, the uncle manages to turn his personal igno-
miny into noble political suffering. He now reconstructs his life in a fic-
tional world, where ‘‘all past experiences can be amended, the beautiful
and the sublime preserved, the ugly and the base completely eliminated,
and the destroyed given a new life’’ (Shushu, ). His desire to shed his
former self provides the psychological motivation for his seminal story,
in which a young rightist departs this dismal world by inhaling poison-
ous gas. Symbolically, ‘‘our uncle’s new life began with the death of a
young rightist’’ (Shushu, ). Not surprisingly, according to the narrator,
the same need to forget a painful past lies behind the uncle’s widely pub-
licized divorce, although the public tends to believe that another woman
is the direct cause. At this point, the narrator details the uncle’s romantic
adventures after he moves to the city as an intellectual celebrity. First, he
regularly visits an older woman for platonic consolation and summons
a young one, about the age of his imaginary daughter, for more physi-
cal satisfaction. Then, in an effort to convince himself of his unflagging
vitality, he sets out to conquer even younger women, easily winning them
over with his paternal charm and rich experience. One inevitable excep-
 Melancholy Against the Grain 325

tion, the narrator infers, occurs when the uncle visits Germany with a
delegation of Chinese writers and mistakenly concludes that his attractive
blonde interpreter must welcome his amorous groping.
The blunt slap on the face that the uncle receives from the German
woman, as the narrator continually reminds us, is mandated by his own
logical inference. He has to rely on conjectures and reasonings in order to
lead his story to its known ending, which is the uncle’s final insight into
his own unhappy fate. This reconstruction, therefore, becomes an oppor-
tunity that allows the narrator to compare and comment on two succeed-
ing generations of writers. The term generation in the text now connotes
undeniable cultural and psychological differentiations. While his analysis
of the uncle’s generation is penetrating but sympathetic, his assessment
of his own generation conveys as much self-content as self-doubt. It is at
this juncture that the narrator directly participates in the story and voices
his ambivalence toward a contemporary world where either generation’s
self-image often turns into a burlesque.
In the narrator’s summary, the main distinction between these two
generations of writers is that the older one already has its belief system
in place when its normal course of life is derailed, whereas the younger
generation encounters great social transformation before it has time to
form any coherent ideals or worldviews. A constant source of anxiety
for the uncle’s generation, therefore, is whether to accept or reject a new
idea or reality. Driven by the need for a systematic faith, this generation
always seeks meaning and causality among things; with classical roman-
ticism as its cultivated aesthetic sensibility, it is perpetually perplexed by
the divergence between reason and emotion. ‘‘When [our uncle] lost one
faith he had to look for another; when he accepted one principle of action
he had to enthrone it as faith and then went on to witness yet another
war for the same throne’’ (Shushu, ). The younger generation, however,
appears to have completely rid itself of any global romantic aspirations
and possesses the prerequisites for playing pragmatic games, albeit under
nihilistic pretenses.

We grew up in an age of cultural desolation, and then came into a most

open time. One hundred years’ worth of ideas, the most sophisticated as
well as the crudest, from the end of the last century to the present, rushed
in to swamp us overnight. What we ended up picking had much to do with
326 Chinese Modern

our endowments and luck, but on the surface, we gave the impression of
being innovative from day to day, always leading the newest trend of our
time. . . .
The latest philosophy urged us to believe in the significance of the mo-
ment, telling us that history is made up of instants and that every instant
is real. All we need do is enjoy to the fullest the pleasure and revelation of
the moment. (Shushu, , )

These contrastive profiles bring into view two antithetical generations,

and their difference is pointedly projected as one between an older, depth-
obsessed modernist and a younger, postmodernized cosmopolitan. In
neither case does the metafictional structure of Our Uncle’s Story allow
the narrator to invest a stable, positive value.17 While the postmodern-
ist playfulness precludes any genuine passion or commitment, the grave
modernist faith is revealed to be a compensatory myth. To adopt Julia
Kristeva’s characterization, the young generation misses an abyssal ‘‘win-
ter of discontent,’’ but the vain and all-too-human uncle can hardly resist
the seduction of a shimmering postmodern ‘‘artifice of seeming’’ either.
In a hurry to postmodernize himself, the uncle rushes through two con-
ceptual thresholds and plunges himself into the contemporary whirl-
wind, mistaking the shrinking of experience for new discoveries. ‘‘At first,
fiction was for him an imaginary world in which our uncle could sat-
isfy certain psychological needs of his; now it was reality that was trans-
formed into a fictitious world, which supplied evidence and material for
his novels.’’ Inhabiting a real world that he took as a mere extension of
his fiction, the uncle ‘‘no longer worried that an ordinary life could harm
him and consequently showed greater than usual readiness to be vulgar’’
(Shushu, ).
What undercuts this postmodern elusiveness and dismantles the artifice
of seeming in Our Uncle’s Story is the return of the repressed past, not nec-
essarily through the memory of a redemptive mission, but rather in the
form of its unspeakable failure. Forgotten pain returns when Dabao, the

. This absence of positive terms, a necessary condition for signification according
to Saussurian structural linguistics, apparently causes discomfort in one commentator,
who complains that the novella fails to provide a positive, uplifting attitude toward
life. See Yan Shu, ‘‘ ‘Shushu’ de kunhe—tan Shushu de gushi ’’ (The confusion of ‘‘our
uncle’’: on Our uncle’s story), Zuoping yu zhengming (Works and controversies), no. 
(August ): –.
 Melancholy Against the Grain 327

uncle’s frail and inarticulate son, shows up one day as an adult stranger
and asks his father to find him an office job in the city. The father’s resent-
ment of his own past leads to an icy indifference, which quickly breeds a
murderous hatred in the son. In the end, wielding a kitchen knife, Dabao
steals into his father’s bedroom, only to be overpowered by his outraged
and stronger father. The father wins the battle, but sees in his opponent’s
despicable face a reflection of himself. In the pathetic weeping of the
beaten, he cannot but hear his own life story bitterly recounted. ‘‘Over-
night, our uncle’s hair turned completely gray. He realized that he was
not to be happy anymore’’ (Shushu, ).
Thus, the uncle’s victory is also his defeat. The final scene of the tragi-
comedy of his life, which the young narrator and his associates appreciate
as if it were directly from a Shakespearean play, restages his life as ines-
capable suffering. He is now compelled to mourn the virtual death of his
own son, whom he regards with a classical psychoanalytic ambivalence of
love and hatred. Grief for the loss of a loved person or the loss of some
abstraction, according to Freud, may be the cause for both mourning
and melancholia. ‘‘The loss of a love-object,’’ furthermore, ‘‘constitutes an
excellent opportunity for the ambivalence in love-relationships to make
itself felt and come to the fore.’’ A Freudian explanation of melancholia
depicts a mental economy wherein ‘‘countless single conflicts in which
love and hate wrestle together are fought for the object.’’ 18 The loss of his
child is precisely such a traumatic experience that foregrounds the uncle’s
ambivalence toward the failure of his life, which becomes the origin of his
sorrow and his melancholy grasp of truth. The same ambivalence also af-
fects the narrator, who, through an ‘‘extremely personal incident,’’ comes
to the same revelation as the uncle in his grander drama. The failure of
history, as the narrator now realizes, is ultimately a failure of human will,
because enormous pain comes from living in historical truth. It is this
revelation that puts in critical perspective his own postmodernist predi-
lections: ‘‘We always seek depth and detest shallowness, and yet we have
no courage to live a deep life. A deep life is too serious and too momen-
tous for us; we simply cannot stand it’’ (Shushu, ).

. Sigmund Freud, ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia,’’ Collected Papers (New York: Basic
Books, ), :, .
 328 Chinese Modern

‘‘The same sharp sorrow suddenly arose from the vast ocean’’

To draw a not entirely improbable comparison, Our Uncle’s Story, in Wang

Anyi’s literary imagination, may occupy the same position that The Ori-
gin of the German Play of Mourning does in Walter Benjamin’s historical
thinking. In his study of the seventeenth-century baroque Trauerspiel as
a historical structure of feeling, Benjamin develops his messianic herme-
neutics and asserts that a theory of Trauer can be secured only ‘‘in the
description of the world which emerges under the gaze of the melan-
cholic.’’ 19 By reconstructing this mournful gaze, in the words of Max
Pensky, Benjamin delineates a ‘‘melancholy subjectivity’’ that dialectically
unifies insight and despair and thrives on a symbiotic connection between
a contemplative subject and the desacralized world of objects.20 Central
to this form of critical subjectivity is the resurrected notion of ‘‘heroic
melancholy,’’ to which I will return at the end of this chapter. With the
completion of Our Uncle’s Story, Wang Anyi seems to have discovered a
passage to historical depth by way of sadness or melancholy. The unhappy
tales that have ensued are intensely subjective and are often centered on
intriguing anamnestic images. If Our Uncle’s Story offers a self-conscious
narrative of the origin of her melancholy writing, in her  novella,
Sadness for the Pacific, Wang Anyi gives a global expression to melancholy
subjectivity through revisiting a family history of sadness.
Sadness for the Pacific is not so much a story about the genesis of melan-
cholia as it is an emotional exploration, set against a contemporary land-
scape of postmodernity, of the melancholy truth of the passion incited by
modernity. It has the structure of retracing a family tree over time and
space, and the first-person narrator, who now seeks to empathize with her
ancestors, participates in the narrative by projecting a subjective mood of
sorrow over past events and retrieved memories. Nostalgia, as both the
motivation for, and the mode of, historical remembrance, grips the nar-
rator, and her journey into the past becomes an encounter with varying
degrees and occasions of the same lament and mourning. The melancholy

. Walter Benjamin, Origin of the German Play of Mourning, quoted in Max Pensky,
Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: University
of Massachusetts Press, ), .
. Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics, ; see chap. , ‘‘Trauerspiel and Melancholy Sub-
jectivity,’’ –.
 Melancholy Against the Grain 329

mood, as Kristeva would say, is inscribed here as the originary language,

as the modality of significance that precedes any meaningful articulation.
In the text, this melancholy is specifically associated with a contemplating
individual who is stricken by the sublime eternity of a vast ocean.
At the beginning of the story, we find the narrator aboard a ship in
the sun-scorched Strait of Malacca on her way to the Malaysian island
city of Binang. This ancient passageway brings to her mind the adven-
tures of Zheng He, the Chinese navigator of the fifteenth century who
sailed the same reflecting waters; the surrounding tropical geography ex-
cites in her no small curiosity either, with its exotic names suggesting a
strange mixture of exuberance and desolation. This initial free association
already sets up the structure of the narrative as one of a contemporary
traveler’s looking for signs of historical depth and relevance. As her desti-
nation arises on the distant horizon, she suddenly realizes that her father
must have had the same view half a century ago when he and his theater
group were approaching Binang. Such an imaginary identification with
her father transfers the narrator back to the past and enlivens that earlier
moment with a tangible immediacy. With the apparition of her father as
a young boy hovering over herself and the Pacific Ocean, the narrator
enters a space of spectrality in which the past as ghost always returns for
a revelatory first time.21

Back then, my father was nineteen years old, obsessed with theater and
national salvation. He had followed the opera troupe from Singapore, trav-
eled across the Malay Peninsula, and was going to Binang as the final stop.
All the way, the group sang songs dedicated to the cause of fighting the
Japanese. It was also the mid-summer season of southern monsoons, and
the tropical sun had tanned my father dark as coal. A sun-burned teenager
in short pants appeared in my view. With his appearance, a sharp sorrow
unexpectedly arose from inside me. The same sharp sorrow suddenly arose
from the vast ocean, expanding and penetrating. Even the sun turned into
a source of excruciating pain.22

. The notion of the specter as ‘‘repetition and first time’’ comes from Jacques Der-
rida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New Interna-
tional, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, ), which, among other things,
offers a complex discussion of the relationship between spectrality and mourning and
is profoundly pertinent to our investigation of contemporary melancholy.
. Wang Anyi, Shangxin Taipingyang (Sadness for the Pacific), collected in her Love
330 Chinese Modern

This visceral experience of sadness in the middle of a timeless ocean

strikes a keynote, and the rest of the narrative flows as if in an unstop-
pable search for the connection between this intense sorrow and the vivid
image of an inspired teenage boy, who, as ‘‘my father,’’ stands for an in-
eluctable destiny. Encoded in the anamnestic image is also the narrator’s
origin and sense of belonging, which she now must know. In order to
fully account for this image and its inexplicable, but enveloping, melan-
choly, the narrator will have to relive time and space as lived by the by-
gone generations of her family. This root-seeking search will lead her
southward through the Pacific as she retraces her forefathers’ footsteps
over Southeast Asia and through Singapore’s gradual emergence as an in-
dependent modern nation. In the end, a melancholy perspective on the
rootlessness of humanity on a global scale takes hold. The solidity of dry
land dissolves, and the ocean asserts itself as the ultimate background
and limit to human existence: ‘‘A world map shows us that even conti-
nents are drifting islands. . . . The ocean may well be the last home for
humanity, the dead end of human migration. Herein lies all the sadness
for the Pacific’’ (Shangxin, ).
The hypertrophy of melancholy subjectivity in Sadness for the Pacific
is most striking when we compare this  narrative with Wang Anyi’s
 short story ‘‘My Origins.’’ The earlier account is also given from the
perspective of a first-person narrator (whose name is Wang Anyi, no less),
but in a markedly realistic style, and is broken into two separate compo-
nents: the first about her search for her mother’s old Hangzhou home;
the second focused on her father’s family overseas, mostly on the amused
observations of her cousin, who is visiting from Singapore in the early
s.23 This second part records many significant details that will re-
appear in the later, longer story—for example, the colorful confetti at the
outset of the father’s voyage to mainland China when he was twenty-one,

and Sentiment in Hong Kong, . Page references to this work are given in the text as
Shangxin. The phrase I translate as ‘‘sharp sorrow’’ is shangtong, which conveys both a
physical sensation and a mental state, evoking what Freud described as Schmerzunlust
in his essay on ‘‘Mourning and Melancholia.’’
. Wang Anyi, ‘‘Wo de laili’’ (My origins), in her Xiao baozhuang (Baotown)
(Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi, ), –. Wang Anyi has another loving portrait of
her father in the essay ‘‘Huashuo fuqin Wang Xiaoping’’ (About my father Wang Xiao-
ping), collected in her Pugongying (Dandelions) (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi, ),
–.
 Melancholy Against the Grain 331

and his not knowing how to use a blanket efficiently on arriving in a chilly
Shanghai. However, no clear picture of either family emerges; the best
that the confused narrator can visualize about her great-grandmother is
a tiny boat drifting into the misty ocean. Everything about that ancient
Fujianese woman ‘‘was too unspeakably vague, remote, and strange for
me to feel related to it,’’ sighs the narrator. More news about her rela-
tives across the ocean started coming in later, ‘‘but because of the bar-
rier of language and the lapse of time, or for other reasons, I always felt
alienated from them. As a result, I was convinced I had a muddled ori-
gin.’’ 24 Nonetheless, she regards herself as being as Chinese as everyone
else around her, although the question of her true historical origin re-
mains, especially after her Singaporean cousin sends over a photograph
of the tomb where her grandparents and great-grandmother are buried.
This question proved to be so haunting in reality that Wang Anyi felt
compelled to confront it again in a two-part book with the scholarly-
sounding title Patrilineal and Matrilineal Myths, in which Sadness for the
Pacific constitutes the first, patrilineal part.25
The pathos of the  ‘‘patrilineal myth’’ seems to have drawn on two
narrative modes that best define Chinese literature of the s. One is the
earlier and widely influential movement of cultural root seeking, which
helped establish an anthropological concept of tradition and naturalistic
vitality as critical antidotes to turbulent state politics as well as to the ills
of modernization. The other development, loosely called either experi-
mental or even avant-garde, is one in which writers such as Mo Yan and
Su Tong, by pursuing family genealogy as a personal and often redemp-
tive project, push further the same intellectual and emotional concern
with historical representation that underlies root-seeking literature. To
these literary movements Wang Anyi has been an attentive and contrib-
uting contemporary.26 In Our Uncle’s Story, the narrator makes a point

. Wang Anyi, ‘‘Wo de laili,’’ –.

. See Wang Anyi, Fuxi yu muxi de shenhua (Patrilineal and matrilineal myths)
(Hangzhou: Zhejiang wenyi, ). Both parts of this volume, Sadness for the Pacific
and Jishi yu xugou (Records and fiction), were first published separately in the jour-
nal Shouhuo (Harvest) in . An unabridged version of Records and Fiction was also
published as an independent novel in .
. Wang Anyi’s  story ‘‘Baotown’’ (its English version collected in Baotown,
trans. Martha Avery [New York: Penguin, ]), for example, is often regarded as a
representative work in the mode of critical root seeking.
332 Chinese Modern

of presenting the root-seeking movement as an intellectual watershed be-

tween the uncle’s generation and that of younger, more cosmopolitan
writers (Shushu, –). On another occasion, Wang Anyi singles out Su
Tong’s novella Nineteen Thirty-four Escapes () as a pivotal text in the
experiment of fictionalizing family genealogy. The title alone is fascinat-
ing enough, she writes, for the word ‘‘escape’’ already evokes a concrete
mode of existence and suggests a perennial human condition of flee-
ing flood, war, and famine.27 This fascination with desperate flight leads
Wang Anyi to rediscover her family genealogy in light of the turn-of-the-
century Chinese diaspora over the South Pacific. A broadened cultural
geography in her narrative consequently helps reveal the historicity of
such formations as the nation-state and national identity.
In Sadness for the Pacific, however, it is the stark discrepancy, from a con-
temporary perspective, between this perennial human restlessness and
individual heroic efforts that seizes the narrator and engulfs her in a global
melancholy. A woeful sense of loss and inconsequentiality, if not outright
futility, now filters her vision of the youthful enthusiasm of her father’s
generation. At the same time, what renders her sorrow so visceral and
indivertible is an anxiety over the absence of comparable passion in her
own life and the bustling world she inhabits. To compensate for this per-
ceived lack, the narrating subject indulges in intense nostalgia, which, by
widening the gap between a vividly remembered past world and an in-
creasingly standardized present life, serves to defamiliarize the present as
having failed its own historical potentials. Such is the dialectical structure
of the discourse of melancholy, which underlies the narrator’s awestruck
gaze at her father’s specter over the Pacific Ocean and her prolonged stay
in front of her ancestors’ grave, now overgrown by robust tropical vege-
tation.
Moved by the imagined scene from her father’s idealistic youth, the
narrator looks back at herself and realizes that in her origins ‘‘there were
actually traces of the tropics’’ (Shangxin, ). Now finding herself in Sin-
gapore for the first time at age thirty-seven, she discovers that a tropical
island demonstrates its history through a changing human physiognomy.
There, old people, wearing the grave expression of a tightly knit frown,

. See Wang Anyi, Jishi yu xugou—chuangzao shijie fangfa zhi yizhong (Records
and fiction: one method of creating the world) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue, ), .
Chap.  (pp. –) of this obviously autobiographical novel may be read as a self-
analysis of Wang Anyi’s literary career.
 Melancholy Against the Grain 333

all appear dark, angular, and achingly doleful. ‘‘Young people, however,
have grown paler thanks to the incubation of modern air-conditioning.
They no longer bear a regional distinction in their facial features and in-
stead appear increasingly internationalized.’’ Walking down the quiet side
streets in Chinatown, the narrator sees in every old person the shadow of
her own wearied and sorrow-laden grandparents. Although their pictures
have always been in the family photo album, she never really recognizes
them until she visits their grave, which is the first thing she does after ar-
riving in Singapore. On approaching the cemetery, she feels her growing
grief being compounded by the brutal heat. ‘‘An endless sorrow welled
up inside me, and I wondered, how could the dead rest in peace in such
sweltering heat?’’ Etched in the tombstone is a picture of her grandpar-
ents, looking as plaintive as ever. She also finds her own name engraved
in the stone. ‘‘Not until then did I realize the fateful connection between
myself and the old couple permanently asleep underneath the ground. I
felt a deep pain for them, one that bound our hearts and bodies together’’
(Shangxin, ).
Later, the narrator will observe that in her search for family roots in
this ‘‘cosmopolitan nation-state’’ that too quickly buries its past, she reaps
only two things: the oppressive heat and a deep sorrow (Shangxin, ).
The clean and orderly city streets offer no consolation, nor do the im-
pressive high-rises. The constant tropical temperature allows her to relate
to her grandparents and to fathom what they must have endured when
they, as first-generation immigrants, fought various hardships and each
other in their struggle to settle in this new land. It also lends itself to a
textured background against which the narrator can picture her father’s
unhappy childhood. In days dominated by the same tropical heat, a reti-
cent, sunburned child would watch the ocean all by himself, nurturing
his first fantasies about the mainland. ‘‘A sad child gazing into the sea:
this was a melancholy, heartbreaking picture’’ (Shangxin, ).
Nonetheless, her father is now recalled as a most representative mod-
ern youth. Born a full century after the British East India Company mer-
chant Sir Stamford Raffles first landed in Singapore in , as the nar-
rator continues to infer from the historical context, her father comes of
age in a time still charged by the revolutionary ethos of May Fourth lit-
erature. As an impressionable boy, he must have paid his homage to Yu
Dafu, the outspoken sufferer of modern romantic melancholy, who came
to Singapore in  and excited the imaginations of many an aspiring
334 Chinese Modern

literary youth.28 Based on an imaginary meeting between her father and

Yu Dafu, the narrator goes on to portray a young generation of ethnic
Chinese who, influenced by May Fourth liberal humanism, consciously
practiced a modern way of living, longed for the mainland as their spiri-
tual homeland, and readily identified with the cause of national salvation
during the Japanese invasion of China. What the narrator reassembles,
from the unfamiliar tropical landscape, is the same central bildungsroman
of the generation of Chinese who, as the spiritual offspring of the May
Fourth era, turned into the revolutionaries of the s. It has the uni-
versal modern plot of an individual actively seeking to participate in a
greater national historical enterprise. Her father’s passionate longing for
the mainland is first expressed as the indefatigable enthusiasm with which
he joins the Malay Chinese theater troupe and its tour of the peninsula
to promote the cause of the Resistance. Eventually, it will lead him to
Shanghai and, after many self-doubts and trepidations, to the Commu-
nist base in southern Jiangsu. By then, he has consciously overcome his
initial uneasiness with a crude communal life and matures into a ‘‘true
soldier’’ (Shangxin, ). He welcomes and enjoys the trip to the bar-
ren hinterland as a peaceful return to the warm interior of a maternal
body.
At the same moment her father penetrates the mainland and claims his
Chinese identity, her second uncle and his comrades are mobilizing to de-
fend Singapore against the Japanese, who cross the Johor Strait on  Feb-
ruary . Such striking synchronicity of two distinct moments is the
narrator’s basic compositional strategy, by means of which she manages
to include numerous historical figures, events, anecdotes, and legends as
integral to her family history. From British colonialism to Lee Kuan-
yew’s successful rule in postcolonial Singapore, from the modern rubber
industry to the worldwide Great Depression, from the course of World
War II to the Comintern’s determination to prevent the Japanese from
attacking the Soviet Union, her multifocal narrative explores the tension
between textbook knowledge on the one hand and concrete images and
personal stories on the other. The ever-deepening gap between a concep-

. Here is one instance, out of several in the text, where the need for melancholy
imagination is satisfied at the expense of historical accuracy. The narrative suggests
that his meeting with Yu Dafu inspired the father to join the opera troupe in , but
historically Yu Dafu did not land in Singapore until . See Sadness for the Pacific,
–.
 Melancholy Against the Grain 335

tual history and anamnestic concentrations makes unavoidable the ques-

tion of historical failure and success, which proves to be a determining
question for a melancholy subjectivity.
Of all the characters and family members, Second Uncle is portrayed
with the greatest love and empathy. While Father deserts his parents to
devote his life to drama and revolution, First Uncle is an avid gambler,
who in his old age turns out to be a good citizen of contemporary Sin-
gapore, with the pride of ‘‘a well-mannered child brought up by Lee
Kuan-yew.’’ Unlike his two older, self-absorbed brothers, the youngest
brother, Second Uncle, ‘‘an unusually tender and kind boy,’’ is much more
grounded, sensitive, and compassionate toward the people around him
(Shangxin, ). He may share a similar abstract longing for the mainland,
but he never leaves Singapore to pursue another path to self-realization.
The narrator imagines his body to be slender and nimble, almost effemi-
nate, and his soul to be that of a resolute hero. He quietly joins the Re-
sistance during the war and, at age eighteen, is tortured to death by the
Japanese police. After his death, ‘‘his soul soared into the sky and looked
down. Only then did he find his island so gorgeously green that it made
his heart ache. Floating in its radiant translucence, the island drifted with
the ocean waves. At this he broke into tears’’ (Shangxin, ). Both Father
and Second Uncle, in contrast to Lee Kuan-yew, the most prominent
Singaporean of the same generation, are ‘‘hot-blooded and passionate’’
young men, and both are vulnerable to a ‘‘drifting sensation’’ that is in-
separable from their life on a small island (Shangxin, –). Father, in
the end, returns to the mainland to escape that anxiety over rootless-
ness and successfully integrates himself into the maternal body of col-
lective history. The pragmatic Lee Kuan-yew, with no idealistic preten-
sions, institutes a postcolonial order and helps ‘‘produce a new people’’
on the island for the modern world (Shangxin, ). Almost paradoxi-
cally, as the narrator comments, ‘‘the day when Singapore finally gained
independence was also the moment when my father was exiled for real’’
(Shangxin, ). For as a romantic revolutionary and determined expatri-
ate, Father can no longer claim any affinity to his rapidly modernizing
country of birth.
Such personalized perspectives give the narrator a chance to ponder the
implications of a Singaporean-style prosperity. Ambivalence once again
surfaces when she realizes that the stern rationalization necessary for Lee
Kuan-yew’s success, which seems to underline the contemporary hori-
 336 Chinese Modern

zon of expectation, has little room for her father’s idealistic passion and
aspirations.29 Keenly aware of a cityscape shaped by global capital and
culture, she finds herself haunted by thoughts of Second Uncle, whose
untimely death creates a permanent lack and source of sadness for genera-
tions in the family. His memory, just like the granite war memorial, casts
a gray, melancholy shadow over the present routine and insists on out-
lining history as a sorry experience of fragments and incompleteness. By
inserting itself to prevent the present from coalescing into a seamless con-
temporaneity, this shadow comes alive as a haunting spirit that embodies
other visions.

The war memorial was a building endowed with the richest sentiment in
this cosmopolitan nation-state. It projected a gentle and sorrowful shadow
in front of us; it was the one consolation that I could find on this island,
offering solace for the sadness that Second Uncle caused my grandparents.
I left the war memorial and walked toward the bustling and colorful Bugis
Street. Underneath my footsteps was a city street that was built over the
ruins of the past two hundred years. The sun was shining. Who knows how
many shadows and images were flying in the luminous sunlight, crisscross-
ing, up and down, and through my body and soul. All I could do was to
approach and try to comfort my second uncle in the formless and weight-
less air. This caused such a bone-crushing ache! (Shangxin, )

‘‘Les mélancolies historiques, les sympathies à travers siècles’’

In Sadness for the Pacific the narrator’s immense sorrow over a past mo-
ment that is at once intimate and yet unapproachable originates in the
end in a simultaneous longing for, and fear of, the genuine passion that
she witnesses in the youth of her father and Second Uncle. This conflict
translates into a deep historical ambivalence, which, expressed in the form

. In this light, Wang Anyi’s text can be read as a complex response to the growing
desire, among Chinese theoreticians as well as policymakers, to emulate the Singapore
model of modernization, which is promoted as an effective combination of the Confu-
cian tradition and modern Western technologies, although it also is obvious that Sin-
gapore does not enter the story because of an established analysis on the writer’s part.
To fully grasp the global concern of the narrative, we need to accept that Singapore,
as part of the postmodern transnational landscape, signifies modernity at large.
 Melancholy Against the Grain 337

of melancholy subjectivity, is in fact a complex response to another mass

reaction to utopian visions. Her melancholy occurs at a moment when
the modern project of collectively determining human destiny seems to
be universally disavowed and when capital claims a global hegemony.
Yet ‘‘haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony.’’ 30 Amid the
spreading postmodern euphoria, melancholy alone reveals negativity as
indispensable to dialectical truth. When the high tide of entrepreneurial
individualism rises across the land to sweep away egalitarian conformity,
so reflects Wang Anyi in , there ought to be solitary souls whose
reaction is more contemplative than instinctive or spontaneous. Now is
the time for writers to understand that ‘‘the independence we so desper-
ately fought for does not entirely consist in happiness. Suffering is its
essence.’’ 31
It may be helpful to recall that we began our discussion of Wang Anyi’s
writing of melancholy by way of Kristeva’s description of the ravaging
effect of melancholia. To the crushing experience of melancholic depres-
sion, Kristeva writes, ‘‘I owe a supreme, metaphysical lucidity. . . . My
pain is the hidden side of my philosophy, its mute sister.’’ 32 What Kristeva
goes on to state in semiotic terms, along with her feminist concerns,
is largely the European Renaissance concept of a ‘‘heroic melancholy,’’
which views the moody temperament as a blessed curse, a humoral source
of insight and creativity.33 A consistent fascination accompanies the
symptomatology of melancholia and depression from Hippocratic times
to the twentieth century, although each historical age has offered a dif-
ferent etiology. Throughout the centuries, especially in the wake of great
social upheaval, continual heroic encounters with melancholia have gen-
erated different legends, memories, and images.34 More often than not,
the melancholy figure emerges as the mournful and profound individual,

. Derrida, Specters of Marx, .

. Wang Anyi, ‘‘Kexi bushi nongchaoren’’ (Sorry, but we are not surfers), Review
of Contemporary Writers, no.  (): –.
. Kristeva, Black Sun, –.
. This notion in its most concentrated form was developed by Marsilio Ficino
(–), a Florentine humanist, who in turn took the idea from the Greek text Prob-
lemata Physica (attributed to Aristotle). See Stanley W. Jackson, Melancholia and De-
pression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern Times (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, ), –.
. See Jackson, Melancholia and Depression, –.
338 Chinese Modern

bitter but compassionate, endowed with an artist’s sensitivity and imagi-

nation. For with the onset of melancholia—not unlike the liminal ex-
perience of madness—insight and darkness are fused together, and the
afflicted individual gains access to the ultimate truth only to compound
his or her incapacitating sadness and pain. This brings about such an in-
tensely private suffering that any effort to ease it through externalization
is bound to result in ever greater despair. Hence, the ‘‘abyss of sorrow,’’
the ‘‘noncommunicable grief,’’ that constitutes Kristeva’s melancholia.
The ideal of melancolia illa heroica proved instrumental to Walter Benja-
min in his study of the baroque Trauerspiel. In Baudelaire, he again would
find its perfect embodiment for Europe’s modernizing nineteenth cen-
tury. Through its heroic form, as Max Pensky points out when expli-
cating Benjamin’s ‘‘melancholy dialectics,’’ the discourse of melancholy
secures ‘‘the truest and most powerful historical image of its dialectical
structure.’’ 35 If such a discourse yields a dialectic of the emotive and the
cognitive, heroic melancholy then strives to elevate this affective experi-
ence to a new form of subjectivity, albeit a precarious one. What helps
keep this heightened subjectivity grounded and expressive, consequently,
is bound to be melancholy as content rather than as form. Underneath
Duras’s inconsolable grief, explains Kristeva, lies the modern, silencing
‘‘malady of death’’ violently exposed by Auschwitz and Hiroshima, which
now ‘‘informs our most concealed inner recesses.’’ 36 Similarly, at the heart
of Baudelaire’s poetic rage lies the very inability to experience. The lyri-
cal poet in the age of commodity capitalism, in the words of Benjamin,
holds in his hands only ‘‘the scattered fragments of genuine historical ex-
perience. . . . To his horror, the melancholy man sees the earth revert to
a mere state of nature. No breath of prehistory surrounds it: there is no
aura.’’ 37 It is this loss of aura, just as it is the loss of voice in the case of
Duras, that dialectically marks Baudelaire’s melancholy vision with his-
torical specificity.
Historical melancholy, as I have tried to show here, is the origin and
content of Wang Anyi’s more recent tales of sorrow. It expresses the pro-
found ambivalence that the writer, conscious of the approaching end of

. Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics, .

. Kristeva, Black Sun, .
. Walter Benjamin, ‘‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,’’ in his Illuminations, trans.
Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, ), –.
 Melancholy Against the Grain 339

a century, sustains toward the course of twentieth-century Chinese his-

tory, in particular its human dimension. Utopian longings, generated by
grand historical visions that are brought into focus at moments of collec-
tive action, inevitably turn into traumatic experiences for the individual,
but the rapid dissipation of idealistic passion in a postrevolutionary con-
temporary world also seems vastly depressing. The loss of genuine excite-
ment, therefore, becomes the historical moment in which Wang Anyi,
through a discourse of melancholy, examines the dialectics of success and
failure. This structure of feeling generates the central plot of her late gene-
alogical ‘‘myths’’: a melancholic individual in the contemporary world
trying to recall and reconcile herself with historical failures as human tri-
umphs.
For this reason, my claim that Wang Anyi’s recent fiction articulates
a ‘‘postmodern melancholy’’ does not mean that melancholy itself be-
comes a postmodernist sentiment. Rather, it acknowledges the postmod-
ern condition that Wang Anyi’s melancholic writings critically reveal and
even interrupt. We may go so far as to conclude that her melancholy,
in which the longing for a modern longing causes the deepest sorrow
and ambivalence, gathers its historical content and relevance only in an
age that deems itself ‘‘post’’ and beyond all ideologies of the modern.
In other words, Wang Anyi’s postmodern melancholy may be read as
a critique of a transnational postmodernism that, in the words of Ross
Chambers, is nonmelancholic, ‘‘a kind of modernism without its pathos
of lack.’’ 38 Melancholy against the grain: this may explain why in Chi-
nese literature at the end of the twentieth century there is an increas-
ingly pronounced mood of sorrow, particularly among a new generation
of women writers.39 This latest development raises complicated issues of
gender, aesthetics, and subjectivity that ought to be engaged at greater

. See Ross Chambers, The Writing of Melancholy: Modes of Opposition in Early
French Modernism, trans. Mary Seidman Trouille (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, ), .
. For instance, in  issues of Review of Contemporary Writers, we find the fol-
lowing essays: Xie Youshun, ‘‘Youshang er bu juewang de xiezuo—wo du Chi Zijian de
xiaoshuo’’ (A writing that is melancholy but not despairing: my reading of Chi Zijian’s
fiction) (no. : –) and Meng Fanhua, ‘‘Youyu de huangyuan: nüxing piaopo de
xinlu mishi—Chen Ran xiaoshuo de yizhong jiedu’’ (Melancholy wilderness—the psy-
chological history of female homelessness: an interpretation of Chen Ran’s fiction)
(no. : –).
340 Chinese Modern

length. It also adds renewed urgency to a famous question, posed by Gus-

tave Flaubert in , about historical necessity: ‘‘Whence come these fits
of historical melancholia, these affinities from century to century, etc.?’’ 40
To begin answering this inquiry, we will have to enter the mournful and
searching gaze that a melancholic directs at the world.

. Quoted in Chambers, The Writing of Melancholy, vii.

AFTERWORD

Thus the mournful and searching gaze that we recognize in the last chap-
ter brings a reflective, if necessarily open-ended, closure to this study, and
we find ourselves at the conclusion of a long and eventful twentieth cen-
tury. We also find ourselves on the threshold of a new millennium that is
steadily losing its auratic abstractness and appears far more familiar and
banal than once anticipated or fantasized. In a deflated sense of the ex-
pression, we live in an age where the future is already now.
To better survey the melancholy subject’s field of vision as delineated
by Wang Anyi and her late twentieth-century contemporaries, we may
recall the utopian millenarianism of Liang Qichao, the most ardent re-
formist thinker of late Qing China. His exuberant ‘‘Ode to Young China,’’
penned at the dawning of the twentieth century, for instance, conjures up
a fantastic vision of grandeur and climaxes in apostrophizing ‘‘My beau-
tiful young China that is as eternal as heaven; my magnificent Chinese
youth who are as bountiful as the land.’’ 1 This stirring essay, together
with Liang’s many other passionate writings, affirms a redemptive future
through ‘‘as much an invocation of a promising new age as a celebra-
tion of the global imaginary into which China as a youthful new nation
is about to enter.’’ 2 The future, for Liang and his generation of Chi-
nese, was envisioned to be radically different from their present, and yet
it would have to be delivered through present action. Such a supremely
confident ‘‘Young China’’ consciousness or optimistic anticipation has
been instrumental in shaping twentieth-century Chinese political and
cultural life, and it has been called upon to legitimize various ideolo-
gies and movements as modern and/or revolutionary. Even repressive
political regimes would find it useful to resort to the myth of an immi-
nent glorious national renewal; conversely, nationalism as a legitimation
mechanism has frequently given rise to authoritarianism and a politics
of sublimation, both of which exacted disciplinary uniformity and enor-

. Liang Qichao, ‘‘Shaonian Zhongguo shuo’’ (Ode to young China), Yinbingshi

heji-wenji (Collected writings from the ice-drinker’s studio: collected essays) (Shang-
hai: China Books, ), :.
. Xiaobing Tang, Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The His-
torical Thinking of Liang Qichao (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, ), .
342 Chinese Modern

mous human sacrifices. The passion and trauma caused by a century of

war and revolution becomes, by the s, the object of an ambivalent,
painfully self-conscious gaze in Wang Anyi’s ‘‘tales of sorrow.’’ A positive,
global longing is at once disavowed and longed for, and her tender atten-
tion to the personal and the quotidian arises inextricably with a sense of
loss and incompleteness. The same melancholic and pensive search is evi-
dent in Chen Ran’s fiction about contemporary urban life, precisely be-
cause she insists on removing ‘‘the Chinese female subject from the over-
arching concern with any kind of determining meaning—revolutionary
passion, humanistic love, lust for the new and different—outside of what
she can gain from her own daily life.’’ 3
Herein lies yet another possible way of conceptualizing the passage
from the modern to the postmodern. The heroic project of social trans-
formation and engineering goes awry, and everyday life reemerges as an
inescapable continuity. The ‘‘overarching concern’’ that is now displaced
or debunked seems to be telltale of the operational logic of moderniza-
tion, and of a utopian modernity in general. Yet any such neat narrative of
modernity yielding to its antithetical other in postmodernity may itself
betray the same impulse of constructing a rational explanation or seam-
less horizon of intelligibility. A more dialectical and historically sensi-
tive approach derives from the notion of spectrality, by which we see the
present as continually haunted and disturbed by ghosts of the past. The
specter of past passions and sentiments, as Derrida observes, will always
return for a revelatory first time. If modernity was famously haunted
by the nightmare of history from which the modern subject desperately
tried to awaken, postmodernity becomes conceivable when a once self-
reassured modern vision metamorphoses into a ghostly, even shameful,
afterimage. From this perspective, historical movement appears not so
much as a temporal flow as an ever-expanding space of spectrality. This is
how we may begin to theorize Wang Anyi’s postmodern melancholy; this
is also why it is crucial to revisit Liang Qichao’s ‘‘Ode to Young China’’
as we try to fully comprehend Wang Anyi’s musings on adulthood as
inevitable adulteration.
Yet at this point an empirical question of method may present itself.
How can we be certain that Wang Anyi’s sorrowful narratives speak to

. Wendy Larson, ‘‘Women and the Discourse of Desire in Postrevolutionary

China: The Awkward Postmodernism of Chen Ran,’’ boundary  . (Fall ): .
 Afterword 343

Liang Qichao’s inspirational essay from almost a hundred years ago? May
it not be a happy coincidence that by juxtaposing these two vastly differ-
ent writers and their different genres of writing (fiction versus polemical
essays), we confirm an implicit narrative embedded in this study of mod-
ern Chinese literature and culture? A more blunt question may be posed:
What is the criterion of selection for Chinese Modern as a whole? What
justifies our moving from Wu Jianren’s ambivalent Sea of Regret to Ding
Ling’s ultimately romantic Shanghai narratives to the residual modern-
ism of the s?
A direct answer to these questions has two parts. First, as a matter
of truism, all criteria of selection are, in the final analysis, arbitrary and
ought to be viewed on their own systemic terms; second, this particular
collection of texts is determined by the larger narrative logic and struc-
ture of Chinese Modern. Together, the literary and visual materials that I
examined in the preceding pages bring forth a conceptual coherence in
my rethinking of China’s twentieth century. They all deepen, to varying
degrees, my appreciation for a central dialectics in terms of which com-
peting claims for or against being modern become intelligible and can be
related to one another. At the same time, these texts, by virtue of their
different genres and effects, demonstrate a historical multiplicity or non-
synchronic synchronicity that is at the core of Chinese modernity. There
is no pretension here to deal exclusively with masterpieces or high aes-
thetic achievements. On the contrary, through what I call an ‘‘intimate
reading,’’ I show how canonical, popular, marginal, or even ephemeral
texts can all begin to reveal and comment on their own making, on the
one hand, and a persistent condition of production, which is generalized
here as the Chinese modern, on the other.
I would, however, resist labeling Chinese Modern as an instance of what
has been described as literary historiography in the mode of an indis-
criminate postmodern encyclopedia, where ‘‘its explanations of past hap-
penings are piecemeal, may be inconsistent with each other, and are ad-
mitted to be inadequate.’’ 4 For obvious reasons, or rather absences, I
would not characterize this study as forming a narrative history either.
Granted that its indirect narrative bears witness to subjective investment
and even commitment, each chapter nonetheless enters a past moment

. David Perkins, Is Literary History Possible? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University

Press, ), .
344 Chinese Modern

and places it in the context of its own genealogies, articulations, and

intersections. As I indicate in the Introduction, it may be impossible for
any one narrative history of twentieth-century China to register all the
moments recollected in Chinese Modern, if only because this book traces
more than one imaginative trajectory and deliberately traverses an uneven
terrain of signification.
A more complicated response to the question of how this book is put
together will have to return to the conceptual coherence or operative
dialectics that I believe underlies it. For only through such a conceptual
framework will the juxtaposition of Wang Anyi and Liang Qichao be-
come revelatory, and the earlier readings of interior design and the tu-
bercular body, for instance, be meaningfully undertaken. This is where it
is crucial to insist on approaching twentieth-century Chinese literature
and, by extension, cultural formations as a dynamic totality, as an inter-
active, interconnected whole. For it may quickly become insufficient to
repeat that the dialectics of the heroic and the quotidian demand that we
read texts from various sources, high, low, and in between. It may also be
misleading to suggest that the method here is ultimately one of logical in-
duction, or that it boils down to stating a governing Zeitgeist in the now
suspect Hegelian fashion. While we derive considerable satisfaction from
reading specific texts intimately and creatively, it is just as crucial for us
to always keep in sight their overlapping contexts and to open our texts
to the elemental forces of history. This involves more than being sensi-
tive to the text-context interaction, because the question is how to gain
access to the—by definition—disembodied contexts and to conceptualize
the intruding presence of history. Put differently, how do we understand
history as both abstract and concrete, both imagined and lived, both ex-
ternal and internal?
Such an inquiry into historical hermeneutics no doubt leads in many
directions and to many answers; it certainly complicates the process even
more when we realize that there could be different constructions or inter-
pretations of the more specific concept of twentieth-century Chinese lit-
erature. Not only may Chinese literature’s content, meaning, and logic be
variously construed, but even its coverage, reference, or legitimacy may
be seriously negotiated and contested. In the mid-s several rising
literary critics in China proposed, for a pathbreaking first time, that
twentieth-century Chinese literature be grasped ‘‘as an indivisible and
organic totality.’’ They viewed the development of this body of litera-
 Afterword 345

ture as an ongoing process of transformation, through which traditional

literature gives way to modern literature, Chinese literature merges into
‘‘world literature,’’ modern national consciousness enters literary expres-
sion, new literary genres and forms emerge and eventually establish them-
selves. Their strong ‘‘totality consciousness’’ (zhengti yishi), they explain,
would enable them, in literary studies and historiography, to achieve his-
torical depth, intervene in the present, and anticipate the future.5 As pro-
nounced as their totality consciousness is a mission consciousness, for at
the time they obviously viewed it their historical task—after the dogmatic
aberration of the intervening socialist period—to integrate contemporary
Chinese literature of the reformist ‘‘New Era’’ back into the more open-
minded and innovative May Fourth tradition. The legitimating discourse
for this conception of ‘‘twentieth-century Chinese literature,’’ therefore,
was modernization and cosmopolitanism.6
In contrast to this commanding narrative of a multiple rational un-
folding, the more recent Literature of China in the Twentieth Century by
Bonnie S. McDougall and Kam Louie adopts an intrinsic approach to lit-
erary history while acknowledging changes in literature both as an artis-
tic practice and as a social institution. In hopes of representing and ex-
plaining the inner dynamics of literary production in twentieth-century
China, the authors of this informative history focus on the three major
genres: fiction, drama, and poetry. The continual interaction among
these literary forms and their coeval unevenness provide the organiza-
tional structure of a historicizing narrative. Thus, the ascendance and
political prominence of one particular genre over the other two, such
as poetry during the May Fourth period and drama during the Cultural
Revolution, shed light on the general background of the given historical
moment. Attention to this mobile triad logically leads McDougall and

. Huang Ziping, Chen Pingyuan, Qian Liqun, ‘‘Lun ‘ershi shiji Zhongguo wen-
xue’ ’’ (On ‘‘twentieth-century Chinese literature’’), originally published in Wenxue
pinglun (Literary review), , collected in Wang Xiaoming, ed., Ershi shiji Zhongguo
wenxue shilun (Essays on twentieth-century Chinese literary history), vol.  (Shanghai:
Dongfang chuban zhongxin, ), –.
. As if in response to this initial proposal, when he published a much more system-
atic book elaborating a necessary totalizing approach, Chen Sihe would emphatically
describe ‘‘twentieth-century Chinese literature as an open totality.’’ See his Zhongguo
xin wenxue zhengti guan (A comprehensive review of Chinese new literature) (Taipei:
Yeqiang chubanshe, ), esp. –.
346 Chinese Modern

Louie to divide twentieth-century Chinese literature, ostensibly from

 to , ‘‘into three major periods on the basis of changes within the
structure of the literary canon.’’ 7 Although in the end the authors also
affirm that literature produced in twentieth-century China is undoubt-
edly part of world literature, they apparently arrive at the conclusion by a
different path than that outlined by the Chinese critics in the mid-s.
The totality of twentieth-century Chinese literature, in other words, con-
tains meanings and revelations that are contingent upon the context or
discursive tradition in which this body of literature is configured.8
The authors of Literature of China in the Twentieth Century obviously
are aware of a further complication in examining this literature as a whole.
Since midcentury, they note, ‘‘the development of literature in Taiwan,
Hong Kong, and Overseas Chinese communities took separate routes.’’
Consequently, they decide to leave these ‘‘largely independent literatures’’
out of their presentation of ‘‘the literature of China.’’ 9 By limiting their
scope to mainland China, McDougall and Louie make their history much
more manageable and coherent, but at the same time they effectively sub-
ject this literary history to the geopolitical stipulations of the modern
nation-state. While historiographical expediency may call for such a clear
demarcation, the invigorating ambiguity of ‘‘twentieth-century Chinese
literature’’ stems from the fact that, when taken as an interconnected
whole, this body of literature will always force us to critically reconsider
our assumptions about what constitutes the identity of modern China.

. Bonnie S. McDougall and Kam Louie, The Literature of China in the Twentieth
Century (New York: Columbia University Press, ), . In historical hindsight, we
may question whether the stirring events in the spring of  constituted such a sig-
nificant discontinuity as is suggested by The Literature of China, in which the authors
designate ‘‘–’’ as one continuous, although eventful, period.
. For instance, in the afterword for his The City in Modern Chinese Literature and
Film: Configurations of Space, Time, and Gender (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, ), Yingjin Zhang suggests succinctly that the evolving tension between
the city and the country forms a central theme around which successive periods and
various elements of modern Chinese literary history can be examined (pp. –).
David Der-wei Wang, in his Fin-de-siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing
Fiction, – (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, ), offers a rather dif-
ferent perspective on modern Chinese literature when he brings literary productions
in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong at the end of the twentieth century into a historical
dialogue with the last fin-de-siècle.
. McDougall and Louie, The Literature of China, .
 Afterword 347

The concept of ‘‘Taiwan literature’’ and its relationship to the literature of

China, in fact, are fascinating topics to ponder and investigate. To deny
any relationship between these two entities is itself to postulate a rela-
tionship; to pit one against the other amounts to a more radical alterna-
tive; to see them as evolving from a common cultural heritage and ab-
sorbed in the same maelstrom of modernity points to yet another way of
making sense of these two separate developments. The third approach,
which I adopt in my comparative reading of Su Tong and Xiao Ye, is for
me a productive one and promises a great field for future research. The
history and vitality of Taiwan and Hong Kong literatures in the twenti-
eth century, I would argue, make an ever more compelling case that by
‘‘modern Chinese literature’’ we understand not a narrow nation-state in-
stitution (in the modern Japanese tradition of kokubungaku), nor just one
geopolitically bounded literary production, but rather a vast literature
written in modern Chinese and interacting with long and uneven literary
and cultural traditions—regional as much as national. Just as ‘‘Taiwan lit-
erature’’ is a legitimate concept denoting literature produced in Taiwan,
so ‘‘Chinese literature’’ should be usefully broadened to mean ‘‘Zhong-
wen wenxue’’ (literature in Chinese) and replace a narrowing ‘‘Zhongguo
wenxue’’ (literature of China, or even, of the Chinese nation-state).10
Untidy but inevitable complications, as much as various methods of
configuration, in the study of twentieth-century Chinese literature finally
bring home one central point. Our reading and understanding of this
body of literature must be an open-ended interpretive project. The ‘‘to-
tality of twentieth-century Chinese literature’’ is a concept that is open
to continuous construction and contestation. Yet it is an indispensable
construct insofar as each and every instance of interpreting a specific text
in this tradition bespeaks, either explicitly or implicitly, a certain con-
ception or evaluation of its entirety. At this point, our belief in democ-
racy and the principle of tolerance may convince us that all methods
and readings have their inalienable right, if not always intellectual merit.
Ultimately, however, it also becomes irrefutable that different concep-
tions of twentieth-century Chinese literature and its inner dynamics high-
light different ideological visions of Chinese modernity. Such highlight-
ing constitutes the epistemological advantage of entertaining the notion

. See my article ‘‘On the Concept of Taiwan Literature,’’ Modern China . (Oc-
tober ): –.
348 Chinese Modern

of totality; it should also encourage us to go on and seek a more explana-

tory critical language and analytical model through which to understand
various totalizing methods and ideologies themselves. Needless to say,
this is not at all the central task undertaken in Chinese Modern; I nonethe-
less hope that the book’s underlying conception and interpretations will
make a modest contribution to an incipient study of twentieth-century
Chinese literature and culture as one dynamic and interconnected whole.
Only when viewed in its entirety will the extraordinarily rich and tortu-
ous history of twentieth-century Chinese literature and culture reveal its
dialectical meaning and enable the literary and cultural critic to ‘‘continue
to pass judgment on the abstract quality of life in the present, and to keep
alive the idea of a concrete future.’’ 11 On this account, Chinese Modern is
written for the past century as well as for the new, postmillenarian one.

. This quotation is taken from the last section of Fredric Jameson’s Marxism and
Form, where he defines the tasks of a dialectical criticism. In the contemporary world
of late capitalism, according to Jameson, it is no longer possible to find the older real-
istic cultural works that Lukács examined and where reality and its interpretation are
built together. The traditional symbiosis of the fact and commentary on the fact is now
rendered asunder, and ‘‘the literary fact, like the other objects that make up our social
reality, cries out for commentary, for interpretation, for decipherment, for diagnosis.’’
Yet all other disciplines seem to have failed to offer a viable approach to this problem.
‘‘It therefore falls to literary criticism to continue to compare the inside and the out-
side, existence and history, to continue to pass judgment on the abstract quality of
life in the present, and to keep alive the idea of a concrete future.’’ See Marxism and
Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, ), .
GLOSSARY

This is a selected list of Chinese names, titles, and terms.

A Ying 阿英
baihua 白话
Ba Jin 巴金
Bashi ri huanyou ji 八十日环游记
Beijing nizao 北京你早
Beitong zhi di 悲恸之地
Benming nian 本命年
bomu 伯母
Cao Xueqin 曹雪芹
Cao Yu 曹禺
cheng 诚
Chen Kaige 陈凯歌
Chen Pingyuan 陈平原
Chen Ran 陈染
Chen Sihe 陈思和
Chen Xiaoming 陈晓明
Chen Yun 陈耘
chinian 痴念
chixiang 痴想
Ciwen xiangei shaonü Yang Liu 此文献给少女杨柳
Cui Jian 崔健
Da chuanqi 大喘气
Dai Jinhua 戴锦华
Daoma zei 盗马贼
Daqing 大庆
Da youren 答友人
Dazhai 大寨
Di Baoxian (Pengdeng ge) 狄保贤(平等阁)
350 Glossary

Didi nihao 弟弟你好

Ding Ling 丁玲
e’ren 恶人
Ershi nian mudu zhi guai xianzhuang 二十年目睹之怪现状
feng 疯
Fengkuang de daijia 疯狂的代价
Feng Menglong 冯梦龙
Fengyu zhong de lüdao—xiandai jiaju 风雨中的绿岛 – 现代家居
fengzi 疯子
Fu Lin 符霖
Fuxi yu muxi de shenhua 父系与母系的神话
Ganlan zhen  橄榄镇
Gaozu 高祖
Ge Fei 格非
Gei kafei jia dian tang 给咖啡加点糖
Gudian aiqing 古典爱情
guguo 故国
guli 故里
Guomindang 国民党
Guo Moruo 郭沫若
Guo Zhenyi 郭箴义
gutu 故土
Guxiang 故乡
guyuan 故园
Haitian duxiaozi 海天独啸子
Hanye 寒夜
hao 好
haoren 好人
He Dun 何顿
Henhai 恨海
Hongdeng ji 红灯记
Hong gaoliang 红高粱
Honglou meng 红楼梦
 Glossary 351

huaju 话剧
Huangshan zhi lian 荒山之恋
Huang tudi 黄土地
Huang Zongying 黄宗英
huixiang 回乡
Hu Shi 胡适
Hu Yepin 胡也频
Jia 家
Jiang Guanyun 蒋观云
Jiang Qing 江青
Jiating wenti 家庭问题
jiaye 家业
jiefu 节妇
Jie hu hui 劫余灰
jingcheng 精诚
Jinggang shan 井冈山
Jingwei 精卫
Jingwei shi 精卫石
Jin Songcen 金松岑
Jishi yu xugou 纪实与虚构
Ju Dou 菊豆
kang 炕
Kongbu fenzi 恐怖分子
kuang 狂
Kuangren riji 狂人日记
lai 来
laohaoren 老好人
Laojing 老井
Lei Da 雷达
Liang Qichao 梁启超
Liaozhai zhiyi 聊斋志异
Liechang Zhasa 猎场扎撒
Li Jiefei 李洁非
352 Glossary

Lin Gang 林刚
Lin Shu 林纾
Lin Yaode 林耀德
Li Tuo 李陀
Liu Bang 刘邦
Liu Heng 刘恒
Liu Shaoqi 刘少奇
Liu Zaifu 刘再复
Li Yang 李扬
Lunhui 轮回
Lu Xun 鲁迅
Mao Dun 茅盾
Mao Zedong 毛泽东
Mengke 梦珂
Meng Yue 孟悦
Mi Jiashan 米家山
Mo Yan 莫言
Nahan 呐喊
Nianqing de yidai 年轻的一代
Nihao yangfengren 你好养蜂人
nikeng 泥坑
 Gaosha baihe 高砂百合
Nüwa 女娲
Nüwa shi 女娲石
Peng Wen 彭文
Pingjing ru shui 平静如水
pingmin 平民
pingshu 评书
Pu Songling 蒲松龄
Qiangbao 强暴
Qianwan buyao wangji 千万不要忘记
qing 情
Qing bian 情变
 Glossary 353

Qingcheng zhi lian 倾城之恋

Qingchun ji 青春祭
qing jiao 情教
qing ji cheng chi 情极成痴
Qingshi leilüe 情史类略
Qin hai shi 禽海石
Qiong Yao 琼瑶
Qiqie chengqun 妻妾成群
Qiu Jin 秋瑾
Qiyuan 憩园
qu 去
Rensheng 人生
Ri 日
Shafei nüshi de riji 莎菲女士的日记
shangshan xiaxiang 上山下乡
Shangxin Taipingyang 伤心太平洋
Sha Ou 沙鸥
Shenghuo wuzui 生活无罪
Shi ji 史记
Shi jing 诗经
Shi Nai’an 施耐庵
Shishi ru yan 世事如烟
Shitou ji 石头记
Shui 水
shuqing shidai 抒情时代
Shushu de gushi 叔叔的故事
Sima Qian 司马迁
Su Tong 苏童
tanci 弹词
Tang Sheng 唐生
Tan Sitong 谭嗣同
Wang Anyi 王安忆
Wang Guowei 王国维
354 Glossary

Wang Meng 王蒙
Wang Shuo 王朔
Wanzhu 顽主
wenqing 文情
Wo bu xiangshi 我不想事
Women de Heilong jiang a 我们的黑龙江啊
Women de tianye 我们的田野
Wu Jianren 吴趼人
Wu Tianming 吴天明
Wutuobang shipian 乌托邦诗篇
Xianggang de qing yu ai 香港的情与爱
Xiangnü Xiaoxiao 湘女潇潇
xiangtu wenxue 乡土文学
Xianshi yizhong 现实一种
xiaoshuo 小说
xiao tiandi 小天地
Xiao Ye 小野
Xie Fei 谢飞
xieqing xiaoshuo 写情小说
Xinmin congbao 新民丛报
Xin qingnian 新青年
xin shimin xiaoshuo 新市民小说
Xin xiaoshuo 新小说
yanqing xiaoshuo 言情小说
Yao Wenyuan 姚文元
Yeshan 野山
Yijiu sanling nian chun Shanghai 一九三零年春上海
Yijiu sansi nian de taowang 一九三四年的逃亡
yu 欲
Yuanye 原野
Yu Dafu 郁达夫
Yueyue xiaoshuo 月月小说
Yu Hua 余华
 Glossary 355

Zhang Ailing 张爱玲

Zhang Minquan 张民权
Zhang Nuanxin 张暖昕
Zhang Yiwu 张颐武
Zhongguo qingnian 中国青年
Zhongguo xiaoshuo shi 中国小说史
Zhou Guisheng 周桂笙
Zhu ni jiankang 祝你健康
Zisha 自杀
Ziye 子夜
This page intentionally left blank
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Only those books directly quoted from or referred to in the preceding pages are
included in this bibliography. Journal titles and individual essays are not listed.

A Ying. Gengzi shibian wenxue ji (Anthology of literature about the  inci-
dent). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, .
g. Wan Qing xiaoshuo shi (History of late Qing fiction). Beijing: Dongfang,
.
g. Xiaoshuo santan (The third collection of essays on fiction). Shanghai:
Shanghai guji, .
Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by C. Lenhardt. Edited by Gre-
tel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, .
Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brew-
ster. New York: Monthly Review Press, .
Anderson, Marston. The Limits of Realism: Chinese Fiction in the Revolutionary
Period. Berkeley: University of California Press, .
Ba Jin. Ba Jin quanji (The complete works of Ba Jin). Beijing: Renmin wenxue,
–.
g. Ba Jin wenji (Collected works of Ba Jin). Beijing: Renmin wenxue, .
g. Cold Nights, a Novel by Ba Jin. Translated by Nathan K. Mao and Liu
Ts’un-yan. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, .
g. Chuangzuo huiyi lu (Reminiscences about my writing). Hong Kong:
Joint Publishing, .
g. Family. Translated by Sidney Shapiro. New York: Doubleday, .
g. Xiaoren xiaoshi (Little people and little things). Shanghai: Wenhua sheng-
huo, .
Barlowe, Tani, and Gary J. Bjorge, eds. I Myself Am a Woman: Selected Writings of
Ding Ling. Boston: Beacon Press, .
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and
Wang, .
g. S/Z. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, .
g. Writing Degree Zero. Translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith.
New York: Noonday-Farrar, .
Baudrillard, Jean. For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. Translated with
an introduction by Charles Levin. St. Louis: Telos Press, .
g. Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings. Edited with an introduction by Mark
Poster. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, .
358 Selected Bibliography

Baum, Richard, and F. C. Teiwes. Ssu-ch’ing: The Socialist Education Movement of

–. Berkeley, Calif.: Center for Chinese Studies, .
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. Edited with an intro-
duction by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, .
Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity.
New York: Penguin, .
Berry, Chris, ed. Perspectives on Chinese Cinema. London: British Film Institute,
.
Birch, Cyril, ed. Chinese Communist Literature. New York: Praeger, .
Calinescu, Marei. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence,
Kitsch, Postmodernism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, .
Chambers, Ross. The Writing of Melancholy: Modes of Opposition in Early French
Modernism. Translated by Mary Seidman Trouille. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, .
Chan, Anita. Children of Mao: Personality Development and Political Activism in the
Red Guard Generation. Seattle: University of Washington Press, .
Charney, Leo, and Vanessa Schwartz, eds. Cinema and the Invention of Modern
Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, .
Chen Bohai and Yuan Jin, eds. Shanghai jindai wenxue shi (History of modern
Shanghai literature). Shanghai: Shanghai renmin, .
Chen Pingyuan. Ershi shiji Zhongguo xiaoshuo shi: di yi juan – (History of
twentieth-century Chinese fiction: volume one, –). Beijing: Peking
University Press, .
g. Xiaoshuo shi: lilun yu shijian (History of the novel: theory and practice).
Beijing: Peking University Press, .
g. Zhongguo xiaoshuo xushi moshi de zhuanbian (The transformation of the
narrative pattern in Chinese fiction). Shanghai: Shanghai renmin, .
Chen Sihe. Zhongguo xin wenxue zhengti guan (A comprehensive review of Chi-
nese new literature). Taipei: Yeqiang chubanshe, .
Chen Xiaoming, ed. Zhongguo chengshi xiaoshuo jingxuan (Anthology of Chinese
urban fiction). Lanzhou: Gansu renmin, .
Chen, Yu-shih. Realism and Allegory in the Early Fiction of Mao Tun. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, .
Chen Yun, Zhang Lihui, and Xu Jingxian. Nianqing de yidai (The young genera-
tion). Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, .
Chow, Rey. Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West
and East. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, .
Cong Shen. Qianwan buyao wangji (Never forget). Beijing: Zhongguo xiju, .
Deleuze, Gilles. Coldness and Cruelty. In Masochism: ‘‘Coldness and Cruelty’’ by
Gilles Deleuze and ‘‘Venus in Furs’’ by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Translated by
Jean McNeil. New York: Zone Books, .
 Selected Bibliography 359

Deng Jiuping and Yu Haiying, eds. Tiandong cao: yi guxiang (Chinese asparagus:
remembrances of the native land). Beijing: Zhongguo duiwai fanyi, .
Denton, Kirk A., ed. Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature,
–. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, .
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri C. Spivak. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, .
g. Positions. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
.
g. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New
International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, .
Ding Ling. Ding Ling daibiaozuo (Representative works by Ding Ling). Edited
by Jiao Shangzhi and Liu Chunsheng. Zhengzhou: Henan renmin, .
g. Ding Ling wenji (Collected works of Ding Ling). Shanghai: Yiwen shu-
dian, .
Dittmer, Lowell. China’s Continuous Revolution: The Post-Liberation Epoch, –
. Berkeley: University of California Press, .
Doleželová-Velingerová, Milena, ed. The Chinese Novel at the Turn of the Century.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, .
Duke, Michael S., ed. Modern Chinese Women Writers: Critical Appraisals. New
York: M. E. Sharpe, .
Eagleton, Terry. Against the Grain: Essays, –. London: Verso, .
Feng Menglong. Qingshi leilüe (A classified history of passion). Edited by Zou
Xuemin. Changsha: Yuelu shushe, .
Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst. Paris as Revolution: Writing the Nineteenth-Century
City. Berkeley: University of California Press, .
Feuerwerker, Yi-tsi Mei. Ding Ling’s Fiction: Ideology and Narrative in Modern
Chinese Literature. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, .
Foster, Hal, ed. Vision and Visuality. Seattle: Bay Press, .
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan
Sheridan. New York: Vintage, .
g. History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction. New York: Vintage, .
g. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Trans-
lated by Richard Howard. New York: Vintage, .
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Translated by James Strachey.
New York: Norton, .
g. Collected Papers. New York: Basic Books, .
g. Freud: On War, Sex, and Neurosis. New York: Arts and Sciences Press,
.
g. Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety. Revised and edited by James Strachey.
New York: Norton, .
360 Selected Bibliography

g. Sexuality and the Psychology of Love. Edited with introduction by Philip

Rieff. New York: Collier Books, .
g. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.
 vols. Translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, .
Gerstlacher, Anna, Ruth Keen, Wolfgang Kubin, Margit Miosga, and Jenny
Schon, eds. Woman and Literature in China. Bochum: Brockmeyer, .
Gilman, Sander. Franz Kafka: The Jewish Patient. New York: Routledge, .
Gipoulon, Catherine, trans. Pierre de l’oiseau Jingwei: Qiu Jin, femme et révolution-
naire en Chine au XIXe siècle. Paris: des femmes, .
Guo Zhenyi. Zhongguo xiaoshuo shi (History of Chinese fiction). Changsha: Com-
mercial Press, .
Habermas, Jürgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Trans-
lated by Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, Mass.:  Press, .
Hanan, Patrick, trans. The Sea of Regret: Two Turn-of-the-Century Chinese Roman-
tic Novels. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, .
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cul-
tural Change. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, .
Hawkes, David, trans. The Story of the Stone: A Chinese Novel by Cao Xueqin in Five
Volumes. London: Penguin, .
He Dun. Shenghuo wuzui (Life is not a crime). Beijing: Huayi, .
Heller, Agnes. Everyday Life. Translated by G. L. Campbell. London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, .
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans-
lated by John Cumming. New York: Seabury Press, .
Hsia, C. T. A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, –. New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, .
Hsia, Tsi-an. The Gate of Darkness: Studies on the Leftist Literary Movement in
China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, .
Hsü, Kai-yu, and Ting Wang, eds. Literature of the People’s Republic of China.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, .
Hu Shi [Hu Shih]. Hu Shi wencun (Selected works of Hu Shi). Taipei: Yuandong,
.
Hu Wanchun and Fu Chaowu. Jiating wenti (Family problem). Shanghai: Shang-
hai wenhua, .
Huang Lin. Jindai wenxue piping shi (History of modern literary criticism).
Shanghai: Shanghai guji, .
Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, .
Jackson, Stanley W. Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic Times to Modern
Times. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, .
Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of
Literature. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, .
 Selected Bibliography 361

g. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, N.Y.:

Cornell University Press, .
g. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, .
g. Signatures of the Visible. New York: Routledge, .
Jia Zhifang, Tang Jinhai, Zhang Xiaoyun, and Chen Sihe, eds. Ba Jin zuopin ping-
lun ji (Essays on Ba Jin’s works). Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian, .
Jian Yizhi, Chen Erdong, Zhao Shaoliang, and Wang Xiaochuan, eds. Zhongguo
jindai wenlun xuan (Selections from early modern Chinese literary criticism).
Beijing: Renmin wenxue, .
Karatani Kojin. Origins of Modern Japanese Literature. Edited and translated by
Brett de Bary. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, .
Kirkby, R. J. R. Urbanization in China: Town and Country in a Developing Econ-
omy, – .. New York: Columbia University Press, .
Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Translated by Leon S. Rou-
diez. New York: Columbia University Press, .
g. The Kristeva Reader. Edited by Toril Moi. New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, .
Kwok, R. Yin-Wang, et al., eds. Chinese Urban Reform: What Model Now? Ar-
monk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, .
Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Nor-
ton, .
g. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Edited by Jacques-Alan
Miller. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, .
Laing, Ellen Johnston. The Winking Owl: Art in the People’s Republic of China.
Berkeley: University of California Press, .
Lang, Olga. Pa Chin and His Writings: Chinese Youth Between the Two Revolutions.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, .
Lau, Joseph S. M., C. T. Hsia, and Leo Ou-fan Lee, eds. Modern Chinese Stories
and Novellas, –. New York: Columbia University Press, .
Lee, Leo Ou-fan. The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, .
g. Voices from the Iron House: A Study of Lu Xun. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, .
g, ed. Lu Xun and His Legacy. Berkeley: University of California Press, .
Levenson, Joseph R. Revolution and Cosmopolitanism: The Western Stage and the
Chinese Stages. Berkeley: University of California Press, .
Levin, David Michael, ed. Pathologies of the Modern Self: Postmodern Studies on
Narcissism, Schizophrenia, and Depression. New York: New York University
Press, .
362 Selected Bibliography

Lewis, John Wilson, ed. The City in Communist China. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, .
Li Cunguang, ed. Ba Jin yanjiu ziliao (Research materials on Ba Jin). Fuzhou:
Haixia wenyi, .
Li, Wai-yee. Enchantment and Disenchantment: Love and Illusion in Chinese Litera-
ture. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, .
Li Yang. Kangzheng suming zhi lu: shehui zhuyi xianshi zhuyi (–) yanjiu
(The path of resisting destiny: a study of socialist realism [–]).
Changchun: Shidai wenyi, .
Li Zehou. Zhongguo jindai sixiangshi lun (Essays on modern Chinese intellectual
history). Taipei: Fengyun shidai, .
g and Liu Zaifu. Gaobie geming: huiwang ershi shiji Zhongguo (Farewell to
revolution: review of twentieth-century China). Hong Kong: Cosmos, .
Li Zongying and Zhang Mengyang, eds. Liushi nianlai Lu Xun yanjiu lunwen
xuan (Selected essays of Lu Xun studies in the past sixty years).  vols. Beijing:
Zhongguo shehui kexue, .
Liang Qichao. Yinbingshi heji-wenji (Collected writings from the ice-drinker’s
studio: collected essays). Shanghai: China Books, .
Lin Gang, ed. Fengyu zhong de lüdao—xiandai jiaju (Safe haven in a storm—mod-
ern living). Beijing: Zhongguo shangye, .
Lin Yaode [Lin Yao-te].  Gaosha baihe (—Lilium formosanum). Taipei:
Unitas, .
Lin Yü-sheng. The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Antitraditionalism in the
May Fourth Era. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, .
Link, E. Perry, Jr. Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twen-
tieth-Century Chinese Cities. Berkeley: University of California Press, .
Liu Heng. Black Snow. Translated by Howard Goldblatt. New York: Atlantic
Monthly Press, .
Liu, Kang, and Xiaobing Tang, eds. Politics, Ideology, and Literary Discourse in
Modern China: Theoretical Interventions and Cultural Critique. Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, .
Liu, Lydia H. Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated
Modernity—China, –. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, .
Liu Zaifu. Liu Zaifu lunwen xuan (Selection of essays by Liu Zaifu). Hong Kong:
Dadi, .
Lu Xun [Lu Hsün]. A Brief History of Chinese Fiction. Translated by Yang Hsien-yi
and Gladys Yang. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, .
g. Lu Xun quanji (The complete works of Lu Xun). Beijing: Renmin wen-
xue, .
g. Lu Xun: ‘‘Diary of a Madman’’ and Other Stories. Translated by William A.
Lyell. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, .
 Selected Bibliography 363

g. Silent China: Selected Writings of Lu Xun. Edited and translated by Gladys

Yang. London: Oxford University Press, .
g. Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilüe (A brief history of Chinese fiction). Beijing: Bei-
xin shuju, .
Lukács, Georg. Realism in Our Time: Literature and Class Struggle. Translated by
John Mander and Necke Mander. New York: Torchbooks-Harper, .
Lyell, William A. Lu Hsün’s Vision of Reality. Berkeley: University of California
Press, .
Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. Cambridge, Mass.: Technology Press, .
McDougall, Bonnie S., and Kam Louie, The Literature of China in the Twentieth
Century. New York: Columbia University Press, .
Malmqvist, Goran, ed. Modern Chinese Literature and Its Social Context. Nobel
Symposium (). Stockholm, .
Mao Dun. Midnight. Translated by Hsu Meng-hsiung and A. C. Barnes. Peking:
Foreign Languages Press, .
g. Yexiangwei (The wild roses). Shanghai: Dajiang shupu, .
g. Ziye (Midnight). Beijing: Renmin wenxue, .
Mao Zedong. Ten More Poems of Mao Tse-tung. Hong Kong: Eastern Horizon
Press, .
Meng Yue and Dai Jinhua. Fuchu lishi dibiao: xiandai funü wenxue yanjiu (Emerg-
ing from history: studies in modern women’s literature). Zhengzhou: Henan
renmin, .
Mi Hedu. Hongweibing zhe yidai (The red guard generation). Hong Kong: Joint
Publishing, .
Moretti, Franco, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture.
London: Verso, .
Mowry, Hua-yuan Li. Chinese Love Stories from the ‘‘Ch’ing-shih.’’ Hamden, Conn.:
Archon Books, .
Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, .
Newton, Judith, and Deborah Rosenfelt. Feminist Criticism and Social Change:
Sex, Class and Race in Literature and Culture. New York: Methuen, .
Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Translated by Walter Kaufman
and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, .
Outram, Dorinda. The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class, and Political Cul-
ture. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, .
Peasant Paintings from Huhsien County. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, .
Pensky, Max. Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, .
Perkins, David. Is Literary History Possible? Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, .
364 Selected Bibliography

Průšek, Jaroslav. The Lyrical and the Epic: Studies of Modern Chinese Literature.
Edited by Leo Ou-fan Lee. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, .
Reik, Theodor. Masochism in Modern Man. Translated by Margaret H. Beigel and
Gertrud M. Kurth. New York: Farrar, Straus, .
Ren Fangqiu. Zhongguo jindai wenxue zuojia lun (Essays on modern Chinese writ-
ers). Zhengzhou: Henan renmin, .
Richett, Adele Austin, ed. Chinese Approaches to Literature from Confucius to Liang
Ch’i-ch’ao. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, .
Rose, Gillian. Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, .
Rose, Jacqueline. Sexuality in the Field of Vision. London: Verso, .
Rowe, Colin, and Fred Koetter. Collage City. Cambridge, Mass.:  Press, .
Roy, David T. Kuo Mo-jo: The Early Years. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, .
Schram, Stuart R., ed. Authority, Participation and Cultural Change in China.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, .
Schudson, Michael. Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on
American Society. New York: Basic Books, .
Semsel, George S., Hou Jianping, and Xia Hong, eds. Chinese Film Theory: A
Guide to the New Era. New York: Praeger, .
Sennett, Richard, ed. Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities. New York: Meredith,
.
Sit, Victor F. S., ed. Chinese Cities: The Growth of the Metropolis Since . Oxford:
Oxford University Press, .
Soja, Edward W. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social
Theory. London: Verso, .
Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York:
Doubleday, .
Sorlin, Pierre. European Cinemas, European Societies, –. London: Rout-
ledge, .
Sparke, Penny. An Introduction to Design and Culture in the Twentieth Century.
London: Allen and Unwin, .
Spence, Jonathan D. The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution,
–. New York: Penguin, .
g. The Search for Modern China. New York: Norton, .
Spivak, Gayatri C. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York:
Methuen, .
Strassburg, Richard E., and Waldermar A. Nielsen, eds. Beyond the Open Door:
Contemporary Paintings from the People’s Republic of China. Pasadena, Calif.:
Pacific Asia Museum, .
 Selected Bibliography 365

Su Tong. Raise the Red Lantern. Translated by Michael Duke. New York: William
Morrow, .
g. Qiqie chengqun (Wives and concubines). Taipei: Yuanliu, .
Tang, Xiaobing. Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The His-
torical Thinking of Liang Qichao. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press,
.
g, ed. Zai jiedu: dazhong wenyi yu yishi xingtai (Rereading: people’s litera-
ture and arts movement and ideology). Hong Kong: Oxford University Press,
.
Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, .
Taylor, Ronald, trans. Aesthetics and Politics: Debates Between Ernst Bloch, Georg
Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno. London: NLB, .
Wakeman, Frederic, Jr. Policing Shanghai, –. Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, .
g, and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds. Shanghai Sojourners. Berkeley: Institute of East
Asian Studies, University of California, .
Wang Anyi. Baotown. Translated by Martha Avery. New York: Penguin, .
g. Fuxi yu muxi de shenhua (Patrilineal and matrilineal myths). Hangzhou:
Zhejiang wenyi, .
g. Huangshan zhi lian (Love on a barren mountain). Hong Kong: South
China Press, .
g. Jishi yu xugou—chuangzuo shijie fangfa zhi yizhong (Records and fiction:
one method of creating the world). Beijing: Renmin wenxue, .
g. Pugongying (Dandelions). Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi, .
g. Xianggang de qing yu ai (Love and sentiment in Hong Kong). Beijing:
Zuojia, .
Wang, Ban. The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-
Century China. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, .
Wang, Chi-chen, trans. Ah Q and Others: Selected Stories of Lusin. New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, .
Wang, David Der-wei. Fictional Realism in Twentieth-Century China: Mao Dun,
Lao She, Shen Congwen. New York: Columbia University Press, .
g. Fin-de-siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, –.
Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, .
Wang Guowei. Wang Guowei xiansheng sanzhong (Three works by Wang Guowei).
Taipei: Guomin, .
Wang, Jing, ed. China’s Avant-Garde Fiction. Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, .
g. High Culture Fever: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Deng’s China. Berke-
ley: University of California Press, .
366 Selected Bibliography

g. The Story of Stone: Intertextuality, Ancient Chinese Stone Lore, and the Stone
Symbolism in ‘‘Dream of the Red Chamber,’’ ‘‘Water Margin,’’ and ‘‘The Journey
to the West.’’ Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, .
Wang Shiqing. Lu Xun: A Biography. Translated by Zhang Peiji. Beijing: Foreign
Languages Press, .
g. Lu Xun zhuan (Biography of Lu Xun). Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian,
.
Wang Xiaoming, ed. Ershi shiji Zhongguo wenxue shilun (Essays on twentieth-
century Chinese literary history).  vols. Shanghai: Dongfang chuban zhong-
xin, .
Wang Yao, ed. Beijing daxue Lu Xun danchen yibai zhounian jinian wenji (Com-
memorative essays on the centenary of Lu Xun from Peking University). Bei-
jing: Peking University Press, .
Wasserstrom, Jeffrey N. Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China: The View
from Shanghai. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, .
Wei, Betty Peh-T’i. Shanghai: Crucible of Modern China. Hong Kong: Oxford
University Press, .
Wei Shaochang, ed. Wu Jianren yanjiu ziliao (Research materials on Wu Jianren).
Shanghai: Shanghai guji, .
White, Gordon. Riding the Tiger: The Politics of Economic Reform in Post-Mao
China. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, .
Whyte, Martin King, and William L. Parish. Urban Life in Contemporary China.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, .
Widmer, Ellen, and David Der-wei Wang, eds. From May Fourth to June Fourth:
Fiction and Film in Twentieth-Century China. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, .
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University
Press, .
g. The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists. Edited with intro-
duction by Tony Pinkney. London: Verso, .
Wong, Yoon Wah. Essays on Chinese Literature: A Comparative Approach. Singa-
pore: Singapore University Press, .
Wu Jianren. Qing bian (Passion transformed). Shanghai: China Eastern Normal
University Press, .
Xiao Ye. Wudi haixing (Legless starfish). Taipei: Yuanliu, .
Yang, Gladys, and Hsien-yi Yang, trans. Lu Xun: Selected Stories. New York: Nor-
ton: .
Yeh Chia-ying. Wang Guowei ji qi wenxue piping (Wang Guowei and his literary
criticism). Hong Kong: China Books, .
Yu Hua. The Past and the Punishments. Translated by Andrew F. Jones. Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, .
 Selected Bibliography 367

g. Shibasui chumen yuanxing (On the road at age eighteen). Taipei: Yuanliu,
.
g. Shishi ru yan (This world of clouds). Taipei: Yuanliu, .
Yu Simu. Zuojia Ba Jin (On the writer Ba Jin). Hong Kong: Nanguo, .
Yuan Jin. Yuanyang hudie pai (The mandarin duck and butterfly school). Shang-
hai: Shanghai shudian, .
Yuan Ke. Zhongguo gudai shenhua (Ancient Chinese myths). Shanghai: Commer-
cial Press, .
Yuan Liangjun, ed. Ding Ling yanjiu ziliao (Research materials on Ding Ling).
Tianjin: Tianjin renmin, .
Zeitlin, Judith T. Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical
Tale. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, .
Zhang Ailing. Zhang Ailing quanji (The complete works of Zhang Ailing).Vol. .
Taipei: Huangguan, .
Zhang Geng, ed. Zhongguo xin wenyi daxi, –: xiju ji (Compendium of new
Chinese arts and literature, –: the drama collection). Beijing: Zhong-
guo wenlian, .
Zhang Minquan. Ba Jin xiaoshuo de shengming tixi (The life forms in Ba Jin’s fic-
tion). Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi, .
Zhang Ruoying. Zhongguo xin wenxueshi ziliao (Documents from the history of
Chinese new literature). Shanghai: Guangmin shuju, .
Zhang, Xudong. Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms: Cultural Fever, Avant-
Garde Fiction, and the New Chinese Cinema. Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, .
Zhang, Yingjin. The City in Modern Chinese Literature and Film: Configurations of
Space, Time, and Gender. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, .
Zhang Zhanbing and Song Yifu. Zhongguo: Mao Zedong re (China: Mao Zedong
fever). Taiyuan: Beiyue wenyi, .
Zhao Jiabi, ed. Xiandai Zhongguo wenxue daxi (Compendium of modern Chinese
literature). Shanghai: Liangyou, –.
Zhejiang Lu Xun Studies Society. Lu Xun yanjiu lunwen xuan (Essays from Lu
Xun studies). Hangzhou: Zhejiang wenyi, .
Zito, Angela, and Tani E. Barlow, eds. Body, Subject, and Power in China. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, .
This page intentionally left blank
INDEX

A Ying, , –, ,  Benjamin, Walter, –, , n,

Adorno, Theodor, , n, n , , , n, , 
All Story Monthly (Yueyue xiaoshuo), Benming nian. See Black Snow
,  Berman, Marshall, 
Althusser, Louis,  bildungsroman, , –, , ,
Anderson, Marston, –, , – 
anti-imperialism. See imperialism Black Snow (Benming nian), , –
anxiety: in Black Snow, –, ; , –; and aesthetics of depth,
in Cold Nights, , , , ; in –, ; compared with Good
Diary of a Madman, ; of everyday Morning, Beijing, –; intellectu-
life, , , , –, , , alizing in, –
–; and history as mirror, , boredom: in avant-garde fiction, ,
, ; and homesickness, ; and , ; in Ding Ling’s fiction, ,
idealism, ; in the lyrical age, , , , 
, , ; and modernism, , Boxer Rebellion, –, –, , ,
n, ; and postmodernism, , –
, n; post-utopian, , , Brown, Wendy, –
; and revolution, , ; in The
Sea of Regret, , – Calinescu, Matei, 
avant-garde fiction (experimental fic- Cao Yu, , 
tion), –, –, , , capitalist realism, , , 
 catastrophe (haojie), , 
Chambers, Ross, , n
Ba Jin, , –, , –, , – Chang, Eileen. See Zhang Ailing
. Works: Family (Jia), , , ; Changsha, , , , , , ,
Leisure Garden (Qiyuan), –, , , 
; Little People and Little Things cheng. See sincerity
(Xiaoren xiaoshi), . See also Cold Chen Pingyuan, –, n
Nights Chen Ran, n, 
Balzac, Honoré de, , ,  Chen Sihe, n, n, , n
Barlow, Tani, n, ,  Chen Xiaoming, n, –, –,
Barthes, Roland, , , , n,  –
Baudelaire, Charles, , , , ,  Chen Yun, –, n. See also The
Baudrillard, Jean, n, –, , Young Generation
,  Chinese Youth (Zhongguo qingnian),
Beijing, , , –, ; in cinema, –, , 
, –, –, – Chongqing, , , , , . See
Beijing nizao. See Good Morning, Beijing also Cold Nights
370 Index

Chow, Rey, n, –, n , , , , , , , ,
cinema, –, , , , –; , , , , , 
Fourth Generation, –; Fifth collectivization, , 
Generation, –; in The Town of colonialism, , , , , 
Olive in , –. See also Black comedy, –, , 
Snow; cinematographic representa- Confucianism, , , , , , ,
tion; Good Morning, Beijing; New n
China cinema consumer society, , , , , ,
cinematographic representation: in ; in avant-garde fiction, , ,
Nineteen Thirty-four Escapes, ; of ; in Ding Ling’s fiction, , –
Shanghai, –; in The Town of , ; in He Dun’s fiction, ,
Olive in , –, . See also –, , ; in lyrical age, ;
cinema; visuality in postrevolutionary age, , ,
city, ; and cinema, –; in Ding , –, , –, , ,
Ling’s fiction, –, , –, –; in Wang Anyi’s fiction, 
, ; and narrativity, –; and cosmopolitanism, , 
nationalism, –; and native-land country, , ; in cinema, , , ;
literature, ; and ‘‘new fiction of the as the city’s other, –, ; in
city dwellers’’ (xin shimin xiaoshuo), postrevolutionary society, –;
; in lyrical age, –, –; in revolutionary society, –; in
in postrevolutionary age, –, Su Tong’s fiction, , , , ,
–, –, , , –, –; in Yu Hua’s fiction, . See
–; in Su Tong’s fiction, –, also city
–, –; in Yu Hua’s fiction, Cultural Revolution, , , , , ,
–. See also Beijing; Black Snow; , , , n, n, , ,
country; Good Morning, Beijing; He , , , , , , , ,
Dun; Shanghai; Shanghai, Spring 
; urbanization
Clark, Paul,  Dai Jinhua, , , , , n
A Classified History of Passion (Qingshi Deleuze, Gilles, , , , , ,
leilüe), ,  –
Cold Nights (Hanye), –; and Derrida, Jacques, , n, , 
deconstructive writing, ; and De Sica, Vittorio, –
individual failure, –, –, desire: in Black Snow, , , ; in
–, –; legacy of, –; Cold Nights, , , , –; in
and masochism, , –, ; Diary of a Madman, , ; in Good
moral discourse of, –; and Morning, Beijing, ; and the mir-
ressentiment, , –; and tuber- ror of history, ; and nostalgia,
culosis, , , , –, , ; postrevolutionary, , , ,
–,  , –, , ; in The Sea
collectivism, , , , , , , of Regret, , , , ; in Shanghai,
 Index 371

Spring , –, , ; ‘‘spec- epistemology: and Chinese modern-
tacles of,’’ –, , ; tragedy, ism, ; and ‘‘Diary of a Madman,’’
; urban setting, –. See also , ; ‘‘epistemic violence,’’ –;
passion; sexuality; utopianism and late Qing fiction, –
‘‘Diary of a Madman’’ (Kuangren riji), ethnic minorities, –, , 
, n, , ; absent father in, , experimental fiction. See avant-garde
; deconstructive reading in, – fiction
, , , ; dual ending of, –; exteriority: aesthetics of, ; in avant-
feng and kuang (madness), –; garde fiction, ; and interior
history in, –, –, , ; design, ; in painting, ; and
legacy of, –; and New Culture the ‘‘politicized body,’’ –; revo-
movement, –; paranoia in, , lutionary desire for, ; transition
, , ; and realism, –, –, from interiority to, , –

Di Baoxian (Pingdeng ge), , . See father figure: in avant-garde fiction,
also ‘‘Tang Sheng’’ , , , ; in Cold Nights,
Ding Ling, , , –, –, – –; in ‘‘Diary of a Madman,’’
, –, –, , , , . , ; in ‘‘My Native Land,’’ ; in
Works: ‘‘Daylight’’ (Ri), –; Sadness for the Pacific, –; in The
‘‘Diary of a Suicide,’’ –; Flood Young Generation, , , 
(Shui), ; In Darkness, ; ‘‘In the femininity, , –, , , ,
Hospital’’ (Zai yiyuan zhong), ; –, , . See also feminism;
‘‘Mengke,’’ , ; ‘‘Miss Sophia’s gender; masculinity
Diary’’ (Shafei nüshi de riji), , , feminism, , –, –. See also
; ‘‘One Day’’ (Yitian), n; Wei femininity; gender; masculinity
Hu, n. See also Shanghai, Spring feng (madness), –, . See also
 kuang
Dittmer, Lowell, n, n,  Feng Menglong, ; A Classified His-
Doleželová-Velingerová, Milena, ,  tory of Passion (Qingshi leilüe), ,
drama, , , , , –, , – ; and ‘‘passionism,’’ 
, ; golden age of, ; ‘‘model Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst, 
theater,’’ ; opera, ; spoken Feuerwerker, Yi-tsi Mei, , , n,
(huaju), ; tanci, . See also The n
Young Generation fiction (xiaoshuo), –, –, ,
Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou , . See also novel
meng) (The Story of the Stone), , Fifth Generation. See cinema: Fifth
,  Generation
Duras, Marguerite, , ,  Flaubert, Gustave, n, 
folklore, , 
Egan, Michael,  Foucault, Michel, , 
Enlightenment, , , , ,  French Revolution, , , , , 
372 Index

Freud, Sigmund, , , , , n, , Habermas, Jürgen, 
, , ,  hagiography: and pathography in The
Fu Lin, , , , , , , ; Stones Sea of Regret, , –, , , , 
in the Sea (Qin hai shi; Bird, sea, Hanan, Patrick, , 
stone), –, , –,  Hanye. See Cold Nights
haojie. See catastrophe
Ge Fei, ,  Harvey, David, 
gender: in Cold Nights, ; in Ding He Dun, , , , , –,
Ling’s fiction, , –, , – , , –. Works: Hello, My
; and feminist writing, –; in Younger Brother (Didi nihao), –
Hello, My Younger Brother, ; in late , –, –; I Don’t Care (Wo
Qing, ; and postmodern melan- bu xiangshi), , ; Life Is Not a
choly, ; and revolution, –; Crime (Shenghuo wuzui), –,
in The Sea of Regret, , –; in The , n, n, 
Young Generation, –. See also Hegel, G. W. F. (Hegelianism), , ,
femininity; feminism; masculinity , , , , 
Gilman, Sander, ,  Heller, Agnes, –
Gissing, George, – Henhai. See The Sea of Regret
Gogol, Nikolay,  heroic, the: in Ba Jin, ; in ‘‘Diary of
Goldblatt, Howard, n, n a Madman,’’ ; ‘‘heroic melancholy,’’
Good Morning, Beijing (Beijing nizao), , –; and Mao Zedong’s
, , –; and the ‘‘collage poetry, ; in ‘‘My Native Land,’’
city,’’ –; compared with Black , ; and New China cinema, ,
Snow, –; and legitimation of ; and postrevolutionary self-
the market, –; and rhetoric transformation, ; and quotidian
of compromise, –, ; and dialectic, , , –, , ; and revo-
self-transformation, –; and lutionary mass culture, , , ,
temporality, –; and Third ; in Shanghai, Spring , ,
World condition, – ; and socialist realism, ; in
Great Leap Forward, ,  Wang Anyi’s fiction, , , ,
Guangzhou, , ,  , ; and Xiao Ye, . See also
guilt: Nietzsche on, ; in postrevo- quotidian
lutionary culture, ; in The Sea of Hiroshima, –, 
Regret, , –, , ; and The Hong Kong, –, , 
Young Generation,  Hsia, C. T., , n
Guomindang (), . See also Hsia, Tsi-an, , n, 
Nationalist government Hsiao Yeh. See Xiao Ye
Guo Moruo (Kuo Mo-jo), , –, Hsü, Kai-yu, 
n Huang Zongying, 
Guo Zhenyi,  humanism, , , –, –,
guxiang. See native land , , , . See also liberalism
‘‘Guxiang.’’ See ‘‘My Native Land’’ Hu Shi, 
 Index 373

Hu Yepin, – Jameson, Fredric, –, –, –,

hyperstimulation, , –, . See also , –, –, , , n,
trauma , n, , n
Japan, , , ; and criticism of
Chinese theater, ; literature of, ,
ideology, , , , , , –, , , , ; and The Town of Olive
, , , ; of asceticism, , in , , , –, ; trans-
, ; in Cold Nights, , , lations in, . See also Sino-Japanese
, –; of compromise, – War
, ; of consumption, –; Jiang Guanyun, 
critique from margins, –, ; Jiang Qing, , 
of everyday life, , ; ideolo- Jingwei, –, 
geme, –; and Lu Xun studies, Jin Songcen, –
–; in lyrical age, , , ; of Joan Haste (H. Rider Haggard), –,
marketization, ; of modernism, 
, , , , ; of modernity,
, , ; of postmodernism,
Kafka, Franz, , , , , ,
, n, ; in postrevolutionary
, , , 
society, , , , , , ;
Karatani Kojin, 
of realism, , ; of seeing, ,
Kiely, Robert, –
; and The Young Generation, ,
Kristeva, Julia, –, , , ,
, , n, –
, 
imperialism, , , , , , ,
kuang (madness), –, , . See

also feng
‘‘I-novel,’’ , 
‘‘Kuangren riji.’’ See ‘‘Diary of a Mad-
interior design, –, –
man’’
interiority, ; in avant-garde fiction,
, , –, , , , ;
in Black Snow, –, ; in Cold Lacan, Jacques, , , , n, , 
Nights, , , –; ‘‘dialectic’’ La dame aux camélias (Alexander
of, ; in Ding Ling’s fiction, , Dumas fils), , , 
, , ; and interior design, Lang, Olga, n, 
, , –; in lyrical age, ; League of Communist Youth, , 
in ‘‘My Native Land,’’ , ; post- League of Left-wing Writers, 
modern lack of, ; in pre- Lee Kuan-yew, , –
works, ; in The Sea of Regret, , , Lee, Leo Ou-fan, –, , n
, , ; in Stones in the Sea, ; and Lei Da, 
‘‘subjectivity’’ in s, –, . Lei Feng, 
See also exteriority; interior design; Lenin, V. I. (Leninism), , , n
subjectivity Liang Qichao, –, n, –, ,
Italy, , , . See also neorealist , –; ‘‘Ode to Young China,’’
cinema , –
374 Index

Liaozhai zhiyi (Records of the strange , ; kuang/feng in ‘‘Diary of a

from the liaozhai studio),  Madman,’’ –, 
liberalism, , , –, ; in Cold Mandarin Duck and Butterfly fiction,
Nights, –, , –. See also 
humanism Mao Dun, . Works: Midnight (Ziye),
Li Jiefei,  –, ; ‘‘Suicide’’ (Zisha), 
Lin Gang, ,  Mao Zedong, –, , n, –
Link, Perry,  , , , , , 
Lin Shu, n,  Marcus, Millicent, n, n
Lin Yaode, ,  marketization, –, , , ,
literary production: commodification –, , –, 
of, ; instrumentalization of, , Marx, Karl, , , , n
; in late Qing, –; in lyrical Marxism, , 
age, , ; proletarianization of, masculinity: in Ding Ling’s fiction, ,
–; socialist reorganization of, ; ; in late Qing, ; and masoch-
in Third-World culture,  ism in Cold Nights, , ; in ‘‘My
Li Tuo,  Native Land,’’ ; and revolution,
Liu Heng, , , n, n –. See also femininity; feminism;
Liu Shaoqi,  gender
Liu Zaifu, , –,  masochism: in Cold Nights, , –,
Li, Wai-yee,  –, ; and residual modern-
Li Yang, n,  ism, ; in The Sea of Regret, –,
Li Zehou, n, n 
Louie, Kam, – May Fourth movement, , , , ,
Lukács, Georg, , n, , , , , , , , , , , ,
n , –, 
Lu Xun, , , n, –, , , , McDougall, Bonnie S., –
, , , , , ; on ‘‘awaken- melancholia, –, , , –,
ing,’’ , ; and native-land litera- . See also melancholy
ture, –; state-sponsored studies melancholy, , ; in Black Snow, ;
of, . Works: Call to Arms (Nahan), in Ding Ling’s fiction, , ; and
, ; ‘‘Medicine’’ (Yao), ; ‘‘On guxiang, ; in He Dun’s fiction,
the Power of Mara Poets’’ (Moluo ; heroic, , –; historical
shili shuo), ; Wild Grass (Yecao), or ‘‘postmodern,’’ –, ; Wal-
. See also ‘‘Diary of a Madman’’; ter Benjamin on, , ; in Wang
‘‘My Native Land’’ Anyi’s fiction, , , –, ;
Lynch, Kevin, , , , n in Yu Dafu’s fiction, , . See also
lyrical age (shuqing shidai), , –, melancholia
–, , . See also The Young melodrama: in cinema, 
Generation Meng Yue, , , , , n, ,
–, , n
madness: in avant-garde fiction, – ‘‘misty poetry,’’ 
 Index 375

model theater, , n, ,  ; and realism, –, –, –
‘‘modern girl,’’ ,  ; and reality/memory gap, –,
modernism, –, –, , , ; sexuality in, ; and utopianism,
, , ; in Black Snow, , , –
, ; in ‘‘Diary of a Madman,’’
–, , , ; European, , , nationalism, , –, , , , ,
; and interior monologue, ; , –, , , , , ,
residual, , –, , . See , 
also Black Snow; ‘‘Diary of a Mad- Nationalist government (Republic of
man’’; Su Tong; Xiao Ye; Yu Hua China), , , , , , 
modernity, , , , , , , , native land ( guxiang), –, , .
, n, ; and bildungsroman, See also ‘‘My Native Land’’; native-
; in cinema, , ; and disease, land literature
–, , ; and everyday life, native-land literature (xiangtu wenxue),
, , , ; and hyperstimula- –, . See also ‘‘My Native Land’’
tion, , ; and ideology, , , , neorealist cinema, , –, , –
, ; and late Qing new fiction, . See also Good Morning, Beijing
–; and nonsynchronic synchro- neurosis: as a meaning of feng, ; in
nicity, , ; and postmodernism, The Sea of Regret, , , –; in
, , ; and residual modern- Stones in the Sea, 
ism, , , , , –, ; Never Forget (Qianwan buyao wangji),
and Shanghai, , ; socialist, ; , n
utopian, ; Western, –, ,  New China cinema, –, 
modernization, , n, , , , New Citizen Journal (Xinmin congbao),
, , , ; in cinema, , 
, , –, ; incomplete, New Culture movement, , , 
, , , ; in lyrical age, New Fiction (Xin xiaoshuo), , , ,
; and narration, ; in post- , 
revolutionary age, –, ; New Life movement, , 
revolution as, ; Singapore model New Literature movement, 
of, , n; and ‘‘twentieth-century New Sensationists (Xin ganjue pai), 
Chinese literature,’’  New Youth (Xin qingnian), 
Moretti, Franco, –,  Nietzsche, Friedrich, , , –, ,
mother figure: in Cold Nights, , – , , 
; in ‘‘My Native Land,’’ ; in The nostalgia, ; for Maoist era, ; and
Young Generation, – native-land literature, , , , ;
Mo Yan, , n,  in Nineteen Thirty-four Escapes, ,
Mulvey, Laura, , n , ; and residual modernism,
‘‘My Native Land’’ (Guxiang), –; , ; in Stones in the Sea, ; in
and homesickness, , –, ; The Town of Olive in , , ;
and landscape, –; and leaving, in Wang Anyi’s fiction, , ,
–; and misrecognition, –, , ; in Zhang Ailing’s fiction,
376 Index

nostalgia (continued ) popular music, , . See also rock

, . See also ‘‘My Native Land’’; and roll
native land ( guxiang); native-land postmodernism, , , , ; and
literature; Sadness for the Pacific Chen Xiaoming, –, ; and
novel, ; in late Qing, –, ; in cinema, , n, –, ; and
lyrical age, . See also fiction melancholy, , –, , –,
Nüwa, –,  n, ; and reemergence of every-
day life, ; and residual modern-
passion, , , ; and Ba Jin, ; ism, –, , ; and ‘‘society
vs. ‘‘benevolence,’’ ; and Cultural of the spectacle,’’ , –
Revolution, , ; in Ding Ling’s postrevolutionary culture, , , ,
fiction, , , , ; in Good , , , , , , , ,
Morning, Beijing, ; vs. lust ( yu), , 
; of lyrical age, , , –, Proust, Marcel, , –
–, , ; mythology of qing, Průšek, Jaroslav, , n
–; and revolution, –; and psychological realism, , , , ,
romanticism of s, –, – , , 
; in The Sea of Regret, , , , Pu Songling, , n
–, , , –; in Stones in the
Sea, , , ; and tradition of ‘‘pas-
Qiu Jin ( Jingwei shi; The Stones of
sionism’’ (qing jiao), –; in Wang
Jingwei ), 
Anyi’s fiction, , , , , ,
Qiu Tao (Dream Girl), –
, , 
quotidian, the (everyday life): anxiety
pathography. See hagiography: and
of, , –, , , , –
pathography in The Sea of Regret
; in cinema, , , ; and
pathos: of Ba Jin, ; and ‘‘native
the city, , –, –, ;
land’’ ( guxiang), –, ; in The
in Cold Nights, –; and heroic
Sea of Regret, , , ; of Wang
dialectic, , , –, , ; in lyri-
Anyi, , 
cal age, , , , –, ,
patriarchy. See father figure
; its negation in Flood, ; and
Peng Wen, n, , 
postmodernism, ; and post-
Pensky, Max, , 
revolutionary society, , ;
People’s Liberation Army (), ,
revolutionary impoverishment of,
, , 
–; in Shanghai, Spring ;
People’s Republic, ; founding of, –
and Su Tong’s fiction, ; in Wang
, ; ‘‘peaceful construction’’ of,
Anyi’s fiction, , , , ; in

Yu Hua’s fiction, , –. See also
poetry, , , ; in lyrical age, ,
heroic, the
; of Mao Zedong, –
Poetry (Shikan), , n
Popular Cinema (Dazhong dianying), race, –
 realism, –, , n; and Ba Jin,
 Index 377

–; and Lu Xun, , –, – Rose, Jacqueline, –

, , –, –, ; and moral Rosenfelt, Deborah, n, n
commitment, , ; and native-
land literature, ; revolutionary, Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, , ,
, . See also capitalist realism; 
psychological realism; socialist sadism, 
realism Saussure, Ferdinand de, , n
Reik, Theodor, ,  The Sea of Regret (Henhai), , , –,
residual modernism. See modernism: –, –, , –, ; legacy
residual of, –; and trauma, –, , ,
ressentiment, , , –,  ; virtue and sexuality in, –, 
revolution, , , , –, , sexuality: in Cold Nights, ; in Ding
, , ; and avant-garde fic- Ling’s fiction, , –; in ‘‘My
tion, , –, ; and Ba Jin, Native Land,’’ ; in s fiction,
; and the body, , –; and –; in The Sea of Regret, –,
cinema, ; and ‘‘Diary of a Mad- , 
man,’’ ; and end of s romanti- Shanghai, , , , , , , ,
cism, –; and exteriority, –; , , ; in Ding Ling’s fiction,
global, , , ; memory of, , –, ; interior design in,
; as modernization, ; in peace- –; s descriptions of, –
time, , . See also Shanghai, ; politics of, –; in Stones in
Spring ; The Young Generation the Sea, . See also Shanghai, Spring
‘‘revolution and love’’ fiction, , , 
, n. See also Shanghai, Spring Shanghai Literature (Shanghai wenxue),
 
‘‘revolutionary literature,’’  Shanghai, Spring  (Yijiu sanling nian
revolutionary mass culture, , –, chun Shanghai), , , , ;
–, , –, . See also conclusion of, –; and discourse
The Young Generation of revolution, –, –; femi-
revolutionary romanticism, , , , ninity and consumption in, –,
,  ; gender and revolution in, –
rock and roll, , , . See also ; and the pre-revolutionary body,
popular music –; and training the male body,
romanticism, , , , , , , –
, , , , , ; combined Shi ji (Records of the historian), 
with realism, n, ; in Ding Ling’s Shi jing (The book of songs), 
fiction, , , , ; of s, Sima Qian, 
–, , . See also lyrical age; sincerity (cheng), –
passion; revolution and love fiction; Singapore, , , –
revolutionary romanticism; The Sea Sino-Japanese War, , , , , ,
of Regret; Stones in the Sea , , , , . See also World
root seeking (xungen), , ,  War II
378 Index

socialist realism, , , , , – Works: ‘‘As Serene as Still Water’’
, , , , , , , (Pingjing ru shui), –, , ;
. See also realism; revolutionary ‘‘Hello, My Beekeeper’’ (Nihao,
romanticism yangfengren), –, ; Nineteen
Soja, Edward,  Thirty-four Escapes (Yijiu sansi nian
Sontag, Susan, – de taowang), n, , , –,
Sorlin, Pierre, ,  
Soviet Union, , , , –, Symbolism, , 

Sparke, Penny,  Taiwan, , , , , , ,
spectrality, , , , ,  , , , , 
Spence, Jonathan D., , n ‘‘Tang Sheng,’’ –, 
Spivak, Gayatri, – Tan Sitong, 
Stalinism, , – Taylor, Charles, , 
The Story of the Stone. See Dream of the teleology, 
Red Chamber totality, –
stream of consciousness, ,  tragedy, –, –, –
subjectivity: in avant-garde fiction, , tragicomedy, , , 
, –, –, ; in cinema, trauma, ; and Cultural Revolution,
, , , , , , ; in , ; and hyperstimulation, , –
Cold Nights, , , , , , , ; and melancholy, , ; in
–; collective, –; , , The Sea of Regret, , , , –, ,
; female, ; and guilt, –; , , ; in Stones in the Sea, 
and Hegel, ; illness and, ; Troubleshooters (Wanzhu), –, ,
imprisoning urban, –, –; 
and interior homeland, –; lyri- tuberculosis, ; in Cold Nights, ,
cal, , –; melancholy, , , , –, , –, ; as
, –, ; in Ming Dynasty, desire, ; and Ding Ling’s hero-
; and the mirror of history, , ines, ; as metaphor, –, ;
, –; and (mis)recognition, after , –; as psychosomatic
–; modernist, , , –; in illness, , , 
s intellectual debates, , ,
–, n; and postrevolutionary United States, –, , –, ,
self-transformation, ; and realist , , , , , , , 
orthodoxy, ; ‘‘subjection’’ of, – Urbach, Henry, 
, –; traumatized, , , , urbanization, –, , . See also
. See also collectivism; exteriority; city; country
interiority utopianism, , , –, , , , ,
sublime, , ,  , , , ; and anxiety, n,
suicide, , , , –,  –; and economics, ; and
Su Tong, , n, , , , everyday life, , ; failure of,
, , n, , , , . ; in Good Morning, Beijing, ,
 Index 379

, ; and interiority, –; in Williams, Raymond, n, , ,
Maoist era, , , , , – , , n, –
, ; and melancholy, , ; World War II, , , , , . See
in ‘‘My Native Land,’’ , –, ; also Sino-Japanese War
in native-land literature, , ; and Wu Jianren, , , , , , ;
postrevolutionary culture, , , criticism of new fiction, ; on pas-
; and residual modernism, , sion (qing), –; on role of the
, ; and revolution, , ; novel, . Works: Ashes After the
and subjectivism, ; and writing Catastrophe (Jie yu hui), n; Passion
. See also heroic, the Transformed (Qing bian), n, n;
Strange Things Witnessed in the Past
Twenty Years (Ershi nian mudu zhi
Viladas, Pilar, 
guai xianzhuang), . See also The
virtue: in ‘‘Diary of a Madman,’’ ; in
Sea of Regret
The Sea of Regret, , , –, , 
visuality: in Nineteen Thirty-four Es-
Xiao Ye (Hsiao Yeh), , , , ,
capes, –; in The Town of Olive in
; The Town of Olive in  (Gan-
, –
lan zhen ), –, –, ,

Wang Anyi, , , n, –, , Xie Fei, –, , , n, ,
, –, , , . Works: . See also Black Snow
‘‘Baotown’’ (Xiao Baozhuang), n, Xin Xiaoshuo. See New Fiction
; Love and Sentiment in Hong Kong
(Xianggang de qing yu ai), –, Yao Wenyuan, , n
n, n, ; Our Uncle’s Story Yin Bansheng, 
(Shushu de gushi), –, –; The Young Generation (Nianqing de
Records and Fiction (Jishi yu xugou), yidai), , n, –, –;
n, n; Sadness for the Pacific ‘‘bourgeois quagmire’’ in, –,
(Shangxin Taipingyang), , , , ; climax of, –; family as
– symbolic order in, –; historical
Wang, Ban, n,  context of, –; indebtedness in,
Wang, Chi-chen, –, n ; and urban youth, –. See
Wang, David Der-wei, , n, n, also lyrical age
n, n Yu Dafu, , , –; ‘‘Blue
Wang Guowei,  Smoke,’’ 
Wang, Jing, n, n, – Yu Hua, –, –, , ,
Wang Meng, n,  . Works: ‘‘Classical Love’’ (Gu-
Wang Shiqing, ,  dian aiqing), ; ‘‘Narrative of
Wang Shuo, ,  Death’’ (Siwang xushu), n; 
Wang Zheng and Xiao Hua, , n, (Yijiubaliu nian), –; ‘‘One Kind
n of Reality’’ (Xianshi yizhong), ;
Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, – ‘‘On the Road at Age Eighteen’’
380 Index

Yu Hua (continued ) Zhang Minquan, 

(Shibasui chumen yuanxing), – Zhang Nuanxin, , –, . See
, n, ; ‘‘This Story Is Dedi- also Good Morning, Beijing
cated to a Girl Named Yang Liu’’ Zhang, Xudong, n, n, n, 
(Ciwen xiangei shaonü Yang Liu), Zhang Yimou: Ju Dou, n; Raise
–; ‘‘This World of Clouds’’ the Red Lantern, n; Red Sorghum
(Shishi ru yan),  (Hong gaoliang), 
Zhang Yiwu, 
Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang), –, Zhou Zuoren, –
, , ; Love in a Fallen City
(Qingcheng zhi lian), 
This page intentionally left blank
Xiaobing Tang is an Associate Professor in Modern Chinese Literature, Univer-
sity of Chicago. He is the author of Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of
Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao (Stanford, ). He edited
the following books: (with Stephen Snyder) In Pursuit of Contemporary East Asian
Culture (Westview, ); (with Liu Kang) Politics, Ideology, and Literary Discourse
in Modern China: Theoretical Interventions and Cultural Critique (Duke, ).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tang, Xiaobing
Chinese modern : the heroic and quotidian / Xiaobing Tang.
p. cm. — (Post-contemporary interventions)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
 --- (alk. paper). —  --- (pbk. : alk. paper)
. Popular culture—China. . Chinese literature—th century—History and
criticism. . Postmodernism—China. I. Title. II. Series.
. 
'.—dc -
Plate  (fig. ). Photograph, Bringing You the Colors of the World, Giordano ().
Plate  (fig. ). Oil, Dream Girl, by Qiu Tao ().