Constructing girlhood: Female adolescence, depression and the making of a female tradition in modern Chinese literature

Front. Lit. Stud. China 2011, 5(3): 321–349 DOI 10.1007/s11702-011-0132-z

Received December 10, 2010

XU Lanjun ( ) Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117570, Singapore E-mail: [email protected]

RESEARCH ARTICLE

XU Lanjun

Constructing Girlhood: Female Adolescence, Depression and the Making of a Female Tradition in Modern Chinese Literature

© Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag 2011

Abstract This essay examines stories of girls coming of age as depicted by modern Chinese women writers—in particular to the pervasive ness of a certain melancholy in their treatment of the subject. This study offers a vantage point from which it will be possible to survey writers ranging from Ding Ling and Xiao Hong in the 1930s and 1940s to Wang Anyi and Tie Ning in the 1980s and 1990s. As a rule, these seemingly trivial coming-of-age stories are set in the whirlwind of historical change through deep sorrow and grief, not the transcendent aesthetics of the sublime as suggested by grand historical narratives. Mainly based on the close-reading of three literary texts including Xiao Hong’s novel Tales of Hulan River (1941), Tie Ning’s novel The Rose Door (1988), and Wang Anyi’s novel Reality and Fiction (1993), the author argues that the recurrent figure of the “melancholic girl” functions as an important trope in the writing of modern Chinese women writers and that it also serves to reveal various problematic aspects of women’s emancipation in modern China; at the same time, this essay also reveals how melancholy—in the psychological and clinical sense—serves to legitimize a certain degree of ego-formation in its female sufferers. Keywords girlhood, melancholy, historical narrative, women writers, modern Chinese literature

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Introduction

Many narratives centering on young female protagonists are to be found in modern and contemporary Chinese literature. In this essay, however, I wish to examine stories of girls coming of age as depicted by modern Chinese women writers—in particular to the pervasiveness of a certain melancholy in their treatment of the subject. I hope to offer a vantage point from which it will be possible to survey writers ranging from Ding Ling 丁玲 (1904–86) and Xiao Hong 萧红 (1911–42) in the 1930s and 1940s to Wang Anyi 王安忆 (1954–) and Tie Ning 铁凝 (1957–) in the 1980s and 1990s. As a rule, these seemingly trivial coming-of-age stories are set in the whirlwind of historical change through deep sorrow and grief, not the transcendent aesthetics of the sublime as suggested by grand historical narratives. I contend that this recurrent figure of the “melancholic girl” functions as an important trope in the writing of modern Chinese women writers and that it also serves to reveal various problematic aspects of women’s emancipation in modern China; at the same time, I am interested in ascertaining how melancholy—in the psychological and clinical sense—serves to legitimize a certain degree of ego-formation in its female sufferers.

Before delving further into the nature of the “melancholy girl,” it will of course first be necessary to clarify the notion of “girl” as well as its relation to “melancholy” in the Chinese context. Here, I define “girlhood” as Catherine Driscoll does, as “a stage to be passed through on the way to something else—mostly to ‘being a woman.’”1 As for the word “melancholy,” I will admit to some reservations at the idea of using it to translate the Chinese expressions “youyu” 忧郁 or “youshang” 忧伤 (as used of young female characters in the texts I examine here), especially since according to some recent feminist critics,2 melancholy in the Western tradition is usually gendered as male, just as depression and hysteria are often considered to be “women’s diseases,” to be essentially feminine disorders. On the other hand, the Chinese expressions “youyu” and “youshang” are not as explicitly gendered as the concept of “melancholy” is in Western tradition; at the same time, as will be seen in my study of the figural formation of “melancholy girls” in the works of modern Chinese women writers, melancholy is treated more as a subjective mood3 in their writings. The texts I discuss here center on young female characters who exhibit the symptoms Freud considered to be characteristic of the melancholic: “profoundly painful dejection, abrogation of interest in the outside world, loss of 1 Driscoll, 2002, 2. 2 The two typical examples are Luce Irigaray and Kaja Silverman. They have a debate over whether women are incapable of melancholia or are constitutively melancholic. 3 For a detailed discussion of the transformation of the meaning of these related terms such as “melancholy,” “melancholia” and “mourning,” see Jennifer Radden, 1987, 231–50.

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the capacity to love, inhibition of all activity, and a lowering of the self regarding feelings to a degree that finds utterance in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment.”4 At the same time, melancholia is more of a pathological fixation on an imaginary sense of loss that has been repressed deeply in the subject’s unconscious (as opposed to mourning, the conscious working through of a concrete loss).

More importantly, in addition to his significant emphasis on loss, Freud also connects narcissism to melancholia. “[I]n the clinical picture of melancholia,” he says, “dissatisfaction with the ego on moral grounds is the most outstanding feature.” Such remarks remind us of the importance of moral dissatisfaction or heightened self-criticism in the melancholy subject. An object-loss was usually transformed into an ego-loss and “the conflict between the ego and the loved person into a cleavage between the critical activity of the ego and the ego as altered by identification.”5

I will examine Xiao Hong’s novel Hulanhe zhuang 呼兰河传 (Tales of Hulan River, 1941), Wang Anyi’s novel Jishi yu xugou 纪实与虚构 (Reality and fiction, 1993) and Tie Ning’s novel Meigui men 玫瑰门 (The rose door, 1988); all three feature first-person narration for the most part and are usually considered to be autobiographical in nature. This tendency to adapt childhood reminiscences into coming-of-age stories, incidentally, is an interestingly pervasive phenomenon in the work of modern Chinese women writers. On the other hand, it must be emphasized that not all of the texts selected here belong completely to the realm of mere memoir. In Xiao Hong’s novel Tales of Hulan River, the unhappy little girl’s story only begins in the middle of the text. Wang Anyi’s novel Reality and Fiction is constructed around the interaction of a girl on the cusp of maturity in socialist Shanghai and an ancient family legend passed down on her mother’s side of the family. In the case of Tie Ning’s novel The Rose Door, the little girl’s painful coming of age functions chiefly as a framework around which to organize her grandmother’s dramatic life. In other words, the girl’s story is usually told in conjunction with other stories, which define the meanings of the sadness of these melancholy girls.

These three novels also give us a significant perspective into these writers’ views of history and into their own gender identity. The role of melancholy in the works of modern Chinese male writers has been extensively studied in the past;6 4 Freud, 1957, 153. 5 Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” see Peter Gay, ed., 1989. 6 For instance, Lee Leo Ou-fan, 1976; Denton, Kirk A., 1998. About the role of emotionality in the narrative representation and use of new women in modern Chinese literature, Jin Feng (2004) uses the term “the politics of emotionality” to examine the various modes with which May Fourth intellectuals deployed emotions in both their critical essays and narratives for the generation and control of symbolic capital, but also the consequences of such discursive practices. She especially reminds us that male writers used the “feminine emotionality” against women writers “for the purpose of marking themselves as masculine modern subjects.”

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in contrast, I would like to ask what role modern women play in the Chinese culture of melancholy. I would also like to push the first question further by asking if there is perhaps a kind of tradition behind this tendency of modern female Chinese writers to depict their own losses and depressions via the unhappy girls of their fiction.

Ding Ling and Zhang Ailing: Between “Melancholy Girls” and New Women in 1930s and 1940s

It is hard to pinpoint the exact time in which melancholic girlhood first made its appearance in the works of modern Chinese women writers, but the 1930s definitely marked an important stage to examine the politics of melancholic girls in modern Chinese literature. There was of course a historical reason for this phenomenon; as a result of female emancipation during the May Fourth period, there was an increase in the number of middle-class women or upper-class women who were able to obtain employment independent of their families.7 These “new women” became career women: teachers, writers, doctors, and revolutionaries; some of them even went abroad to study in the West, leaving their families behind. By the 1930s and 1940s, many women of the previous two generations (roughly defined as Late Qing and May Fourth), who had pursued independence and freedom outside the patriarchal family structure, were already married with children. The conflicts between their maternal role and their professional careers would eventually give rise to the stories of their unhappy daughters that pervade the work of women writers of this period.

Ding Ling’s short story “Guonian” 过年 (Chinese new year) is an interesting example of this type of narrative, depicting as it does the subtle psychological changes that take place in Xiao Han 小菡, a seven-year-old girl, when her mother, preoccupied with her own career, leaves her in the household of her maternal uncle; the little girl then proceeds to move from anxious anticipation of her mother’s return during the Chinese Lunar New Year through joy at the reunion with her mother to profound sadness when she realizes that this reunion will be an all too short-lived one. The emotional needs of this little girl and her deep anxiety about the transience of her reunion with her mother affects her self-identity.

Ding Ling’s story, then, was something of a challenge to the modern post-May Fourth agenda of Chinese women’s liberation. After “Nora” walks out of the conjugal domicile, she appears to be asking, what of the children left behind by 7 Wang Lingzhen discusses this issue in her chapter “Mother-daughter Relationship in Revolutionary Literature” in her book Personal Matters: Women’s Autobiographical Practice in Twentieth-century China, 2004.


her? Little attention has been paid to the issue thus far. Lu Xun answered in this way: “There are only two ways for Nora after she goes out of her husband’s family. One is to become corrupted, and the other one is to return back to her husband’s home again.”8 However, in the 1930s and 1940s, as the “new women” of the May Fourth period became mothers, this issue began to make its way into the foreground. Ding Ling’s short story was only the first in a long line of texts by women writers questioning the effects of female emancipation via the melancholia of their little-girl protagonists.

The motive of the “melancholic girl” is however by no means only represented by the type to be found in Ding Ling’s short story; another type in this period is to be found in the self-representations of Lu Yin 庐隐 (1898–1934) and Zhang Ailing 张爱玲 (1920–95) as a precocious and unhappy girl. Lu Yin zizhuan 庐隐

自传 (Autobiography of Lu Yin) was published in 1934 in Shanghai five months after the author’s death. About Lu Yin’s autobiography, Wang Jing already has done a very good close-reading of the text and emphasizes Lu’s focus on the literary aspects of her life, “enhancing writing as the matrix on which she builds her identity.”9 On Lu Yin’s chronological narration of her childhood, she incisively argues that it “heal(s) Lu Yin’s early trauma, giving her the chance to narrate her past would by means of highlighting her development as a writer. In the meantime, focusing on her childhood and then her writing career served as effective strategies to hush up the feminine and domestic excesses invalidated ideologically in the 1930s.”10

In 1939, Zhang Ailing, at the age of eighteen, wrote an article entitled “Tiancai meng” 天才梦 (The dream of a genius), which won honorable mention in a competition organized by The Western Wind magazine in Shanghai. At the beginning of this essay, she describes herself as “a very peculiar girl, regarded as a genius since I was small, the sole aim of my life is the development of that genius. But once the fantasies of childhood had slowly faded, I realized that all I had was the dream of being a genius—the eccentricity of genius and nothing more. The world forgives Wagner his excesses, but I do not think that it will forgive me.”11 Zhang was very conscious of her literary talent. She describes how she eloquently recited poetry from the Tang dynasty at three, began to compose her first family tragedy at seven, and started a Utopian novel entitled “Kuailecun” 快乐村 (Happy village) at eight. However, despite her talent in writing, she was, by her own account, an “idiot” without any ability to communicate with others in everyday life, solitary and often depressed. Now, children who show distinctive talents surprising for one their age are usually 8 Lu Xun, 1953, 65. 9 Wang M. Jing, 2008, 116. 10 Ibid., 117. 11 Zhang, Ailing, 1996, 25.

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referred to in Chinese as “zaoshu” 早熟 (Precocious). Given the words Zhang, in contrast, employed—words suggestive of pathology, like “guaipi” 乖僻 (Peculiar), “kuangxiang” 狂想 (Fantasies), and “guguai” 古怪 (eccentricity) —it is hard not to observe the familiar melancholic symptoms of despair and self-depreciation as described by Freud.12

From this essay, it may also be seen that Zhang’s youthful melancholy derived in no small part from the question of whether she is to develop into a “modern lady” or a “old-style talented girl”—a typical issue for most girls in the early twentieth century, though her family background only made this conflict more dramatic. Zhang Ailing had grown up in a declining though once influential family in the Shanghai International Settlement; her paternal grandfather Zhang Peilun 张佩纶 (1848−1903) was a son-in-law to Li Hongzhang 李鸿章 (1823− 1901). Her family was the typical mixture of modern Western and traditional Chinese lifestyles. Her mother, who had left for France to study the arts after her husband took a concubine (Zhang Ailing herself was only five at the time), was a typical independent “new woman,” who held independence and freedom to be more important than her children, whereas her father was a typical old-school conservative gentry, an opium addict who liked to read old novels. Her parents eventually divorced and Zhang Ailing remained at first with her father while her mother was still abroad. Under his influence, Zhang learned a lot about Chinese classical novels such as Dream of Red Chamber, Journey to the West, Tale of Water Margin, Three Kingdoms, and Chin Pin Mei. When she was fourteen years old, Zhang Ailing finished a novel entitled Honglou mengyan 红楼梦魇 (Modern dream of the Red Chamber), which was a parody of the traditional narrative mode of Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies Fiction; her father helped her to set up the titles of the chapters and as such could be said to have tried to encourage her development into the “traditional talented girl.”

In contrast, Zhang’s mother, especially after her return from France, attempted to groom her into a decent lady with strong social skills who could function in the modern city. In “The Dream of a Genius,” Zhang writes:

In school I had freedom to develop. My confidence grew stronger every day, until I turned sixteen, when my mother came back from France, and surveyed the daughter whom she had not seen for many years. ‘I regret having nursed you so carefully when you had typhoid,’ she said to me. “I’d rather see you die than watch you cause yourself so much suffering.”

12 Freudianism was introduced to China at the same time that Darwinism, Marxism, pragmatism, and other western philosophies began to influence Chinese intellectuals early in the beginning of the twentieth-century. For a detailed discussions about the psychoanalysis in China, please see Zhang Jingyuan, 1992.


My mother gave me two years to learn how to cope. She taught me to cook; wash clothes with powered soap; practice good posture when walking; take my cue from other people; draw the blinds after turning on the lights; study my expressions in the mirror; and never, if lacking a gift for comedy, try to tell jokes.

In terms of the common sense needed for ordinary social interaction, I clearly am an astonishingly stupid person. My two-year plan was a failed experiment. Other than disrupting my mental composure, my mother’s heartfelt warnings had absolutely no effect on me.13

From these confessional passages, it is obvious that Zhang Ailing viewed her inability to become the modern lady of her mother’s expectations as a fundamental flaw in herself. The essay ends with a delicate trope conveying her grief at being so flawed: “I can’t, not even for a single day, conquer all those little, teeth-gnashing frustrations. Life is a gorgeous gown, swarming with lice.” As such, while Zhang was conscious of—indeed, even proud of—her writing talent, she was also sufficiently humiliated by her failure to live up her mother’s expectations to have called herself an “astonishingly stupid person.” In other words, her melancholy self-writing is a complicated mixture of narcissism and self-devaluation—a critical exposure of the conflict faced by most girls at this transitional moment between the old and the new.

Xiao Hong’s Tales of Hulan River (1940): Is Mood a Language?

If Zhang Ailing’s self-representation as a melancholic little girl lies more in her realization of the existence of sadness as a modern clinical symptom as well as her self-conscious linkage of her literary talent and melancholy, then Xiao Hong’s contribution lies mainly in turning melancholy into a particular language or narrative structure. Her autobiographical novel Hulanhe zhuan 呼兰河传 (Tales of Hulan River) has as narrator a melancholic little girl (something of an innovation at the time), and I am particularly interested in the relationship between this novel’s “immature” structure and its childlike language (by which I mean its deviance from the normal poetic structure of a novel), and the melancholic mood of this novel. The narrative structure of the whole novel favors emotional intensification over plot development, which sometimes results in the interruption of or abstention from rational principles. I will argue that Xiao Hong’s childlike language is not only the logical corollary of its having a child as narrator, but also a result of the novel’s melancholic mood, which could be more 13 Zhang Ailing, 1996, 25.

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easily accessed via childlike language. Xiao Hong began to write this novel in 1937, when she was still living in

Wuhan; she finished it in 1940 in Japanese-occupied Hong Kong, dying a year later at the age of thirty-one. In simple yet highly poetically beautiful language, she recounted her childhood memories, unlike most of her contemporaries, who occupied themselves with writing of serious wartime events. In comparison with Xiao Hong’s novella Shengsichang 生死场 ( The field of life and death), this novel received less attention. As such, many have wondered why Xiao Hong should have, in this time of national crisis, chosen to turn her back on contemporary events and retreat into her memories of her childhood in her small northern hometown. About the Xiao Hong of this time, Ding Ling writes:

At that time I hoped she could come to Yan’an, where she could stay quiet for a while and devote herself to writing. The exhaustion caused by traveling during the war seemed to make her not sure where she could arrange her life. She might get more used to a peaceful and delicate life than me. Yan’an might not be a good enough place where she could execute a long-term writing plan, but during the war, it actually could help her get out of the trivial details of everyday life and plan something grander. Moreover, there is a kind of vigor, which could make her healthier. But Xiao Hong eventually chose to leave for the southern part. Until now I still regret that I gave too few suggestions on her life style. It might have been due to the fact that we didn’t know each other very well and our life styles were also very different.”14

Tales of Hulan River required a long process of writing which was parallel to Xiao Hong’s travelling as a homeless wandering women during the national crisis. The writing of this novel can be traced back to the period when she was in Japan in 1936, where she wrote “Jiazu yiwai de ren” 家族以外的人 (The family outsider), which became the basis for chapter 6 of Tales of Hulan River. Upon returning to China, she briefly moved between Wuhan, Shanxi, and Shaanxi. Also at this period, Xiao Jun 萧军 left her to join a teacher’s movement in North China. She thereafter returned to Wuhan with Duanmu Hongliang 端木蕻良, who soon became her lover. After Wuhan fell in 1938, Xiao Hong travelled alone to the wartime provisional capital of Chongqing through Guilin to meet up with Duanmu. At that time, she was pregnant and one of her Japanese friend writes about her situation of the time like this: “Whenever I think of Xiao Hong, who was pregnant and moved slowly in the crowds of refugees at the dock of Wuchang in the rain, with her hands full of umbrella and also luggages. Duanmu 14 Ding Ling, 2001, 181–82.


Hongliang was besides her but didn’t help her anything. She had to stare at her own big belly with hatred and contempt.”15 After she and Duanmu Hongliang moved to Hong Kong in 1940, the novel was first published in the local newspaper Constellation Daily between September and December 1940 before it was published in book form in 1942. To a certain degree, we can say that the episodic narrative of the novel reflects the fragmented nature of the nation and the unstableness of the diasporic life of the author as a writer in exile during the war.

In his study of Xiao Hong, Howard Goldblatt writes of the content of this novel: “This work is divided into seven chapters, each of which tells its own story or paints a separate picture, but all are connected by a common locale, a common time, and the observations of the child-narrator.”16 The first two chapters describe for the most part the people inhabiting her hometown and various local traditional festivals by way of introduction. In the following two chapters, the author then nostalgically recounts the time she spent as a child in the rear garden and, especially, the days she spent with her grandfather. The other parts of this novel consist of individual stories of various people, who are outside of her family but closely related or not related, including the abused child-bride in the neighborhood and two old servants, You Erbo and Feng Waizuizi 冯歪嘴子. Loneliness was to plague her throughout her life, the loneliness of a child raised in a family where love was in short supply and an environment where there were few playmates available. In this novel, the first “I” narrator is a little lonely girl of eight years old, neglected by her parents.

In the novel, the “I” is always repeating three actions: “running,” “jumping” and “shouting.” To a certain degree, this kind of action is a reflection of unnamed anxiety and nervousness. During that time, the adult Xiao Hong was also imbued with different pressures such as the heath deterioration, the war, and isolation from the mainstream anti-Japanese movements. And the loneliness and frustration from such pressures are very similar to the loneliness of that little “I” in the rear garden, which may partly explain why Xiao Hong chose the little girl as the narrator. In the entire story, besides loud laughter, the only voice that belongs to the little girl is “screaming.” The author details an episode about how she studies poetry with her grandfather:

I couldn’t have told you what the words meant, but they sounded good when I said them, so I shouted them gleefully along with Grand-dad and I was always louder than he was.

15 Hasegawa Teru, 2001, 190. 16 Goldblatt, 1976, 107.

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Whenever I recited poems, I could be heard in every room in the house, and since Granddad was afraid I’d injure my voice with all that shouting, he often said:

“You are going to blow the roof right off the house!” I’d smile at his little joke for a moment, but before long I was shouting again. In the evening, I shouted, as always, until Mother scared me by saying that

if I kept it up she’d spank me. Even Granddad said: “No one recites poetry like you do. That isn’t ‘reciting’ poetry, it’s just a lot

of screaming.” But there was no way I could change my habit of screaming, and if I

couldn’t shout, what was the use in reciting them anyway?17

Of the many indicators suggesting melancholy, such as loneliness, silence, inactivity, and withdrawal from society, loneliness plays perhaps the greatest role in the work of Xiao Hong. In 1946, Mao Dun wrote his famous article “Preface to Tales of Hulan River” (which became the standard reading of this novel), in which he interpreted the whole novel in light of this loneliness: “In December 1940, a year or so before she died and while her health was still fairly good, Hsiao Hung finished her last book, Tales of Hulan River. But even then she was lonely. Moreover, Tales of Hulan River shows us what a lonely childhood she had. Read the brief epilogue to the book and you sense Hsiao Hung’s loneliness as she recalled her lonely childhood days.”18 From these words, we can see Mao Dun not only emphasized the loneliness that Xiao Hong felt when she was writing this novel, but also implied that it was a kind of fate for her that plagued her whole life through making a connection between the adult Xiao Hong’s emotional frustration and her loneliness when she was a little girl.

It is exactly this sadness that connects the adult author and her narrator and that allows us to interpret the lonely little girl as the mirror image of the adult Xiao Hong. In the history of modern Chinese literature, the latter has typically been characterized as a girl who never grew up into womanhood or motherhood. In her short life, she had several unsuccessful relationships, including her dramatic love affairs with the famous writers Xiao Jun and Duanmu Hongliang. She was pregnant two times, but neither survived. All these tragic experiences partly explain the frustration and the deep sadness to be found in her writings. Also, apart from the oppressive patriarchal order against which she was to react throughout her whole life, her own personality played a significant role in the tragedy of her life. As Xiao Jun, her main lover, said: “Xiao Hong doesn’t have 17 Xiao Hong, Tales of Hulan River, see The Field of Life and Death and Tales of Hulan River, translated by Howard Goldblatt and Ellen Yeung, 1979, 173. 18 Mao Dun, 1979, 284.


the ability to be a good wife, but I have also never asked that of her.”19 When Xiao Hong was nine, she lost her mother; her father was a cold, distant figure. She fared no better in her relationship with her stepmother. Goldblatt writes, “In ‘The Family Outsider,’ a long story written along the lines of Tales of Hulan River, the author admits that she was afraid of her mother, who often hit and even threw stones at her. Elsewhere she has written laconically that her mother was a woman of ‘mean words and nasty looks.”20 In other words, she had never experienced the mother-daughter bond in her personal life.

The central figure in Xiao Hong’s Tales of Hulan River—as in her personal life—was her grandfather. Notably, the most important space connecting her and her grandfather is the rear garden of their house. In Chinese tradition, the rear garden represents a marginal space, in contrast with the principal rooms in the house. It is also usually seen as a place where one may be inspired with longing for nature, freedom and even desire, as evinced in so many Chinese traditional romances—a typical example being the famous Ming dynasty masterpiece by playwright Tang Xianzhu, The Peony Pavilion. Xiao Hong posits the rear garden as an opposite to the father’s home, the dreariness of which she repeatedly asserts in chapter 4: “My home was a dreary one,” she says at one point, and “the compound in which I lived was a dreary one” at another. She also often uses the word “Huangliang” 荒凉, which is a term more spatial than temporal. The garden, in contrast, is the only happy world for this lonely little girl: “The garden was bright and cheerful, deriving its freshness and beauty from all the reds and the greens…. This is how it went, day in and day out: Granddad, the garden, and me—the inseparable trio.”21 The rear garden, then, represents her state of togetherness with her grandfather, as opposed to the house itself, which is dominated by her cold father.

One might push this argument further and see the little garden as representing the “archaic” origins of language for Xiao Hong. The garden, which testifies to the happiness of her childhood, is not just the environment of her childhood, but also the place where her sense of being a daughter originated from. The garden can be interpreted as an ersatz for the caring maternal space that she lacked in her life. Her happiness with her grandfather, too, can be read as an alternative to the mother-daughter union. In the article “Zufu sile de shihou” 祖父死了的时候 (When grandfather died), she talks about the death of her grandfather, which invoked in turn the death of her birth mother:

If I lost my grandfather, I would have lost the most important person in my life; it would be as though he was taking away from me all the “love” and

19 Xiao Jun, “Cemian” 侧面 (One side), see Xiao Hong, 1996, 302. 20 Goldblatt, 1976, 17. 21 Xiao Hong, 1979, 178–86.

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“warmth” in the world. My heart felt like it was tied up by a string or entangled in an iron thread. I connected this to the moment when my mother died.22

Strictly speaking, the melancholic image of this little girl itself is quite vague in the novel. Its significance manifests itself more in the narrative structure, especially in the interaction between the “loose” narrative structure and the melancholic mood. According to Zhao Yuan 赵园 (1945–), “The ‘loneliness’ is not an object for the author, but is a kind of ambiguous feeling, which permeates every corner of the whole text, like mist. Therefore, we can consider the ‘loneliness’ to be a coherent worldview.”23 After Tales of Hulan River was published, its fractured structure was noted unfavorably by more than one critic. Howard Goldblatt has explained that “[o]ther Communist critics reverse the priorities by labeling the novel a major step backwards, a literary fiasco, and further indication of the author’s almost total separation from the masses and the ‘struggle.’”24 In reply to these criticisms, Mao Dun wrote:

Some readers may not regard Tales of the Hulan River as a novel. They may argue: No single thread runs through the whole book, the stories and characters in it are disconnected fragments, the work is not an integrated whole. Others may look upon The Hulan River as an autobiography of an unorthodox sort. To my mind, the fact that it is not an orthodox autobiography is all to the good and gives it an added interest. And we may counter: The main point is not that this work is not a novel in the strict sense, but that it has other qualities more ‘attractive’ than those to be found in the average novel. It is a narrative poem, a colorful genre painting, and a haunting song.25

From these words, we can see that Mao Dun, despite being a communist critic, was very appreciative of Xiao Hong’s “immature” structure, defining it as a perfect combination of “a narrative poem, a colorful genre painting, and a haunting song.” What interests me most is Xiao Hong’s deviance from the normal definition of the novel and the relationship between this atypical structure and the mood of melancholy in the novel. The mutual infiltration of two narrative genres coupled with the fractured structure of her works bespeaks the historical juncture during which she was caught.

Julia Kristeva’s concept of “poetic structure,” can elucidate the linkage 22 Xiao Hong, 2009, 171. 23 Zhao Yuan, 1987, 213–52. 24 Goldblatt, 1976, 106. 25 Mao Dun, 1979, 288. According to Howard Goldblatt, the original version to this preface, dated August 1946, appeared only in the 1947 Shanghai edition of the novel.


between the melancholic mood of the novel and its poetic narrative structure. According to Kristeva,

The melancholy thing interrupts desiring metonymy, just as it prevents working out the loss within the psyche. How can one approach the place I have referred to? Sublimation is an attempt to do so: through melody, rhythm, semantic polyvalence, the so-called poetic form, which decomposes and recomposes signs, is the sole “container” seemingly able to secure an uncertain but adequate hold over the Thing.”26

In other words, in Kristeva’s understanding, it is only through the poetic form that loss can be more easily accessed.

In Tales of Hulan River, especially in the depiction of the rear garden, the sentences are short, the structure is simple, and most of them are narrated through the perceptions of a child:

When the flowers bloomed, it was as though they were awakening from a slumber. When the birds flew, it was as though they were climbing up to the heavens. When the insects chirped it was as though they were talking to each other. All these things were alive. There was no limit to their abilities, and whatever they wanted to do, they had the power to do it. They did as they willed in complete freedom.

If the pumpkins felt like climbing up the trellis they did so, and if they felt like climbing up the side of the house they did so. If the cucumber plant wanted to bring forth an abortive flower it did so; if it wanted to bear a cucumber it did so; if it wanted none of these, then not a single cucumber nor a single flower appeared, and no one would question its decision. The cornstalks grew as tall as they wished, and if they felt like reaching up to the heavens, no one would give it a second thought. Butterflies flew wherever they desired; one moment there would be a pair of yellow butterflies flying over from the other side of the wall, the next moment as a solitary white butterfly flying over from this side of the wall. Whose house had they just left? Whose house were they flying to? Even the sun didn’t know the answers to such questions.27

In these paragraphs, it can be seen that the author often uses repetitive sentence structures, as for example in the line “If the pumpkins felt like climbing up the trellis they did so, and if they felt like climbing up the side of the house they did so.” This repetitiveness is, to be sure, rather apt given the age of the narrator; on 26 Kristeva, 1989, 14. 27 Xiao Hong, 1979, 180.

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the other hand, it also vividly represents the loneliness and ennui of this unhappy girl. Deprived of familial love and care, she spends her time in the rear garden watching the butterflies and the vegetables. Furthermore, in the above paragraphs, there is after each sentence the use of the Chinese word le (了), which implies that something has been done or belongs to the past: “When the flowers bloomed it was as though they were awakening from a slumber. When the birds flew it was as though they were climbing up to the heavens.” The constant use of the word le provides a certain rhythm to the prose, it is true, but more importantly, this word also suggests the adult author’s sadness over the gradual but inescapable loss of childhood.

While this novel may be based on Xiao Hong’s childhood memories, it must also be noted that she was struggling with illness and impending death when she was writing it. As such, death (an extreme form of loss, after all) permeates the whole novel. In the first two chapters, when the author describes seasons, festivals and cultural customs in the small town of Hulan, she gives a good deal of attention to the ghost festival, and when she introduces the local shops, she gives a detailed portrayal of a shop dealing in the paper offerings that are traditionally burnt for the dead. Goldblatt, then, was able to say that these two chapters are “more about ghosts and goblins than about people, more a tale of superstition and fear than the interaction of human beings.”28 The following chapters also reveal—through the eyes of the little girl—the barbarous side of life, with an account of a ritual killing of a child-bride by her in-laws. Certainly, her deep grief comes from her granddad’s death:

The little town of Hulan River, in earlier days it was where my granddad lived, and now it is where he is buried. When I was born granddad was already in his sixties, and by the time I was four or five he was nearly seventy. As I approached the age of twenty granddad was almost eighty; soon after he reached the age of eighty granddad was dead.

The butterflies, grasshoppers, and dragonflies that were in the garden may still return year after year; or perhaps the place is now deserted.

The former masters of that rear garden are now gone. The old master is dead; the younger one has fled.29

The whole story ends with a series of deaths, not only that of her grandfather, but also those of Second Uncle Yu, the old cook and probably other neighbors. More importantly, she mentions the possibility that the rear garden, her old refuge, might now be “deserted.” 28 Goldblatt, 1976, 107. 29 Ibid., 275.


Years of Sadness: Melancholic Girls after 1976

Tie Ning’s novel The Rose Door: A War between “Little Women” and “Old Women” Only in the late 1980s and 1990s did contemporary women writers like Tie Ning and Wang Anyi begin to organize memories of their childhood (which took place, for the most part, in the 1960s) around the unhappy coming-of-age story of a little girl. I choose these two writers because they shared a similar background and both began their own career of writing by relating the stories of girls growing up in 1950s–1970s. Also, they played an important role in setting up the paradigm of contemporary women’s writing.

Tie Ning, an important contemporary Chinese woman writer (albeit one neglected by scholars so far) born in Beijing in 1957, wrote a series of stories on girlhood (or more precisely, on adolescent females) in the early 1980s. The girls in Tie Ning’s stories are usually pure of heart but undergo a series of frustrations and failures in the adult world. She often pays particular attention to the bonds between women, for instance sisterly ties or the affinities that the little girls have with their grandmothers or other female relatives. Her little girls also tend to grow up in families which often have been broken up by political agents.

It is safe to say that the first one of these paradigmatic adolescent girls of this period is the pure countryside girl in Tie Ning’s 1982 short story “O, xiangxue” 哦, 香雪 (Oh, aroma snow) which tells the story of a village girl who has a strong yearning for urban modernity. In 1984, Tie Ning finished another important story of girlhood, the novella Meiyou niukou de hongchenshan 没有纽

扣的红衬衫 (The red shirt without buttons). This relates the story of an outspoken and pretty adolescent girl living in a middle-sized city and focuses on her frustrations and disappointments in the adult world, revolving as it does around how An Ran, the sixteen-year-old middle-school student, tries her best to win the “Three Merits Student” award and the responses of her schoolteachers, her family members and her classmates to her. These stories of adolescent girls make the term “adolescent girl” visible, and these images are usually represented in a positive tone. As a rule, they are reflective of the 1980s enlightenment discourse and their promotion of human subjectivity and freedom.

Tie Ning’s 1988 novel The Rose Door marks an important stage in her writings of girlhood. In contrast to her earlier positive images of girls in the early 1980s, this novel focuses on the evil struggle taking place between several generations of women during 1949–1976, though it is, in terms of the narrative structure, the little girl Meimei’s coming-of-age story. Meimei’s parents, busy with their political activities, send her to Beijing to live with her grandmother.

This novel is an extended and also more complicated version of Tie Ning’s

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1984 short story “Yinmiao” 银庙 (The silver temple). They have in common some similar characters and plotlines. This short story basically relates the experiences of a little girl living with her paternal grandmother in Beijing. The main story is how a cat becomes a focal point of conflict between the bourgeois grandmother and the revolutionary family who occupies the northern part of her grandmother’s house for political reasons. One day, the grandmother’s cat sneaks into the neighbors’ kitchen and steals a chicken from their pot. The neighbors, whose hostility to the grandmother is long-standing, takes the opportunity to beat the cat almost to death—an assault witnessed by the little girl, who is frightened by the incident.

Apart from this implicit commentary on the violence, the story also relates the development of its protagonist’s sexual consciousness in that particular historical moment. In the second part of the story, this cat turns feral and the little girl frequently sees him wandering around on the roof of her grandmother’s house. One night, the little girl sees this cat together with a group of other strays on the roof, participating (as it seems to her) in some kind of carnival, with their loud screeching and crazed dancing. She also sees the cat mating, which spectacle proves to be a horrifying and traumatic one for her. The story ends with the adult protagonist revisiting her grandmother’s house together with her six-year-old daughter some fifteen years after in the company. Tie Ning reused the plot of this story in her first novel and the scene of the cat being beaten also makes an appearance in the novel The Rose Door (though the owner of the cat plays a different role here). In the novel, too, the relationship between historical violence and the little girl’s coming of age is explored and elaborated upon. However, the figure of the grandmother, who was not a main character in the short story, plays a much more important role in the novel. She also interestingly moves from the paternal side of the girl’s family, as in the short story, to the maternal side in the novel. This change, while small, has its own significance; this shift means that the novel focuses exclusively on the maternal side of the girl’s family, making it, as it were, the history of a matrilineage.

The Rose Door also focuses for the most part on its female characters. Tie Ning also defines the whole story as a rosy war among women. Both grandmother and granddaughter are categorized as “women” by Tie despite the disparity in their ages. This suggests that young Meimei 眉眉 and Zhuxi 竹西, the middle-aged daughter-in-law of the grandmother, can both be seen as representing different stages of the grandmother’s life. At the same time, the author’s use of “an old woman” and “a little woman” to describe the relationship between Meimei and her grandmother serves to de-emphasize the blood relationship between them, which is not entirely surprising since the familial framework serves primarily as a pretext to juxtapose the various women with each other and does not, in itself, undergo much scrutiny.


Young Meimei’s coming of age is characterized by a series of traumatic shocks. In other words, melancholy is, for Meimei, more defined as a state of fear. The first major trauma for Meimei is the death of Gu Ba, the sister-in-law of her grandmother. Gu Ba abandons her female identity and begins to cross-dress after she is abandoned by her husband on her wedding night because of her abnormally big chin. Her cat steals a piece of meat from her revolutionary neighbor’s kitchen, and as revenge, the revolutionary neighbor gets a group of Red Guards to kill her cat and beat Gu Ba almost to death. This violence culminates in the gory moment when the Red Guards insert a long iron stick into Gu Ba’s vagina to satisfy their curiosity as to whether Gu Ba is a woman or a man; Meimei is left to watch Gu Ba die covered in blood and with the iron stick still stuck between her legs. Another major trauma comes from an episode involving her grandmother’s younger sister. At the beginning of the story, her great-aunt, with her grey hair and bosom, is considered by Meimei to look more grandmotherly than her actual grandmother, who seems too youthful-looking and pretty for the role. However, when Meimei meets her again during the period of the Cultural Revolution, she is terrified and appalled to see that her great-aunt’s “grandmotherly” breasts have been disfigured by her own son, who had thrown hot oil on her chest for political reasons. All these traumatic experiences inspire in Meimei a profound fear of her gender identity.

While Meimei’s melancholy can be attributed in part to the pervasive violence of the period, it is also occasioned by her oppressive grandmother, who often uses her as a tool for her own purposes. Their relationship begins unpromisingly: “Their first meeting was not happy at all.… She was born in 1957 and her grandmother was almost fifty years older than her. She could not understand why this person made her so unhappy and she even consciously wanted to do something to annoy her. That year, she was five years old.”30 Later, Meimei is considered by her grandmother to be a political “burden”; she also seems to relish pushing her granddaughter into various embarrassing situations. The most egregious example of this is the episode where Meimei catches her aunt Zhuxi and Daqi, the revolutionary neighbor’s eldest son, in flagrante delicto. The grandmother, who is trying to catch the adulterous couple in the act, does not hesitate to arrange for Meimei to witness the whole thing, even though she knows that Meimei has something of a crush on Daqi. The girl, of course, is terribly hurt and finally runs away from her grandmother’s house—which even then does not completely terminate her painful relationship with her grandmother. At the very end of the novel, when Su Mei (the adult Meimei) becomes a famous painter, the grandmother continues to spy on her and makes trouble for her, in an apparent effort to reassert control over her life. 30 Tie Ning, 1991, 9.

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In contrast to the affectionate grandfather in Tales of Hulan River, the grandmother in The Rose Door is an evil woman who takes pleasure in hurting others. In Meimei’s eyes, she is too pretty and young as a grandmother: “In front of her five-year-old self, the grandmother seemed very tall and pretty. Her white and exquisite face, her rosy lips, and her still mostly black hair all made her look younger than her age.”31

In the novel, Si Qiwen 司绮纹, the grandmother, is a composite of mother and femme fatale. Her ardent participation in various political movements turns out to be a failure. In her youth, Si Qiwen was a “new woman,” active in the May Fourth movement and enamored of a radical student leader, who could well have, like the protagonist Lin Daojing 林道静 in Qingchun zhi ge 青春之歌 (The song of youth) by Yang Mo 杨沫 ,32 escaped from her feudal family and developed into a revolutionary member under the guidance of her communist lover. However, this never actually happens. After spending a night with her, Si Qiwen’s lover disappears and only shows up fifty years later. Eventually, she is forced by her parents to marry a rascal who is consistently unfaithful to her and leaves her alone at home most of the time—not that his sporadic reappearances are any more comforting, given that he tends to bring with him things like venereal diseases and enormous debts. This pattern of personal failure characterizes Si Qiwen’s political aspirations as well; she actively participates in various political movements after 1949, but is always marginalized because of her ambiguous family background. As such, The Rose Door is not only an account of Meimei’s coming-of-age traumas, but also can be seen as an account of her grandmother’s own traumatic coming of age. Meimei is, in this sense, closely related to Si Qiwen, which is arguably the most significant aspect of this novel.

In the novel, Meimei may well be a melancholy being, but her grandmother is also an abject being, abandoned by her husband and foiled by patriarchal society as she is. Here I would like to use Julia Kristeva’s concept of “abjection” to interpret this figure. In Powers of Horror,33 working from Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger, Kristeva develops a notion of abjection that has been very useful in diagnosing the dynamics of oppression. She describes abjection as an operation of the psyche through which subjective identity is constituted by excluding anything that threatens one’s own borders. Si Qiwen, rejected by the 31 Ibid. 32 Yang Mo’s novel The Song of Youth was published in January 1958. About the story, as Mao Dun said in “How to Evaluate The Song of Youth”: “The novel describes how a young woman, under the historical conditions of a previous age, changes her thinking—from simply rebelling against the feudalist family to participate in the revolutionary movement led by the Communist Party of China,” 209. 33 Kristeva, 1982.


patriarchal culture but also threatening to it, can be read as such an abject being. According to Kristeva, abjection is a state of crisis, of self-disgust and disgust with others. It is not so much the physically repulsive but that which “disturbs identity, system, order.” Si Qiwen’s revenge against patriarchal society consists of sneaking into her father-in-law’s bedroom one night and forcing him to have sex with her. However, even though she is a victim of the patriarchal order, Si Qiwen is also the villain of the piece, with her sadistic pleasure in tormenting others, as seen in her treatment of the innocent Meimei.

Despite the enmity between the grandmother and the granddaughter, there are moments of détente between the “old woman” and the “little woman,” which tend to occur when they notice their resemblance to each other. When the grandmother gets into political trouble because of her neighbor, Meimei realizes that her grandmother is not as strong as she looks, and develops (at least for a short while) a modicum of sympathy for her. There is also the episode where the grandmother carefully applies make-up to the little girl’s face, shows her a mirror, and tells her: “You look the way I did when I was eighteen years old.” The grandmother’s words scare the little girl and force her to see herself from a totally new perspective:

The words of her grandmother push Meimei to go beyond her parents and compare herself with the grandmother. This shocks her: she looks exactly like her grandmother. She looks not only like her grandmother as an eighteen-year-old, but also the grandmother of the present. The only differences between them are the grandmother’s white hair and her wrinkles. Perhaps she actually also has the same white hair and wrinkles but she is not willing to prove that. This is not the fourteen-year-old Meimei, but the eighteen-year-old Si Qiwen. This is the combination of two Si Qiwens in the mirror. Meimei tries to push her grandmother away but the grandmother holds her shoulders all the more tightly.34

The author, then, denies any difference in age or appearance between the little girl and her grandmother; they are one with each other, which may point to a certain pessimism regarding the fate of women: only if they are the same gender, there is no difference between women. This does not make any sense at all.

Toward the end of the story, the grandmother is paralyzed and bedridden for five years and her body gradually declines. Su Mei 苏眉 administers euthanasia to her grandmother by stifling her with a towel and, in a later conversation with Zhuxi (who detests the grandmother and keeps her alive only in order to prolong her suffering), claims that she killed her grandmother because she loved her and 34 Tie Ning, 1991, 402.

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did not want to see her live like an animal. The death of the grandmother does not mean an end to the war between women, however. Ultimately, Su Mei also becomes a mother and has a daughter, who has a mysterious moon-like scar on her forehead, very similar that of Su Mei’s grandmother, which was caused by her husband, who hit her head with a bottle upon discovering her attempts to divorce him and start a new life with another man. The scar as such symbolizes both the grandmother’s strong will in her struggle against the patriarchal order and her failure. Significantly, the novel ends with a cryptic question: “Does she love her?” The identity of “her” is kept ambiguous; it could refer to the grandmother, but also might refer to the newborn daughter. Quite possibly, for the author, there is no difference between them in any case, just as there was no difference between Su Mei and her grandmother. This final question bespeaks the author’s despair over the fate of women in a patriarchal society: as abject beings, all the women share and repeat the same failure from one generation to another without any possibility of redemption.

Wang Anyi’s Stories of Girls: “Without Family Myths, We Are All Orphans” While The Rose Door still uses the little girl Meimei’s story as a frame for the retelling of her grandmother’s life, Wang Anyi’s stories of girlhood focus more exclusively on the girls themselves. In various short stories and novels published in the 1980s and 1990s, Wang Anyi portrays the enormous emotional difficulties that disrupt the seemingly smooth course of female development. Quite a few of them focus on the coming-of-age experiences of a little girl in the city of Shanghai, including the 1978–82 series of Wenwen, the 1984 novel 69 jie chuzhongsheng 69 届初中生 (The middle-school graduates of 1969) the 1987 novel Liushui sanshizhang 流水三十章 (Thirty chapters like the water flow), the 1992 novel Jishi yu xugou 纪实与虚构 (Reality and fiction), the 1995 novella Youshang de niandai 忧伤的年代 (Years of sadness), and the novel Changhenge 长恨歌 (Ballad of eternal sorrow), to name just a few examples. Two basic questions pervade Wang’s writings: Who am I? Where did I come from? If we define the Bildungsroman as an account of a linear progressive development toward a coherent identity and masterful selfhood, then Wang Anyi’s writings can be said to have something of the anti-Bildungsroman to them, insofar as her heroines’ developments are characterized by frustration and failure. The process of growing up female is, in her work, defined by psychological oppression, disorientation, and the absence of a happy ending.

Most of Wang Anyi’s heroines are unhappy. The word gu’er 孤儿 (orphan), too, crops up often in her work; according to her, everyone in the city is an “orphan” without origins. So for her, looking for origins is the most significant thing. In 1985, Wang Anyi finished a short story titled “Wo de laili” 我的来历


(My origins), which begins with the question “Where did I come from? ”: When I was little, others used to tease me by saying that I was picked up from a dustbin. At first, I didn’t believe it, but gradually became unsure, then angry, and I ended by crying. From this we can see the importance of origins. When I was a little girl, I became frightened when I was not sure of my history. Therefore, everyone should know his own origins. I always wonder: where did I come from?35

In this story, the first narrator embarks on a search for her origins. Her research on the maternal side of the family tree revolves around her difficulties locating an old building built by her maternal great-grandfather, which was later sold by her grandfather; the father’s side is accounted for through the visit of various relatives who had earlier emigrated to Singapore. If we compare this piece with Wang Anyi’s novel Reality and Fiction, we find that many significant details regarding the mother’s side develop into the novel’s part on the ancestors but go further in terms of the time. As Wu Liang 吴亮, a famous contemporary literary critic, said of this novel: “You mourn over the loss of those peoples and events. The loneliness of being marginal and the desperate efforts to recall the lost world, race, kinship and love are also represented in your writing, which gets to the essence of the literature.”36 In this story, the search for origins can be interpreted on three levels: the mother-daughter relationship, the identity of Shanghai itself, and the old family myth.

Of all these autobiographical writings, the novel Reality and Fiction: A Shanghai Story was notable for its melancholic style, which is usually considered as a sign of the maturity of Wang Anyi’s writing in the 1990s.37 Per David Wang:

There are three main characteristics of Wang Anyi’s writings: the examination of history, especially the relationship between the communist revolution and individuals; the self-consciousness of the women body and ideology; the recasting of the Haipai style. These three characteristics appear here and there in Wang’s writings. But not until the 1993 novel Reality and Fiction, these three did not create a proper combination.38

35 See Wang Anyi, 1986, 100. 36 Wu Liang, Wang Anyi, 1996, 325. 37 These years, quite a few critics began to pay attention to the melancholy mood in Wang Anyi’s writings of the 1990s. For example, Tang Xiaobing, 2000, 316–40; and Zhang Xudong, 2000, 349–87; Wang Ban, 2004, 124–41. 38 Wu Liang, Wang Anyi, 1996, 325.

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This novel combines the narrative characteristics of Searching-for-Roots literature in the late 1980s and the coming-of-age story; its value resides precisely in this interaction between the two narrative modes. Compared with the pure Searching-for-Roots story, this novel has one more theme, namely that of its protagonist’s upbringing in the socialist 1950s and 1960s. On the other hand, it also distinguishes itself from the typical coming-of-age story by its insertion of the mythical maternal lineage into the text. The narrative structure of this novel stands out in the œuvre of Wang Anyi as well, with its parallel development of two themes. The odd-numbered chapters mainly focus on the girl’s painful coming of age; the even-numbered chapters relate the saga of her maternal ancestors, which stretches back two thousand years. The story of the ancestors is derived from the narrator’s mother’s surname “Ru” 茹. The author traces it back to the clans of Mongolia and develops it into a story of how the family rises and falls in history, which is a willful imagination based on whatever is associated with her mother’s surname.

The girl’s loneliness is represented through the depiction of various mother-daughter conflicts common in the socialist era of the 1950s and 1960s. At the beginning of the story, the narrator tells us that she is an immigrant to Shanghai and that her parents are communist cadres. Their social circle consists mostly of “comrades,” and is defined by political commonalities rather than traditional kinships. Her mother, always in a tension with this city, prohibits the little girl from exploring the older parts of the city. The girl feels especially ashamed by her lack of opportunity to experience rituals like funerals and traditional wedding banquets, unlike children who come from a big old family. The little girl treats this lack as a fundamental flaw of her family: “I can’t name this big flaw of my family, which is so difficult. It makes me feel disappointed with my family, which is one of the most important reasons for my loneliness.”39 The mother, though born in this city, consciously tries to ignore prior relationships and behaves like a stranger in the city, severing most connections with her relatives and forbidding her daughter to associate with children who are not from the “comrade” families or to speak the Shanghai dialect. The girl’s figurative orphan hood, then, is induced by politics, or, more precisely, her mother’s identity as a “comrade.”

The absence of maternal care in her own life pushes this little girl to come up with alternative origins for herself in the form of the family myth: “Without family myths, we are all orphans, restless and anxious. Our life is plunged into utter darkness on one side and obscured in misty remoteness on the other.”40 It is her loneliness that gives rise to her meditation: “My meditation is the memory of 39 Wang Anyi, 1993, 9. 40 Ibid., 51.


my blood, which is the gift my ancestors left to me. My meditation is so active, flowing out like water. My meditation is like the maternal space… all my ancestors become alive through it, which is exactly the same as my life rusticates in their blood. We are linked together and cannot be separated.”41 She refers to the remote sources of the past and concocts a myth in which her family originates from a small nomadic tribe which later merges into the famed Mongolian nations. As Schiesari says of Freud, “The very nature of the melancholic was to be that of a self-split against itself, fleeing the social into a perpetual dialogue with its own Imaginary, to use Lacan’s term.”42 One can, then, read the family myth as the little girl’s imaginary,43 a kind of ideal self with a glorious past. The discourse of melancholia is valorized in this novel insofar as the individual frustration of the little girl is translated into the heroic suffering of the male heroes, which constructs the situation of lack as a blessed one. Though the family myth is supposedly from her mother’s side, it is still composed of men rather than women. From the first ancestor Gumulv, to Tamerlane and Genghis Khan of the Mongolian steppes, they are all male. Wang Anyi’s efforts to overcome her sadness can be evinced by her attributing to the melancholic a superior quality via the family myth; on the other hand, these efforts turn out to be a failure. In the second part of the story, the author tells of how her ancestral branch declines and, in the Ming dynasty, is banished to the southern part of China (they had originally come from the north). Her ancestors become “humble folk” and do cheap and trivial things.44 At the end of the novel, the family myth and the girl’s own story are integrated in the account of the adult narrator visiting her maternal grandmother’s hometown to look for the old building. She eventually finds out that her mother’s family is a broken one. Her grandfather was a wastrel who squandered his money and abandoned his family. As her mother’s family members either die or leave home, her mother ends up in the orphanage in Shanghai. In other words, the girl’s efforts to overcome her loneliness only result in the confirmation that she is homeless.

Reality and Fiction, however, is also a tale of the city of Shanghai, insofar as it centers on the alienation of an immigrant who lives there; after all, the story begins with the claim that “in Shanghai, we are like outsiders.” In the introduction, Wang Anyi mentions the various titles she had originally come up with for the novel, ranging from the earlier “Shanghai gushi” 上海故事 (Shanghai story) and “Rujiarou” 茹家溇 (The river of Ru’s family) to the later “Shi” 诗 (Poem), “Xungen” 寻根 (Searching for roots), “Chuangzao shijie” 创 41 Ibid., 154. 42 Schiesari, 1992, 8. 43 According to Lacan, the imaginary is the fundamental narcissism by which the human subject creates fantasy images of both himself and his ideal object of desire. 44 Wang Anyi, 1993, 252.

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造世界 (Creating a world), and “Chuangshiji” 创世纪 (Anno mundi). The author’s difficulty in finding a title for this novel may imply her uncertainty as to her main purpose, but it also speaks of her wish for her novel to be as all-encompassing as possible. From these titles, too, it can be seen that the author treats her story as a kind of search for the identity of Shanghai. In this novel, the account of 1950s Shanghai unfolds along with the story of the girl. Her loneliness stems in large part from her difficulties in forming an intimate relationship with the city of Shanghai, difficulties which, as mentioned earlier, are closely bound up with her family background:

Our parents took us to the theater to watch the movies about the battles or the projects of the new constructions, go to the Zoo, or go to a certain hall to join a party with other “comrades.” But they never took me to the places like the Old Town, the Great World, and Jing’an Temple. For me, these places contain magical things, which are the secrets of this city.45

Through the girl’s story, we can see that the city was, after 1949, gradually dominated by second-generation immigrants. Considered outsiders by the native city dwellers, they belonged to their circle of comrades and grew up speaking Mandarin Chinese rather than the Shanghai dialects. A new communist Shanghai also developed in conjunction with this generation. It is also worth noting that the girl seems to be the only one in the story to have felt ashamed of her background and to be so preoccupied with looking for fragments of old Shanghai in this seemingly new city.

Wang Anyi was to write more fiction centering on Shanghai, including the 1995 novel Ballad of Eternal Sorrow, the 2000 novel Fu Ping 富萍 and the most recent 2002 novel Shangzhong hongling xiazhong ou 上种红菱下种藕 (Growing caltrop in the upper layer and lotus at the bottom in a pond). The 1995 novel Ballad of Eternal Sorrow is the most famous of these works; it deals with the life story of Wang Qiyao 王琦瑶, former Miss Shanghai, spanning pre-1949 Shanghai to 1980s. This story is usually read as an allegory of the city of Shanghai in the twentieth century. The novel Fu Ping mainly focuses on a special group of immigrants in Shanghai, nurses, and is set mostly in the 1960s. It is often interpreted as Wang Anyi’s allegorical story of Shanghai city of the early PRC. Growing Caltrop in the Upper Layer and Lotus at the Bottom in a Pond tells the story of a little girl in the outskirts of Shanghai in the contemporary period. As Zhang Xudong 张旭东 said, when he read the novel Ballad of Eternal Sorrow, “In all of Wang’s writings about Shanghai, the reader can sense the constant work of a nostalgia and a melancholy that weave together the tight 45 Ibid., 8.


allegorical space.” He also points out that, in Wang Anyi, nostalgia and melancholy, while seemingly directed toward a past associated with the unfulfilled dreams of bourgeois modernity, are ultimately derived unconsciously from the “mourning for a more recent past shaped by socialist modernity as both a historical project and a form of life.”46 If we follow this line of thought, Reality and Fiction, as the earliest of Wang Anyi’s stories about Shanghai, can be taken as a highly significant insight into the emotional structure of the melancholy mood that characterizes these stories in general. The juxtaposition of different discourses (such as those of myth, family history, socialist urban life and youthful development) and its immediate depictions of the author’s own experience as a little girl in Shanghai provide a critical exposure of the problems created by the communist reorganization of Shanghai city.

In the novel, melancholy, as the most “subjective” moment, can then be shown to be itself a mode of intuition that is intimately linked to concrete socioeconomic conditions in that period. As a member of the first generation to have grown up in communist Shanghai, Wang Anyi provides an important record of family history of that time. In the story, the narrator uses the word “orphan” to describe both her and her mother, though for different reasons. The little girl’s mother is an orphan who grew up in an orphanage in Shanghai and consciously cuts off any connection with her distant relatives in Shanghai after she joins the communist revolution: “She is always willing to look ahead and never mourns over the past. People like that have very practical attitudes to life but are useless when it comes to cultural accumulation. They do not leave any legacy to the younger generations, which is also characteristic of orphans; others abandon her and she also leaves others behind.”47 In contrast to her mother who is proud of her identity as an orphan, the narrator always has a sense of shame at being a daughter from a revolutionary family without origins.

Conclusion

Compared with their male counterparts, who used youhuan yishi 忧患意识 (conscious of tribulation) to claim for themselves positions as subjects of Chinese modernization, these Chinese women writers turned their fixation on personal sadness mainly through telling memories of their own unhappy childhood. These images of melancholic girls in the fiction of modern Chinese women writers translated their authors’ experience in and of historical time into a temperamental process, which becomes affected and eventually presentable. The difficult negotiations and performances of melancholy girls are crucial to the 46 Zhang Xudong, 2000, 383. 47 Wang Anyi, 1993, 44.

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modern understanding of female subjectivity, insofar as they often figure as a definitive failure of subjectification (of coming to be a coherent self-aware subject), something that is particularly evident in The Rose Door, where the melancholy girl Meimei provides a focal point to question the fate of women in the patriarchal society. Noticeably, in these texts, mother-daughter relationships were often posited as the source of their sadness; in all these stories discussed above, the mother usually exists as an absence or an uncomfortable being, which makes melancholy girlhood something of a comment on the emancipation of women in modern China.

All of the above writers, whether Xiao Hong in the 1940s, or Wang Anyi and Tie Ning in the 1980s and 1990s, translated melancholia into a certain particular narrative structure. Xiao Hong’s “immature narrative structure” serves as a parallel to her own identity as an “incomplete woman,” that is, always a girl in process or in transition with regard to the dominant ideas of womanhood. In Wang Anyi’s novel Reality and Fiction, the dialogue between the reality of socialist Shanghai and the fanciful family myth also creates a complicated structure to name and overcome the modern sadness over the origin. Tie Ning’s novel The Rose Door employs the little girl’s story as a framework for the retelling of her grandmother’s life and combines the first narrator, the second narrator and the third narrator together to create a dialogue between the adult Su Mei and the little Meimei. Generally speaking, none of these structures are coherent and linear; instead, they are full of ruptures and repetitions. It might as such be worth asking: is the melancholy, as a subjective mood, a kind of language structure in itself?

Finally, as far as stories of melancholic girls in the writings of Chinese women writers are concerned, it will be seen that the term female adolescence has become highly visible in the late twentieth-century—as “a marker of immature and malleable identity, and as a publicly preeminent image of desirability.”48 Tie Ning and Wang Anyi can be considered as pioneers in this trend. Around 1995–96, China witnessed a rising feminist tide, which is usually correlated with the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing that took place in September 1995. At the same time, there appeared another generation of Chinese women writers after Tie Ning and Wang Anyi, of which two main representatives are Chen Ran 陈染 (1962–) and Lin Bai 林白 (1958–), who attracted much attention with their debuts. They are popularly referred to as “privatized/personalized writer” because of their exploration of the personal affair and in particular of sexuality. Lin Bai’s novel Yigeren de zhanzheng 一个人的战争 (A self at war) and Chen Ran’s novel Siren shenghuo 私人生活 (A private life) are both autobiographical novels, which still follow the model of the unhappy coming- 48 Driscoll, 2002, 2.


of-age story; however, “in contemporary China, where the market and consumerism have reconfigured social relationships, altered the role of literature, and promoted the private and emotional sense of self, the affective mode of existence resulting from particular historical experience and childhood memories has become a major motivating force for self-oriented writing.”49 Inescapably these private self-stories became a part of market consumption, and “sex is a major topic, and privacy is the book’s very trademark.”50

In 1996, there appeared one new group of women writers entitled “After the 1970s,” which referred mainly to writers born after the 1970s, including Wei Hui卫慧 (1973–), Mian Mian 棉棉 (1970–), Zhao Bo 赵波 (1971–), Zhou Jieru 周洁茹 (1976–) and others. This was heralded by columns like “Those Born in the 1970s,” “The Writers who were born in the 1970s,” “The writings of those born in the 1970s,” which appeared in contemporary Chinese literary journals such as Furong 芙蓉 , Shanhua 山花 and Changcheng 长城 . Their writings were published together with artistic photographs of themselves, which led to the appellation of “Pretty Women Writers”; their work was considered to be “body writing.” In contrast to the “melancholy girls” discussed above, these writers usually called themselves as “bad girls” and also applied this term to the girls in their writings. As we said in the beginning of this essay, there is an important aspect of moral dissatisfaction or heightened self-criticism in the melancholic subject, but this seems to disappear in the writings of the group of “after the 1970s.” To a large degree, then, the changes in representations of girlhood that take one from “melancholy girls” to “bad girls” should be read as reflecting a move towards ego-formation on the part of twentieth-century Chinese women writers.

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Documents

Constructing girlhood: Female adolescence, depression and the making of a female tradition in modern Chinese literature