A Voice Silenced and Heard: Negotiations and Transactions Across Boundaries in Ling Shuhua's English Memoirs
2012; Penn State University Press; Volume: 49; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/complitstudies.49.4.0585
ISSN1528-4212
Autores Tópico(s)Chinese history and philosophy
ResumoAmong all Chinese women writers of the 1920s and 1930s, Ling Shuhua (1900–1990) is probably one of the most frequently anthologized. However, due to a marginalization of modern Chinese women writers in the study of Chinese literature, up to now scholars have not paid sufficient attention to her writings. Aggravating the difficulty of producing a comprehensive assessment of her writing career is Ling's use of both Chinese and English in her writings, her low-profile and peripatetic lifestyle, and the antileftist political stand of her husband, Chen Yuan (1896–1970), who wrote under the pen name Xiying. Though recent years have witnessed the republication of many of her works in China, in particular her short stories, few scholars have paid attention to her 1953 English memoirs Ancient Melodies (published under the name Su Hua Ling Chen). In fact, these memoirs did not appear in China and in Chinese until 1994 when the Overseas Chinese Press in Beijing published them. It is sad and ironic that decades after she disappeared from China's literary scene, she had to rely on her identity as an overseas Chinese to secure the publication of her memoirs in her homeland.In the English-speaking world, the past two decades have seen only a few English studies on Ling Shuhua. These include Rey Chow's 1988 essay “Virtuous Transactions: A Reading of Three Stories by Ling Shuhua” and half of a chapter in Shu-mei Shih's 2001 monograph The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937.Chow's essay is inspiring in that it provides us with a new way of looking at modern Chinese women writers and their very act of writing. At the outset of her essay, Chow attacks commonly adopted criteria for evaluating women writers, formulated by patricentric critics. According to these critics, Chinese women writers of the 1920s and 1930s lack “the balance, the mature detachment, the finality, that make for great works of literature.” Chow relentlessly repudiates gender-blind criteria like these, which require that a writer “transcend the circumstances of his or her own life into a vision that is larger and only thus meaningful” and by which Chinese women writers are predetermined to be failures.1 In instituting these criteria, patricentric critics have substantially overlooked the powerful presence of patriarchy in China up to the first half of the twentieth century as well as the invisible ideological imprints it has left on women's psychic life. Under this patriarchal code, women are assigned the role of domesticity and self-sacrifice, which, Chow argues, should be “seen as a predominant, if not the only, paradigm under which many Chinese women's thinking operates.”2In addressing the question of gender and Ling Shuhua's fiction, Chow's essay has, on the one hand, called our attention to the (local) patriarchal milieu in which Chinese women writers of the 1920s and '30s found themselves. On the other hand, it also makes the case for examining Chinese women from other perspectives. Since China was semicolonized by Western imperialists throughout the first half of the twentieth century, to examine Ling and her writing more thoroughly and comprehensively requires that we historicize and contextualize her writing by viewing it through the lens of imperialism, colonization, and semicolonization.From a gendered perspective, Chow examines three of Ling Shuhua's short stories illustrating Chinese women's “virtuous transactions” with patriarchy. In Chow's view, Ling's choice of ostensibly nonthreatening subjects such as women and their emotional life betrays her acceptance of a contract as a woman writer with patriarchy. However, on the other hand, through her subtle exposing and critiquing of patriarchal oppression of women in her writings, Ling breaks the binding contract, which translates into a subversion of patriarchy.Picking up from where existing scholarship leaves off, this article focus on Ling's memoirs, both on how they came to be and on their profeminist standpoint. I contend that far from a conventionally labeled narrow-minded “boudoir writer” (“guixiu pai zuojia”), Ling was a self-conscious Chinese woman writer and that her writings are the product of tensions and negotiations between the traditional and the modern, between the Chinese and the West, and between male patriarchy and feminist consciousness. For the purpose of this article, I concentrate on her English memoirs and their making because they best showcase her negotiation with a variety of hegemonic discourses in patriarchal China.In her chapter on Ling, Shih relates in detail the story behind the making of Ling's memoirs under the patronage of Virginia Woolf (1882-1941).3 According to Shih, Ling was first inspired by Woolf's famous feminist treatise, A Room of One's Own (1929). Following that, her decision to correspond with Woolf was catalyzed by her encounter in Wuhan in the mid-1930s with Woolf's nephew Julian Bell (1908–1937), as well as Christopher Isherwood (1904–1986) and W. H. Auden (1907–1973). It turned out that “Julian Bell would introduce Ling to Woolf, and Isherwood once carried Ling's gifts to Woolf.”4 Ling and Woolf began corresponding in late 1937 or early 1938.After reading Ling's letter about the difficulty of living and working in remote Sichuan during the Sino-Japanese War, Woolf encouraged Ling to write an account of her life in English and offered to read and criticize her writing.5 Though they never met, they continued writing to each other, Ling sending installments of her autobiography and Woolf commenting on them, until just before Woolf's death in 1941. With help from Woolf's novelist and poet friend Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962), the manuscript of Ling's memoirs was revised and published in 1953 in London by the publishing house of the Bloomsbury group, Hogarth Press, with an introduction by Sackville-West.6Through this case of transnational correspondence between an English feminist modernist writer and a Chinese woman writer, Shih attempts to show “how Ling's Third World feminist position may have required a process of voluntary self-Orientalization in order to cohere with Woolf's First World feminist position.”7 Shih notes that “Ling must have seen Woolf's mentorship in the writing of an autobiography in English as flattering, at a time when the adoration of metropolitan Western culture was taken for granted in semi-colonial China, and when Woolf in particular had been hailed as a modernist master and widely read by Chinese writers and critics.”8 Examining “Third World feminism's self-positioning vis-à-vis the West,” Shih concludes that Ling's feminism “was largely constructed on an asymmetrical relationship with Virginia Woolf in the writing of Ancient Melodies.”9In Shih's view, since Ling was already an established writer in China when she first corresponded with Woolf, “there was no particular reason why she should want to or need to write her autobiography in English.”10 Thus, to Shih, the making of Ancient Melodies is obviously an instance of their “asymmetrical relation.” Although Shih's observations are sharp, her tone is somewhat judgmental, which may be partly because Shih did not have access to certain related texts and partly because she underestimates the constraints under which Ling was writing. On the other hand, Shih's self-identity as a female scholar of “third-world” origin may lead her to posit an asymmetrical relationship between a “first-world” and a “third-world” feminist.The use of the term “third-world woman” has been problematized ever since the 1990s by many critics of postcolonialism. First, as Leela Gandhi puts it, the “ethnocentric myopia” of the term “disregards the enormous material and historical differences between ‘real’ third-world women,” and second, “the composite ‘Othering’ of the ‘third-world woman’ becomes a self-consolidating project for Western feminism.”11 It is worth pointing out, however, that this practice of oversimplifying the “third-world woman” is not restricted to “first-world” feminist critics. On the other hand, the practice of “othering” can also be bilateral. By claiming her identity as a “third-world woman,” a “third-world” feminist (living either in the East or the West) can also “other” and homogenize the “first-world woman” to consummate another type of self-consolidation for a different political or cultural agenda. In juxtaposing Ling's feminism to Western feminism, Shih has, to some extent, lost sight of Ling's agency in the formation of her profeminist subjectivity. For a clearer picture of Ling's consciousness as a Chinese woman writer, we should turn to her early interaction with her mentor, Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967).During the May Fourth period, two decades after Liang Qichao first introduced the question of women's liberation in modern China, the woman question or funü wenti became a heated topic. One of the most powerful essays on the subject was Zhou Zuoren's 1922 article, “Women and Literature.” In it, Zhou claims that modern Chinese women need to “take advantage of their own creative abilities to express their true feelings and thoughts and to eradicate age-old misunderstandings and misgivings about women.”12As Amy Dooling and Kristina Torgeson note, although Zhou's views seem theoretically naïve from the standpoint of late twentieth-century feminist criticism, they were “crucial in both legitimating women's writing in the 1920s and informing the ways in which it was publicly received.”13 As if responding to Zhou's article, Ling wrote to him in 1923, not long after his installation as chair of the Department of Modern Literature at Yenching (Yanjing) University, where Ling was a junior majoring in foreign literature. In the letter, Ling expresses her wish to have Zhou as her mentor: 這幾年來，我立定主意作一個將來的女作家，所以用功在中、 英、日三國文上。但是想找一位指導者，能通此三種文字的很 少。先生已經知道的，燕大教員除您以外，實在找不出一個 來，所以我大著膽，請問先生肯收我作一個學生不？中國女 作家也太少了，所以中國女子思想及生活從來沒有叫世界知道 的，對於人類貢獻來說，未免太不負責任了。先生意下如何？ 亦願意援手女同胞這類事業嗎？14(For several years I have been determined to be a woman writer in the future; therefore, I have spent a lot of time studying the Chinese, English, and Japanese languages. I am looking forward to finding a mentor, but people who are versed in all the three languages are hard to find, and as you may also know, you are the only one of such among all the faculty members at Yenching. Therefore, I have taken the liberty to write and to request to be your student. Chinese women writers are really too rare, and that is why the thoughts and life of Chinese women were never known to the world. This is really a neglect of responsibility to human beings. What is your opinion about this [situation]? Would you please lend a hand and help Chinese women compatriots with the enterprise [of contributing to humanity?]) It is noteworthy that Ling, a college student then, already identified herself as a speaker for Chinese women and committed herself to passing on their voices and presenting their “thoughts and life” to the world.Zhou replied ardently to Ling, so in her second letter, she asked Zhou to give her guidance on the new system of Chinese punctuation. With the help of Zhou, Ling made her literary debut in January 1924 with her first short story, which was published in the renowned literary journal Chenbao fukan (Morning Post Supplementary) in Beijing. Zhou thus became her first mentor in modern literature. However, when she recalled her writing career in her old age, Ling only mentioned Xu Zhimo's (1897–1931) literary mentorship. She noted, “而我對於文藝的心得，大半都是由他培植的”(“As for my knowledge/gains in literature and arts, it was mostly cultivated by him [Xu Zhimo]”). She hardly gave Zhou any credit, let alone acknowledged Zhou's role in her writing career.15 It is hard to know exactly why. One reason may be the political conflict between her husband, Chen Yuan, and Zhou Zuoren, generated by literary debates between the factions of two literary societies, the leftist Yusi (Thread of Talk) and the more conservative Xiandai pinglun (Contemporary Review), in the 1920s. But a more compelling reason for their estrangement may be found in Zhou's notion of women's emancipation.Although as one of the masterminds of May Fourth literature, Zhou had been an active spokesman for women's liberation and their participation in creative writing since the early 1920s, a closer look reveals a nationalist overtone in his notion of women's emancipation. In his 1926 article titled “Xin Zhongguo de nüzi” (“Women of New China”), Zhou aims to kindle women's revolutionary consciousness: 我並不想抹殺男子，以為他們不配負救國之責，但他們之不十 分有生氣，不十分從容而堅忍，那是無可諱言的。… … 但我 確信中國革命如要成功，女子之力必得占其大半。有革命思想 的男子容易為母妻所羈留，有革命思想的女子不特可以自己去 救國，還可以成為革命家之妻， 革命家之母。這就是她們的力 量之所在。16(Though I don't want to obliterate men's agency and claim that they are not qualified to shoulder the responsibility of rescuing the nation, it is indisputable that they are not so vigorous, composed and enduring [as women]…. I believe that if we want to see Chinese revolution succeed, half of the support should be solicited from women. Revolutionary men are inclined to be detained by their mothers and wives, but women with a revolutionary consciousness will not only voluntarily fight to save their country but can also be wives and mothers to [male] revolutionaries. That is where their strength lies.) It is clear that, for Zhou Zuoren, the purpose of women's education is to serve the nationalist cause. This betrays his real motivation in promoting women's education.In another essay concerning funü wenti (“the woman question”) written in June 1928, Zhou holds that “我覺得中國婦女運動之不發達，實由於女 子之缺少自覺，而其原因又在於思想之不通徹，故思想改革實為現今 最應重視的一件事” (“I think the reason the feminist movement does not flourish in China can in fact be attributed to a lack of female consciousness, and the fundamental reason for that is because they [women] are not yet enlightened. Therefore, ideological remolding is an issue that deserves our fullest attention”).17 Zhou calls on the intelligentsia to shoulder the responsibility of awakening the masses (including women). Zhou's notion of women's liberation, like that of Liang Qichao, smacks of male-centered nationalism. For both of them the ultimate point of educating women and raising their consciousness was so that they could contribute to the nationalist undertaking. Zhou's nationalist discourse is, in Partha Chatterjee's words, “finally a discourse about women; women do not speak here.”18 Since what Ling seeks is a discourse not only about women but also of women and for women, there was an insurmountable gap between their stances. This may help explain why Zhou and Ling went their separate ways. To compensate for this loss, she had to seek a new mentor, one who shared her understanding of women's liberation entailed. Thus, it is plausible to speculate that after reading A Room of One's Own, Ling wrote to Woolf specifically in the hope that Woolf would offer to mentor her.The background to Ancient Melodies shows that Ling's consciousness as a woman writer played a role in her estrangement from Zhou Zuoren and in her embrace of Woolf's “patronage.” In the following I delve into Ling's memoirs themselves to illuminate her consciousness as a profeminist Chinese woman writer.In the opening chapter of Ancient Melodies, Ling relates a scene she witnessed when she was a small child. The bodyguard of the mayor's residence where her family lived took her out for a walk every morning, and one day they ran across a “red-coat man,” that is, a convict, being carried to the execution site.19 The man on the wagon, who was to be executed soon, sang proudly and loudly alone, and “people followed and watched him earnestly; from time to time they shouted ‘Bravo!’ as one shouts to an actor in the theatre.”20 An allegorical reading of this episode suggests a parallel with a very well-known anecdote of Lu Xun's (1881–1936). As he recalled in 1922, in one of his classes, an instructor showed some pictures from the Russo-Japanese War of Chinese spectators emotionlessly watching the beheading of their fellow countrymen by Japanese soldiers.21 In the book, there are more episodes like this, which betray Ling's nationalist concern; however, it is the Chinese women (primarily her mothers, sisters, and herself), their thoughts, their families and social life, that she endeavors to depict. In this way, her memoirs are similar to her short stories, where, as observed by C. T. Hsia, she shows “a strong antipathy toward the traditional mode of family life” and “an acute insight into the unhappiness of women bound to that mode of existence.”22Ling recalls flying kites together with her foster mother when she was still a young teenager. What impressed her most was the making of the kites, which were “often in the shape of a large butterfly, or a phoenix, or a beautiful woman” (207). This image of a beautiful woman (kite) flying in the sky has a twofold meaning. As the kite can soar up into the boundless sky, it first suggests an aspiration to freedom on the part of Chinese women, who were largely mired in conventional patriarchal mores. However, as the kite is always in the control of the kite flier, the freedom is merely illusive. This is a depiction of the destiny of the majority of Ling's female contemporaries. The beautiful woman, gazed on erotically by the men below and manipulated by the cord, cannot secure genuine freedom except when the cord breaks. Even then, the kite will be rootless or homeless, as suggested by the Chinese phrase “duan le xian de fengzheng” (“a kite cut off from the cord”).23 But is the freedom thus anticipated real or illusory? Ling does not provide any comment on the image of the kite as beautiful woman, but her meticulous representation of women's situations and of their subtle exposure to patriarchal brutality that is commonly found in her short stories is just as conspicuous here.In chapter 10, Ling recalls her relationship with “Great Uncle,” a respectable, liberal-minded senior, who told her two well-known stories, “which were written in poetic form to be sung in public,” namely, in traditional opera. The female protagonists of the dramas disguise themselves as men to take the court examinations. When Great Uncle asked her what she would like to do when she grew up, Ling said, “I should like to disguise myself as a man to take the Court examination” (149). What she aspired to do was similar to what many of the writing women in imperial China who craved men's freedom sought to do. A prominent example is Yu Xuanji (848?–871?). Her poetic lines “自恨羅衣掩詩句，舉頭空羨榜中名” (“How I hate this gauze gown for hiding my verses. / To no avail I look up with envy at the names on the (examination winners') list”) (195) indicate how much she abhorred “the limitations imposed upon her by her gender,” but she could hardly find a way out.24In the girl's answer to the question posed by Great Uncle, we see the seeds of feminist consciousness already planted in her early life, which proliferated further in her later writings. On the other hand, the answer by an ostensibly innocent girl also satirizes the prescribed gendered roles and critiques patriarchal suppression.Ling not only represents the aspirations of the women around her but also stresses the conditions with which they were confronted under patriarchal control. Ling's own mother was the fourth concubine of Ling's father and Ling her fourth daughter. Giving birth to four daughters and no son, Ling observes, her mother had a lifelong “son complex,” that is, an intense disappointment at having no son, which had an impact on Ling as a child: “I often felt unhappy when I considered that I was only a girl. I always hesitated to talk or laugh because I was very sensitive about the fact that I was not wanted in my family” (201). Ironically, Ling adds, “When my father knew that I could paint, I suddenly became his favorite child. Everyone treated me in a different way, except my mother” (201). But even though her father endorsed her learning and skill of painting, when Tutor Ben (her half brother's teacher) volunteered to teach her how to compose poetry, her father said, “I don't expect very much of her; I think a girl like her does not need to learn much. If she can learn how to compose a short poem on her painting when she wants to, that is quite enough” (201). In his view, the point of educating a girl is so that she can decorate the margin of a painting. But Ling saw her childhood education as bestowing on her a lifelong ambition to excel as a woman. Throughout her memoirs, one of the most significant “plotlines” is her educational experience as a child. By presenting herself as an example, Ling reveals, on the one hand, the paucity of educational opportunities for girls and women in traditional China, and on the other, the importance of education to her and to all Chinese women at large.Ling never hesitated to expose women's ignorance and the lack of female consciousness in order to show the extent to which patriarchal ideology had been imprinted on women's psyche. In the 1910s, many of the young peers of Ling's elder half brothers had followed the fashion to go abroad, but “[Third] Mother thinks that [for Eldest Brother and his wife to go abroad together] would be ridiculous. If they went abroad people would think our family very odd, because, Mother says, what is the use of getting a daughter-in-law if she goes abroad with her husband? A daughter-in-law's duty is to look after the house and the whole family” (178). The remark is narrated in the voice of Eighth Sister, a teenage girl. Third Mother was only one of the many women victimized by suffocating patriarchal mores; these women were tragically blind to and willingly accepted patriarchal conventions and suppression.In chapter 7, Ling vividly describes a fight between Third Mother and Sixth Mother (who used to be a prostitute). After several abusive verbal exchanges, Third Mother proclaims, “Hold your tongue! If you dare to speak any more, you will see what I will tell people about you. You have a boil in your mouth, I think. How can you say all these dirty words?” Sixth Mother then cried bitterly as if her heart were broken. Again she knocked her head boldly against Third Mother. She muttered: “I am not ashamed of my past. I had a good excuse for what I did. It was my job to keep myself from hunger and cold. I rather feel ashamed of one who eats her man's rice, uses her man's money, but is always having a pale-faced young man in her own bed. This kind of woman is a cheap bone.” (65) In this as well as in Eighth Sister's remarks, Ling adopts the perspective of a small girl, observing the quarrel but never giving any comment. It seems that the author, eschewing the patriarchal style of pressuring readers, is cautious, consciously trying to avoid imposing her own values on the reader. Instead, the reader is given the freedom to judge by herself/himself. However, Ling's subversive satire of patriarchy is betrayed through her more “feminine style” of subtle description and narration.Recalling her childhood experiences in the end, Ling remarks, “It seems to me, as I recollect it now, that all our mothers were on better terms with each other when Father was away from the house. They talked and laughed heartily” (158). As instantiated by the fight between Third Mother and Sixth Mother, when Ling's father was home, her mothers, being jealous of favoritism shown to the other, often quarreled with each other. But when the patriarch or father figure was absent and the house turned into a women's world, sisterhood germinated between all the wives. An allegorical reading reveals a feminist tone in the message: Ling seems to envision and anticipate a world where patriarchy is obliterated and where women become sisters who “talk and laugh heartily” with their voices that are heard by the world. With the publication of Ancient Melodies in London, Ling's dream had partly come true. Her profeminist consciousness and commitment was finally capable of being seen by all.My analysis helps to answer a question that has perplexed many readers of Ling's work: why do the memoirs “end abruptly with Su Hua about to decide her future” right before 1920 when she enters Yenching University? Given the fact that Ling started writing the work in 1938 and the book was not published until 1953, this is quite puzzling.25 My speculation is that she ended her memoirs in 1920 because after that she began associating with many celebrities of the May Fourth period, who were still alive when the memoirs were written and published. If she had gone beyond 1920, she would have had to touch on her literary debut, the literary debates in the mid-1920s involving her husband and her mentor Zhou Zuoren, and some other unpleasant or unspeakable episodes in her life. As shown in her last letter to Zhou, she just hated to be involved in political debate of any kind.26 Second, since her primary concern was to expose patriarchy at its crudest and to find a voice for Chinese women moored by their conventional roles, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, showcasing the transitional period between the late Qing and the May Fourth was probably strategically the best choice. Third, by limiting the span of the memoirs to her first twenty years, mainly her childhood, the author can better conceal her subjectivity and take an ostensibly objective position, leaving the reader to decipher the subtlety in her text. This, in light of Rey Chow's proposed paradigm in her 1988 essay, may be interpreted as another instance of “virtuous transaction.” Her ostensible timidity about revealing her real subjectivity spells out a subversive thoughtfulness. Fourth, since the published book was based on the manuscript she sent to Woolf, it is possible that Woolf's premature death had brought an abrupt end to any further expansion of her memoirs.Despite its limited coverage and circulation, as an autobiographical work, Ancient Melodies makes an invaluable contribution to world literature, on behalf of Chinese women and women of the world at large. Written in English by a Chinese woman writer with assistance from some English modernist writers, her memoirs are a cosmopolitan cultural and intellectual product. The process of its making attests to a Chinese woman writer's tenacious struggles to make her silenced voice heard by the entire world and by all human beings.
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