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‘To Be Worthy of the Suffering and Survival’: Chinese Memoirs and the Politics of Sympathy

2007; Routledge; Volume: 4; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14484520701211164

1751-2964

Quan Tong, Ruth Y. Y. Hung,

Japanese History and Culture

Abstract Around the mid-1980s a substantial number of Chinese authors started to write, beyond national and linguistic boundaries, about their traumatic experience during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). Jung Chang's Wild Swans (1991) is among the first and best-known titles in this emergent literary formation. Whether the memoirs are narrated by a former People's Liberation Army soldier, or a Red Guard, or an innocent subject drawn into the political vortex, their authors all assume the role of victims who bear witness to a China collapsing into an administered ‘national madness’. Details of the brutalities of the Revolution presented in the memoirs resonate with the Western imagination of Maoist China. This article is a critical study of these memoirs. It explores the political and ethical implications of life writing in the post-Cold War era within the context of global capitalism. Given the cultural and political topicality of the Cultural Revolution as a subject for popular history writing in the West, the production of these memoirs, we argue, is occasioned and enabled by a specific set of geo-political conditions, whose temporal and spatial materiality defines and determines the use and pertinence of the memoirs. Keywords: memoirpolitics of sympathyChinese Cultural Revolutionlife writing as history Notes 1. The term ‘Chinese memoirs’ here refers to personal accounts of the Chinese Cultural Revolution written in English and published outside China. They are considered collectively here more for their thematic commonalities than for their formal or generic ones. Their authors have lived in China for a substantial number of years; many of them participated in or witnessed the Cultural Revolution and emigrated to the United States or the United Kingdom after the Cultural Revolution. English is not their native or first language. Other examples of the ‘Chinese memoirs’ referred to in this article include: Son of the Revolution by Liang Heng and Judith Shapiro; Born Red by Gao Yuan; Red Flower of China by Zhai Zhenhua; A Single Tear by Wu Ningkun; Red Scarf Girl by Ji-li Jiang; Spider Eaters by Rae Yang; A Leaf in the Bitter Wind by Ye Tingxing; Thirty Years in a Red House by Zhu Xiao Di; Colours of the Mountain by Da Chen; Daughter of China by Xu Meihong and Larry Engelmann; To the Edge of the Sky by Gao Anhua; Vermilion Gate (2000) by Aiping Mu; and Red Sorrow by Nanchu. We designate these personal accounts as ‘memoirs’, partly because most of the texts present themselves as such. The term ‘memoir’ is loosely used in this article to refer to a form of writing in which the author, privileged with and in possession of singular access to his or her memories, narrates, explains, or analyses what he or she has experienced or witnessed, often within certain temporal limits, as major and often significant in life or in history. Different from autobiography, these memoirs do not attempt to cover a personal experience that spans a lifetime or delineate in great detail the processes of personal growth or formation; they are different from testimony, which in ‘its most traditional, routine use in the legal context,’ as Felman Felman , Shoshanna , and Dori Laub . Testimony: Crisis of Writing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History . New York : Routledge , 1992 . [Google Scholar] says, ‘does not possess itself as a conclusion’ (Felman and Laub 6, 5), whereas the authors considered here have already made a verdict on the nature and consequences of the Cultural Revolution without suggesting any need of further clarification of historical truth. It should be noted, however, that it is beyond the scope of this article to define ‘memoir’ as a genre and to make generic distinctions among memoir, testimonial, and autobiography. 2. Tan's father had been a loan clerk in a British bank before 1949. During the Cultural Revolution, those who were labelled as ‘historical counterrevolutionaries’ were not far from dead men or dead women, for they were often subject to daily persecution and humiliation in political prisons. 3. See also Ye Tingxing's description of Michael, the English teacher, as an example of American civility: ‘Unlike Chinese men, [Michael] would open the door for women students, insisting that we go ahead. He thanked us for our efforts in studying, and even for wrong answers in class. Amazingly, he would apologize when he sneezed, whereas some of my classmates looked about indifferently after spitting on the floor. His behavior was new to me. I had grown up in an environment in which it seemed that, without shouting and yelling, nothing would be done, in which politeness and common courtesy were labeled phony bourgeois rubbish’ (264). 4. Ye explains that she married Xiao Zhao only because ‘it was evident to all around [them] that [they] would share a future’. But they had little in common, not least in political terms: ‘Xiao Zhao told me one night at dinner that he had been accepted by the Party. I was speechless. He hadn't even told me he had applied. After all the long talks we had had about our suffering on the farm, the attacks on his parents during the Cultural Revolution, the humiliation of my parents and family, he had gone and joined the Communist Party. […] For the first time since I had been married I felt lost, betrayed by the person I had loved and trusted with my life’ (326). 5. ‘I had learned enough about her to be concerned about our relationship. Her military name was the first warning, and as I came to know more about her, I felt more than ever that we were from two different worlds. Her father was no ordinary officer, but the Assistant Commander of the Xiangtan Military District to the southwest of Changsha. During the period of martial law imposed in late 1967, he had been in charge of public security work for the whole of Hunan Province. […] Little Gao herself had been in that group of high-ranking cadres’ children who had become unusually young soldiers when the order came for Educated Youth to go to the countryside. While I was descending to peasanthood, she was rising to the greatest possible Revolutionary glory, a career in the army. How could there fail to be a great distance between us?’ (Liang and Shapiro 250–51; see also 245, 252, and 259–67). 6. In a chapter of her To the Edge of the Sky titled ‘My Bridge to Happiness’, Gao Anhua writes: ‘Harry was important to me for two reasons: first, I cared for him and longed to have him by my side; second, he was my passport out of China. He was no fool. He had already guessed about the second and said he would try his best to help me fulfil my promise to myself to leave China one day’ (386). 7. ‘It is impossible to master the inner man, to see and understand him by making him into an object of indifferent neutral analysis; it is also impossible to master him by merging with him, by empathizing with him. No, one can approach him and reveal him—more precisely, force him to reveal him—only by addressing him dialogically’ (Bakhtin 251–52). 8. At the funeral of Dr Dale Leathers, Nanchu recalls the first conversation she had with the professor upon her arrival at the University of Georgia: ‘In mourning, I saw Dr. Leathers vividly rise up from his big armchair to shake my hand. “You are our first student from communist China. I've heard about the Cultural Revolution. It was quite a miserable time for the Chinese people. But what we know is very superficial. Tragedies like that belong to all mankind. You will tell us more about it, won't you?”’ (254–55, 256). 9. This ‘taboo’ follows Jung Chang to London after the Cultural Revolution: ‘The last taboo to break was having foreign boyfriends, which I had to do secretly, still expecting catastrophe. […] It was then I put on makeup for the first time in my life—I thought this would provide satisfactory disguise from the embassy (which in fact was not carrying out the kind of surveillance I imagined at this time).’ (Chang, Introduction to the 2003 ed. [Hammersmith, Eng.: Harper, 2004], xviii) 10. Sympathy is Adam Smith's first ‘moral sentiment’; for him, the relation between imagination and sympathy is a causal one: ‘As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation’ (11). 11. Many of these memoirists have received from their lovers, friends, or publishers a substantial amount of help in the production of their works, and not just with their English. For example, Jon Halliday, Jung Chang's husband, is ‘indispensable to what made Wild Swans work’; she ‘needed Jon's help to write a book in English’ and was ‘totally dependent on his judgment, and his infallible eye—his beautiful and gazelle-like eyes’ (Chang, Introduction to the 2003 ed., in Wild Swans [Hammersmith, Eng.: Harper, 2004], xxiii). This is a significant phenomenon; however, we cannot fully examine it here owing to the limits of space. 12. In some major bookstores (such as Borders in England), these Chinese memoirs continue to be placed in the section of ‘Chinese History’.