homecoming

回家 hui jia v. to return home

the first thing I always think of is Dalian, the southern most city of the Lianonig Province. the second thing of course is the place i grew up, my small neighborhood in New Jersey. the other things that come along with “home” are family, comfort, tenderness, warmth, childhood. i was not born in Dalian, but since i was only 2 years old, every other summer we traveled there to see my mother’s family. that’s how i know these qualities of family are intimately connected to warmth and love, and that these two “homes” are related through their commonality of family, despite their thousands of miles of distance apart. i recalled reading Bei Dao’s earlier chapters of City Gate, Open Up and understanding his eyes and heart in which he took in the world. my mind functioned similar to his, conceptualizing Dalian in a similar fashion to his painting of growing up in Beijing. but i think i was more naive than he was; i fear i safeguarded my idea of home to ensure the comfort of a familar idea.

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“

祝福 zhu fu

“

n. blessing; Lu Xun’s The New Year’s Sacrifice

You are a scholar, and have travelled too and seen a lot. I just want to ask you something.

”

After a person dies, does he turn into a ghost or not? amongst my readings of Lu Xun, Xiao Qian, and Bei Dao, i have only encountered a story of a woman in Lu Xun’s The New Year’s Sacrifice. the story of an unnamed woman is told interjecting a traditional Lunar New Year’s Eve celebration.

Lu Xun sees his encounter with the unnamed woman as a discomfort, a disruption of sorts to the otherwise festivities of the upcoming New Year’s. the woman is referred to as “Hsiang Lin’s Wife,” who presents to Lu Xun the question, “After a person dies, does he turn into a ghost or not?” we learn the next day Hsiang Lin’s Wife has died “of poverty, of course.” only at the revelation of her death does Lu Xun also reveal to the reader Hsiang Lin’s Wife’s story.

Hsiang Lin’s Wife was seen as a faliure of a woman in traditional Chinese values. she was a widow who became a maidservant for Lu Xun’s family, forced into another marriage by her mother-in-law, bore a child from that marriage, lost her second hubsand to illness, and subsequently lost her child as well. even in the presence of other women such as Old Mrs. Wei and Liu Ma, Hsiang Lin’s wife receives no sympathy for her suffering. it is only Lu Xun’s narration that admissions a sense of symapthy for her.

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Hsiang Lin’s Wife, already nameless, only identified by her relation to her late husband, has already become somewhat of an object in Lu Xun’s story. she does not posssess the power of having a name, an identiy of herself. the objectification of Hsiang Lin’s Wife goes further from her namelessness. as Lu Xun tells the story of Hsiang Lin’s Wife, the townspeople increasingly objectify and scrutinize her physical body. her mother-in-law easily displaces her from her maidservant job and forces her into a new marriage, “a good bargain,” despite Hsiang Lin’s Wife’s vehement protest. even when Hsiang Lin’s Wife laments the death of her child, Liu Ma only replies: “You must have been willing, only you put the blame on [your second hubsand] being so strong,” and taunts Hsiang Lin’s Wife that her two husbands will fight over her in the afterlife. her loss of being a wife and being a mother further reinforces Hsiang Lin’s Wife as a spectacle in which the townspeople can scorn and probe at her. comparatively to Hsiang Lin’s Wife, Lu Xun harbors a respectable position in society as an intellectual male. what does it mean for us to hear her story through Lu Xun’s narration, which is not even his own firsthand experience with her? the reader virtually only knows Hsiang Lin’s Wife through the retelling of others, such as Old Mrs. Wei, Liu Ma, and the rest of the townspeople of Luchen, and of course, Lu Xun. the detatched narrative and social position of Lu Xun from Hsiang Lin’s Wife allows the reader to understand and empathize with the hardships of Hsiang Lin’s Wife imposed upon her by traditional Chinese gender politics. it reveals the isolative and othering nature of social inequality, and the difference in social standing of Lu Xun to Hsiang Lin’s Wife emphasizes the degree of separation between them. it is Lu Xun’s sympathy and discomfort that he feels towards Hsiang Lin’s Wife in the beginning of The New Year’s Sacrifice that bridges

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this large gap from distanced spectating to a closer position of consideration and sympathy of Hsiang Lin’s Wife, effectively allowing the reader to also critically engage with her story.

Lu Xun is able to perform this critique of early 20th-century Chinese gender politics through this storytelling of Hsiang Lin’s Wife. however, it is important to note that this separation between him and Hsiang Lin’s Wife also heavily echoes and reinforces Lu Xun’s privilege. his opposing position as a male intellectual not only grants him the ability to never have to experience what Hsiang Lin’s Wife went through, but also grants him the ability to easily detattach from her suffering.

Hsiang Lin’s Wife’s story is overall encapsulated by a scene of a New Year’s Sacrifice. Lu Xun concludes The New Year’s Sacrifice not with Hsiang Lin’s Wife, but somewhat of a dismissal of her story: “I was woken up by firecrackers exploding noisily ... Wrapped in this medley of sound, relaxed and at ease, the doubt which had preyed on me from dawn to early night was swept away by the atmosphere of celerbation, and I felt only that the saints of heaven and earth had accepted the sacrifice” perhaps this ending was meant to be ironic, meant to starkly contrast the sorrow of Hsiang Lin’s Wife. whatever its intent, the conclusion is clear. Hsiang Lin’s Wife can only achieves relief from her suffering in death, while Lu Xun’s discomfort can be cast away by the New Year’s celebration.

Hsiang Lin’s Wife still remains nameless as the story concludes. i wonder about her, about the other Chinese women of the early 20th century, of the women of dynastic China, of the women of China today, of the women of the Chinese diaspora. what were their names? what did their voies say? what did they have to tell that they never got the chance to?

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男女 nan nü

n. adj. a framework of society: all social, political, and moral institutions perpetuate and reproduce gender inquality; unstranslatebale.

interview 001: 婷婷姐姐，cousin do you feel like [marriage] is a pressure both men and women feel? i think it’s more pressure for women. as a modern woman, we have to work, have to take care of the family, have to have a baby. that‘s too much. men, they only need to work, only need to get some money and that’s all they have to do! but we, we have more things to balance. if i’m having a baby it should take like, 2 years that i couldn’t put any effort in my work. it’s gonna influence a lot of things that people, um other people they go faster than me. and after those 2 years i don’t know if i could be able to-i don’t even know how this pregnancy will affect my body and my life! it’s something that, you know, we don’t.. it’s hard you know? but it’s something that i have to do! you know, this is my ability... i mean my 责任 [zeren]， my responsibility!

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so you have a lot of pressure, right? life, the final result will be very bad for me [if I don’t fulfill my responsibility], that is, the relationship with my parents will be very bad. they may just blame me and blame me for the rest of their lives. they’ll say, you are disobedient. i still want a relationship with them. i just try my best to make everyone feel comfortable. because if you don’t give birth, your parents will always talk about this to you. you have to have different excuses for that, but you cannot use that forever. hahaha. right, so you think they think the only reason to get married is to have children? yes, because in China, single mothers are servile and have to give birth to children and raise them by themselves. without a husband, this matter is actually not good in current Chinese society. people will gossip about you. if you want to live a normal life, get married and have children. if you don’t have children, people will think you are sick and you can’t have children. if you say you have given birth and you don’t have a husband, you are just yourself, others will think, “Oh, is it your own problem? if you don’t marry someone else, you are a bad person.”

This society is not very friendly.

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生计问题 shengji wenti

n. livelihood problem

“when money is the essence of things, not only does marriage lose all the joy of freeedom, but it actually sinks women into bond-servitude”

interview 001: 婷婷姐姐，cousin i have a question, because you said they think marriage is for having children, do they think love is important in marriage? not important at all to China. that is, how should i put it... everyone is just looking for themselves. that is, it would be better to find this person a who has a good job, or if he is very rich, or if his parents are very rich. you say you get married because of love, but few people in China do this. because what if this person is poor, but you still love him so much. . . there’s no point in continuing that. romance is not important for Chinese, they only care about money.

“after the economic revolution, unions will be born out of love.

Love marriages are the noblest and purest marraiges in the world. How can they be a lie or a delusion?”

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风 feng

n. wind

classical Chinese tradition conceived wind as a central force of the universe, reigning over space and time, power and education. but Shigehisa Kuriyama’s essy “The Imagination of Winds and the Development of the Chinese Conceptin of the Body” futher characterizes wind as a central framework of the state of embodiment. wind was considered a signifer of cosmic harmony, a determinant of regularity and order. four seasons and eight winds governed the passing years. our bodies were meant to follow this order. classical medicine thus determined sickness as our bodie’s divergence from this temporal ordering of wind. these irregular winds, evil winds, ‘empty’ winds, were the disruptances of natural order. how is it that an idea of cosmic ordering could be infallible? if wind was supposed to enact cosmic order, what would it

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mean for our bodies’ inner winds to perform in contrary to this ordering?

Kuriyama puts it quite nicely: “the character of all winds, inner or outer, was that they always retained some chaotic contingency, the possibility of suddenly blowing in new and unexpected directions.” what are the possibilities that arise when bodies begin to diverge from the norm?

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women can hold up half the sky Chinese men worship power and authority. They believe that Europeans, Americans, and the Japanese are civilized nations of the modern world who all grant their women some degree of freedom. By transplanting this system into the lives of their wives and daughters, by prohibiting their practices of footbinding, and by enrolling them in modern schools to receive basic education, these men think that they will be applauded by the whole world for having joined the ranks of civilized nations. . . I am inclined to think that these men act purely out of a selfish deisre to claim women as private property. Were it not so, why would a woman’s reputation, good or bad, have anythign whatsoever to do with them? The men’s orignal intention is not to liberate women but to treat them as private property. In the past when traditional rituals prevailed, men tried to distinguish themselves by confining women in the boudoir; when the tides turn in favor of Europeanization, they attempt to acquire distinction by promoting women’s liberation. This is what I call men’s pursuit of self distinction in the name of women’s liberation.

妇女能顶半边天

天

国家 guo jia n. a nation

under Mao’s rule, China underwent the Cultural Revolution. for the purpose of carving out a national state of China under socialist regime, Mao called for gender equality in the name of establishing a sense of mass collectivity. the image of a revolutionary, “liberated” woman was one where her body is stripped off any emblem of female identity. she is either an “iron girl,” big and burly in frame and enacting manual labor, or just another revolutionary soldier, adorned in the same uniform as the male revolutionaires. the phrase “Women hold up half the sky” was proclaimed by Mao, echoing an emancipatory state of the woman from earlier Confucian traditions that confined the woman to the interior. but the extent of this new women’s “emancipation” is clear. her identity is once imposed upon her from an external force: the masculine force of a nationalist state. while men were able to perserve their masculinity under Mao’s regime, it was women who were forced to give up their

the new “emancipated” woman born out of this conception of gender equality was meant to symbolize the principles of a new nation. however, we find that their bodies are once again exploited, now for the interest of the national state’s greater agenda of liberation. but a woman’s liberation on her own term was still nowhere to be found.

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女 nü

works cited

n. woman, female, girl

“

we are not part of your nation. we have no home.

”

what would it mean for a nation built upon a masculine nationalist disscourse to be embodied by a woman? what does it mean for the history and the fate of the nation to be inscribed upon and represented through a woman?

Nieh Hualing’s Mulberry and Peach follows the fracturing of a Chinese woman’s identity amidst the great political and social upheavel war wridden China. the story follows 16-year-old girl Mulberry, escaping from the Japanese soldiers during the end of World War II, to her life in America, 30 years later. unlike Lu Xun’s The New Year’s Sacrifice, the reader gets the first-person view and first-person experience of Mulberry as she narrates her journey through diary entries. perhaps the most significant aspect of her narration is its non-linearity and inconsistent nature. the novel is divided into four parts in temporal order, but within each part Mulberry jumps between past to present. her diary entries are intersperesed with radio clips, letters, newspaper clippings, drawings, and songs, her narration parelleling the slow fracturing of her identity into Peach. its a bit of a sensory overload for the reader, but this narrative style proves effective for that very reason: the reader is forced to take upon the position of Mulberry herself, having the same sensory experiences as she does. each part features the same narrative path: Mulberry is confined in a certain space, and eventually escapes–until the next part comes, and as if the scenario is perpetual, she is back in a space of confinement again. first she is on the refugee boat, stuck in the gorge, but manages to escape. in part two, she finds herself once again confined in the

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confined to an attic in Taiwan, where she develops schizophrenia.

Mulberry’s constant displacement does not result in a new outcome for her; rather, as she changes locations more and more, she seems to become increasingly confined, explaining her schizophrenic breakdown in the Taiwan attic. what is signifcant, furthermore, is that the forces of Mulberry’s confinemenet do not just come from the physical spaces is trapped in, but rather from the patriarchal forces the physical spaces reinforce. the psychological and sexual violence Mulberry receives is riddled with the societlal patriarchal norms of China, revealing the inherently gendered nature of violence upon Mulberry’s body. although Peach’s birth in America in part 4 signifies a sense of Mulberry’s “liberation” from the suffocating patriarchy imposed by modern China, this liberation is precedented with the death of Mulberry’s identity in the first place. but with this liberation constitutes the idea of Mulberry subverting the traditional notions of loyalty, family, purity, and the breaking away from the roles of the mother and the wife, disrupting defintions of Chinese womanhood.

I grope my way into the bathtub. As I sink down into the water, I became a new woman–my headache, all my pains vanish. All feelings of suspicion, fear, and guilt disappear. The water warms my whole body. I am translucent as the water.”

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女性 nü xing n. a new woman

interview 002: 姐姐，sister. (nonbinary) i resonate with wanting to return home, but home not being China i mean, a lot of it has to do with the way people there treat me. i feel like when you’re a kid you’re still pliable enough to your environment when you shift, yeah it feels like a change but it’s like fine. but when you’re like fully grown and you go somewhere where you’ve developed values that don’t align with the current standards in that place, it’s like ok well now i don’t feel welcome here like i used to when i was a kid and didn’t know anything about myself. another thing is Eurocentrism. now that i think about it, when i was younger and more white-washed and abided more to eurocentric beauty standards and sexuality expectations, i was very accepted in China. but then i noticed this year when i went back i did not get that reaction, because i no longer look like that, i no longer value those things.

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i don’t align with traditional chinese values in any way. of like femininity. physically i don’t align in any way with them. i don’t have soft features, my face is very harsh and severe, i’m very physically large. which like, the whole thing is you’re supposed to be is small and really thin. [i thought], “why do i personally place so much value in these things?” i don’t actually as a person, i only think i should place my values here because i’m told i should by other Chinese women and people. they would praise me: “好瘦，好漂亮， 皮肤好白!“ [so skinny, so pretty, and your skin, so white!] i only care about this because i think i should care about it, because other people tell me to. but why do other people tell me to, there’s no reason they should cling to this belief, there’s no reason this belief should oppress all of us. so i was just like, reject. reject all of it. i am no longer this “she” they all talk about it makes me feel good, because im no longer bound to expectations of female beauty, by abandoning that identity. i dont’ even want to say identity-construct! by abandoning the construct of femininity. i think [femininity] is imposed on women by men, a lot of it. because of that, im like why would i subject myself to this. i mean, as for how to escape that as a woman.... i don’t know how to do that. i abandoned my womanhood!

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随黄公望游富 following huang gongwang through fuchun mountains 我对一幅画说“我等待” 山水不回应 我亦然迈 进—— 轻步 慢踱 悠行 我可以是村妇是村姑 也可以是一个侠女 我可 以是 采药人 也可以是一个女 道士 I tell a painting “I’m waiting” the mountains and waters do not reply soft steps slow pace rambling

I forge ahead —

I could be a village wife a village auntie or a woman knight errant I could also be a gatherer of herbs or a woman Daoist With the form of a woman, I walk the space between clouds and water With a woman’s montage, I unfold and advance along the level surface With a woman’s vision, I watch time flicker, now far, now near I have no attachments but I have a “differentiating mind” my whole body is but a few inky brushstrokes but my skeleton remains —

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the

zhai yongming

Zhai Yongming rewrites the positionality and visibility of the woman in the artistic and literary tradition–she intrudes upon the painting, creating herself into a subject. she transcends time and space in the diegetic actions of her poem, but also her overall project of “Following Huang Gongwang Through the Fuchun Mountains.” in inserting herself into the scroll and constructing a poem around the scroll, she effectively is able to insert her own voice and being into the Chinese artistic, literary, and historical tradition, both paving the way for women, and opening up their possibilities.

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works mentioned

Selected Stories, Lu Xun

Body, Subject, & Power in China

Mulberry and Peach Nieh Hualing

The Birth of Chinese Feminism