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Succinct yet packed with insight, Kay Schaffer and Xianling Song's book, Women Writers in Postsocialist China,
offers a panorama of contemporary Chinese women writers at the turn of
the twenty-first century (1992–2012) through a postmodern feminist lens,
building on previous interpretative frameworks that aims to account for
both western and indigenous Chinese feminisms.[2]
The corpus, composed of autobiographical novels, literary fiction,
blogs and popular novels, is brought together as various forms of 'life
writing' understood as a 'general term for writing that takes a life,
one's own or another's, as its subject' and that 'may take on many
guises as narrators selectively engage their lived experience and
situate their social identities through personal storytelling'.[3]
Spanning a twenty-year period defined as 'postsocialist China' that
opens with Deng Xiaoping's trip to the South, and ends in 2012 at the
time of writing the book—coincidentally also the beginning of the Xi
Jinping era—the authors analyse key representative works by women
writers to explore the meanings and constraints of writing history and
the self from a woman's perspective in contemporary China. Concurrently,
they aim to examine how Chinese women-centred writing operates in
transcultural and transnational contexts and pay special attention to
the contexts of creation, translation, circulation and reception of
literary texts and feminist theories, which are understood as one aspect
of the global flow of ideas occurring between China and other parts of
the world, setting them against the background of the Fourth World
Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995.
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The book is structured into seven main chapters, each dealing with one particular facet of life writing. Chapter Two[4] focuses on Hong Ying's 虹影 (b. 1962) Daughter of the River: An Autobiography (Ji'e de nü'er 饥饿的女儿, 1997[5]) as well as her semi-autobiographical fiction Summer of Betrayal : A Novel (Beipan zhi xia
背叛之夏, 1995) in which, the authors argue, Hong Ying manages to straddle
two cultural traditions to articulate a westernised, individualised
'self' still shaped by collective, historical and ideological forces
representative of the Chinese tradition of self-depictions. Chapter
Three offers a subtle analysis of Chen Ran's 陳染 (b. 1962) signature
novel A Private Life (Siren shenghuo 私人生活, 1996), moving
away from the 'private writing' label often attached to her works and
showing how the fragmented narrative weaves together a novel that is
deeply political in scope, albeit in a deconstructive fashion, and
explores how to address the unspeakable through textual fragmentation
and disjunctions.
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Chapter Four brings together Lin Bai 林白 (b. 1958), Sheng Keyi 盛可以 (b.
1970s), and Xinran 欣然 (b. 1958) to explore how their works attempt to go
beyond traditional representations of rural and migrant women (often
'othered' by intellectually privileged city-dwelling writers and
depicted as lacking in suzhi, 'quality'), to give them a 'voice
of their own.' Although Lin Bai uses interview records to allow rural
women to represent themselves in A Record of Women's Chatting (Funü xianliao lu 妇女闲聊錄, 2005), these voices appear nonetheless still mediated through the writing of an established author. Sheng Keyi's Northern Girls: Life Goes On (Bei Mei
北妹, 2004) fictionalises the writer's own experiences to focus on modes
of resilience and survival of female migrant workers, and how they
resist othering at work. The authors are more overly critical of Xinran
who, they argue, uses her privileged position as a popular Europe-based
writer while documenting women's oppression to promote self-serving
notions of a backwards China, instrumental in promoting her charity
Mother's Bridge of Love (MBL) in The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices (2002) and Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love (2010), commodified for a global audience.
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Chapter Five turns to Wei Hui's 卫慧 (b. 1973) Shanghai Baby (Shanghai baobei 上海宝贝, 1999) and Mian Mian's 棉棉 (b. 1970) Candy (Tang
糖, 2000) to discuss the formation process of 'beauty writer' as a
category through paratext, editorial strategies, and reception in China
and abroad, contextualising their writing among the rise of bloggers and
online platforms that foregrounded the recent boom of Internet
literature. If a little less original given the abundant scholarship
already devoted to beauty writers, this chapter's analysis of paratext
as integral to these processes nonetheless sets it apart from previous
work. The further section on bloggers is interesting in exemplifying how
divisions between high and popular culture are rendered less obvious in
contemporary China, but might have needed to be further articulated
with the other works analysed in the book to reach its full potential as
an analytical tool.
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After four chapters more contemporary in focus, Chapters Six to Eight
turn to Chinese history. In examining memoirs, fictionalised biographies
of historical characters and historical fiction, the authors hint at
how the genre can used to destabilise official accounts of Chinese
history, in relation to gender roles in particular, and be deemed
threatening to social harmony. In their historical narratives, Zhang
Yihe 章诒和 (b. 1942) and Chen Danyan 陈丹燕 (b. 1958) are shown to mix their
own remembered experiences with archival materials, interviews and oral
history to conjure China's twentieth-century past against the official
version of history. At this stage, the book attempts to take up the
much-written-about feminine/feminist writer debate (pp. 116–17), but
comes somewhat short of a full-fledged development taking into account
all relevant literature.[6]
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A shorter Chapter Seven on Zhao Mei's 赵玫 (b. 1954) Woman Emperor Wu Zetian (Wu Zetian. N�huang
武则天.女皇, 1998) examines how reading facts in the official annals from a
woman-centred lens allowed the writer to balance rehabilitating the Tang
Emperor from the 'evil unwoman' (p. 199) as she was constructed in
previous biographies, while claiming authenticity by drawing her facts
from the official annals, a crucial feat for biographers of historical
figures in China. Finally, Chapter Eight is dedicated to Xu Xiaobin's
徐小斌 (b. 1953) Feathered Serpent (Yushe 羽蛇,1998), envisaged
not as an historical novel, but as a novel that puts the concept of
'history' itself under a critical lens through a destabilised cyclical
frame that reinterprets historical figures through the everyday lives of
five generations of Chinese women.
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Beyond the analysis of different forms of 'life writing,' the book's
greatest strength lies in its exploration of underlying themes emerging
throughout to shape a panorama of key aspects of contemporary women's
writing: the figure of the protagonist as a writer or artist in
coming-of-age stories (in the works of Hong Ying, Chen Ran, Mian Mian
and Wei Hui), the trauma of the Tian'anmen Massacre as a catalyst to
writing (Hong Ying, Chen Ran, Xu Xiaobin), the importance of the body as
place to register a spiritual or psychological vacuum, and so forth.
Meanwhile, the authors highlight different facets of literary feminism
and women-centred writing in China at the turn of the twenty-first
century; writers' attempts at transcending gender, at interrogating and
subverting notions of social roles (in Hong Ying's refusal to idealise
the working class, in Sheng Keyi's depiction of migrant workers) or, on
the contrary, how self-identified feminist writers can end up publishing
books packaged as commodities for the market. On several instances,
brilliant attention is paid to paratext in transcultural context,
editorial strategies and strategies of censorship avoidance.
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Although no book can be all-encompassing in its subject treatment, the
reader is nonetheless left wanting more when the authors posit the
relative invisibility of lesbian writing in nineties China while
recognising lesbian themes in works by Hong Ying, Chen Ran, Lin Bai and
Xu Xiaobin (see p. 162 n. 6). Given these writers' centrality to the
book's argument, and the importance of lesbian writing within China
LGBT+ and the feminist movement as a whole, more emphasis on this theme,
or even a dedicated chapter, would have completed the book's thematic
panorama beautifully. Future reprints of the book might also be usefully
served by some edits for Chinese characters' consistency. Indeed, while
the names of writers and main works are not always provided in Chinese
characters, and the pinyin transcriptions at times erroneous, some other
chapters disproportionately provide Chinese characters for many phrases
less central to the subject matter. As such, a bilingual
(English–Chinese) glossary of key terms, writers' names and works would
be helpful to the book's intended audience, scholars of Chinese studies
and literature.
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In the final analysis, Kay Schaffer and Xianlin Song's Women Writers in Postsocialist China
aptly manages to capture the struggles and creative strategies of a
generation of women writers caught between the intensification of the
global flow of ideas in the nineties, that helped circulate feminist
theories and brought their writing to a global stage, and the
disillusionment and trauma of the Tian'anmen generation. As such, this
book constitutes a welcome addition to scholarship on twentieth-century
and contemporary women writers[7] and
provides a useful background to many current debates in the field of
contemporary Chinese literature: first with thematic elements that help
situate the debates on China's literary feminism, and second in its
discussion of migrant women in literature in Chapter Four, which would
be very useful in helping contextualise recent cases of migrant women[8] who have taken to the keyboard to narrate their life and plight in the age of social media.
Notes
[1] All pagination in the present review is given from the hardback edition.
[2] See for instance, Wang Zheng,
'Maoism, feminism and the UN conference on women: Women's studies
research in contemporary China,' Journal of Women's History 8(4),
1997: 126–52; Dai Jinhua (戴锦华), 涉渡之舟 新时期中囯女性写作与女性文化 (Shedu zhi zhou:
xinshiqi Zhongguo nüxing xiezuo yu nüxing wenhua; Chinese Women's
Writing and Feminist Culture in the New Era), Xi'an: Shaanxi renmin
jiaoyu chubanshe, 2002; Wendy Larson, Women Writing in Modern China, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.
[3] Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010, pp. 4 and 18.
[4] The introduction being numbered
as Chapter One in the Table of Contents, the seven analysis chapters are
Chapters Two through Eight of the book.
[5] All dates given here when
referencing the writers' works are the year of first publication of the
original edition (in Chinese, except for Xinran whose works were first
published in English).
[6] Although the space constraints
of a book review do not allow for a thorough discussion of relevant
literature, the reader will find a helpful summary of those debates in
Hui Wu, 'Introduction,' in Once Iron Girls – Essays on Gender by Post-Mao Literary Women,
edited by Hui Wu, 1–14, Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2010, and later in
the same book by various Chinese writers in their own terms. A more
theoretical summary of the question can be found in Shih Shu-Mei,
'Towards an ethics of transnational encounters, or "when" does a
"Chinese" woman become a "feminist"?' in Dialogue and Difference: Feminisms Challenge Globalisation, edited by Marguerite Waller and Sylvia Marcos, 3–28. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
[7] Amy Dooling, Women's Literary Feminism in Twentieth Century China, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005; Xin Yang, From Beauty Fear to Beauty Fever: A Critical Study of Contemporary Chinese Female Writers, London and New York: Peter Lang, 2011.
[8] See for instance the case of Fan Yusu, who became an overnight sensation when she published her eponym essay on WeChat. See Tom Philips, '"I am Fan Yusu": China gripped by Dickensian tale of a migrant worker's struggle,' The Guardian,
3 May 2017. Online:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/03/i-am-fan-yusu-china-
gripped-by-dickensian-tale-of-a-migrant-workers-struggle (accessed 27
January 2018).
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