China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer and Chair: C. D. Alison Bailey, University of British Columbia
Discussant: Bonnie S. McDougall, University of Edinburgh
In a recent book of essays Milan Kundera notes and decries the ritual negation of forty years under Communism in Czechoslovakia. He argues that to characterize that period as "forty lost years" is to surrender to the totalitarian tendency to politicize memory and to ignore the poetry of everyday life, loves, laughter, and friendship.2 China seems to be moving beyond that stage of referring to the Cultural Revolution as "ten lost years" and the millions of young people caught up in its struggles as the "lost generation." The politicization of memory so evident in the master narrative of blame promoted by officially-sponsored "wounded literature" has given way to a plethora of accounts in a variety of genres that undermine the simplistic allocation of culpability and point instead to a growing recognition of the complexities and ambivalences inherent in this period of collective trauma. This panel will focus on memoirs, autobiographical fiction and oral testimonies recalling this period and its aftermath, and analyze the role of memory and hindsight in constructing alternate visions of the Cultural Revolution.
1. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. London: Faber & Faber, 1992, p.1.
2. ———. Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts. New York: Harper Perennial, 1996, pp. 224ff.
Shuyu Kong, University of British Columbia
Since the mid-1980s, memoirs by mainland Chinese about their personal experience in the Cultural Revolution have gained great popularity in the West. Life and Death in Shanghai, Wild Swans, Red Flower of China, A Leaf in the Bitter Wind: varied in depth and detail, these works present an historical experience of being victimized in a totalitarian regime. However, we cannot ignore the fact that these memoirs are the work of voluntary exiles, mostly female, who have left China, in many cases married Westerners, and now write in English for potential Western readers. Thus their very success demands critical scrutiny of the way they interpret (or revise) history to fit the requirements of a Western audience.
A basic model can be detected among these personal narratives. Here, family chronicle is deliberately intertwined with national chronicle. The narrator presents herself as a victim as well as a survivor, and her story becomes a popular history of modern China with an indictment of Mao’s revolution at its core. This approach, while providing a history based on concrete experience—an alternative to prevailing master narratives—nevertheless largely reinforces stereotypes of revolutionary red China and tends to reduce Chinese life and society to a simplistic political nightmare. By "Orwellizing the recollection of [her] own life" (Kundera), such a narrator often overlooks the complexity of the historical situation which has driven people to such extremes, and omits her own responsibility towards history, instead presenting herself and her family as mere victims. Thus, her narrative fails to provide a full response to life and its complex range of emotions. One is left wondering where the future of a nation lies when it seems the only solution is to escape to the West.
C.D. Alison Bailey, University of British Columbia
Shame often aids forgetfulness; incidents that weigh on one’s conscience or are so disgraceful are never fun to recall, so they easily slip through our minds and vanish without a trace.2
This paper will explore the themes of memory, confession, and personal responsibility in memoirs and oral testimonies of the Cultural Revolution, particularly by Ba Jin and Feng Jicai as compiler. Ba Jin has chosen to use his memoirs to confess to sins of omission and commission. His memoirs have become a place for him to tell the truth as he perceives it and to take responsibility for his actions and words, while urging others to do the same. Feng Jicai has acted as confessor to scores of anonymous informants anxious to bear witness about their experiences as (often interchangeable) agents and victims. Both Ba Jin and Feng stress the compelling necessity to recall and tell the truth. They share the widespread belief in the therapeutic role of narrative as healing act or catharsis: coping strategies of somatization are deeply embedded as metaphor in modern Chinese culture. Often, their endeavors represent a pathology describing symptoms rather than uncovering causes: motivations are rarely analyzed.
Their joint enterprise to lay bare the truth is hampered by the workings of memory. Primo Levi has warned us that the human memory is a fallacious instrument. Trauma and guilt can erase or distort memories; memories blur and become stylized in the telling and re-telling. Well-told ties can evade central issues of culpability and construct "convenient truths," while the accounts of victims can take on a stereotyped shape, blocking out traumatic memories to create a "consolatory truth" out of fragments and shards.3
1. Preface by Qian Zhongshu, in Yang Jiang, Six Chapters From My Life Downunder. Seattle & London: University of Washington Press, 1984, p.2.
2. Ibid., pp.2–3.
3. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved. London: Abacus, 1993, pp.11–21.
Richard King, University of Victoria
The 1990s have seen a revival of interest in the record of educated youth (zhiqing) in the Chinese countryside in the decade following the Mao directive that sent them there in 1968. An exhibition of zhiqing memorabilia at the Historical Museum in Beijing in 1991 was instrumental in bringing together the veterans of the Great Northern Wilderness, and led to the compiling of directories, and the establishment of associations, of former zhiqing. New anthologies of zhiqing writings have been issued, and to this existing material has been added chronologies, historical analysis, "case-files" and other reminiscences, as well as television series, theatre and fiction.
Memories of the experience of rustication are clearly influenced by the distance of the narrator from the events recalled, changes in his or her economic or social status, and variations in political or ideological climate, quite apart from the natural tendency of autobiographers to embroider, omit, and lie. A reading of literature by and about zhiqing from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s reveals dramatic fluctuations in attitude and mood, from the forced optimism of early writing, through anguished revelation and confession in the ‘80s, to the zhiqing and "post-zhiqing" writing of the 1990s, which, while recounting some of the horrors which recur in the fiction of the previous decade, nonetheless displays a nostalgia for an era now twenty years past, an elegy for a time of dramatic shared experience. In this paper, I examine the theme of elegy in a variety of zhiqing writings of the 1990s; the essay is being prepared in tandem with an anthology of zhiqing writings in translation for the Hong Kong journal Renditions.