Chair: Emma Teng, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The issue of nostalgia serves as the unifying theme for the four papers in our panel. Nostalgia conjures up an image of the past from the point of view of the present. As a result, it often reflects the present more than it does the imaginary past. During periods of social and political transition, nostalgia has created imagined spaces that fulfilled various cultural roles, ranging from the personal to the political. Bestriding both premodern and modern fields, our interdisciplinary panel will examine various aspects of nostalgia in Chinese literature and art.

Sophie Xiaofei Tian explores how jiangnan, the Southland, was envisioned by poets as early as in the Southern Dynasties, and how this imagined space, romanticized and feminized, was transformed into a cultural icon for later generations. Min-Min Liang focuses on a late-Ming chuanqi drama, Xilou Ji, "The Romance of Western Mansion," by Yuan Yuling. She discusses the interplay between the idea of mutual recognition, nostalgic sentiment and gender ideology in this play. Daisy Ng analyzes how the memoirs of Hong Kong’s old way of life re-create a collective memory and imagined community for Hong Kong people and uphold the myth of Hong Kong’s success at the expense of class and gender differences. Feng-ying Ming demonstrates how the idea of "nostalgia" in Taiwan is manipulated and appropriated for political and commercial uses in recent years.

Sophie Xiaofei Tian, Cornell University

This paper explores the nostalgic romanticizing of the image of Southland (jiangnan) in classical Chinese poetry and the cultural meanings it entails. When Du Mu, the late Tang poet, wrote his famous quatrain "Spring in Jiangnan," he was writing more about an imagined space than about the real geographical region, as he envisaged the Southland stretching a thousand miles long with the Southern Dynasties towers and terraces hidden in the misty rain. Nostalgia and romanticizing are an incestuous pair. The fascination with jiangnan, which figures so prominently in Chinese literature and popular culture, began with the Southern Dynasties aristocrats, who moved to the south due to the invasion of the non-Chinese tribes. Seeing themselves not as natives of the Southland, only as inhabitants, they in their literary writings initiated the process of turning the Southland into a fetishized object under voyeuristic gaze, a cultural icon with a fatal sensuality.

Min-Min Liang, University of Pennsylvania

This paper intends to analyze the interplay between the idea of mutual recognition, nostalgic sentiment, and gender ideology in Xilou Ji, "The Romance of the Western Mansion," a late-Ming chuanqi drama by Yuan Yuling. By the late Ming, the celebration of the intensity and transcendent dimension of qing (love and passion) had become a predominant cultural phenomenon, and the idea of mutual recognition, xiangzhi, was intimately connected with qing. The chaos in the public realm intensified an individual’s longing for xiangzhi in the private sphere. Lamenting the lack of xiangzhi and feeling nostalgic go hand in hand in this play, as the idea of mutual recognition is measured against a lost value system rooted in the cultural past. Another interesting aspect of the play is that the idea of mutual recognition has its limits, in that the idea of someone’s dying for a man is represented as an unquestionable virtue, but the idea of a man’s willingness to die for his female zhiyin is tested and challenged. Did Yuan Yuling deliberately set up a gender hierarchy in his play? I argue that the answer is more complicated than it seems, since the apparent hierarchy merely reflected the aesthetic standard of the time and was not politically motivated.

Feng-ying Ming, Whittier College

The nostalgia cultural products in Taiwan grows out of a series of contested forces operating between the discourses of cultural nostalgia, political nativism, consumerism, and a wide range of economic and social factors. It was to transform what had been conventionally regarded as "old" (i.e., their roots in the past and the native) into a hot cultural commodity. The memorable "past" thus becomes a bridge between the bleak present and the hopeful future. The nostalgic longing for an ever-receding past coincides, therefore, with a utopian vision of a better future, a land of political nativism characterized by communal support, tenacity, and an unfailing faith in the future.

In this paper, I hope to contribute to a more nuanced interpretation of nostalgia, by using the Taiwan case as focus to show the conflict and ambivalence involved in the construction of Taiwan’s past and future, via the tropes of nostalgia. I suggest that in Taiwan, "memories" are contested as a process of constant erasure, and nostalgic sentiments have also been appropriated for political or commercial use.

The materials I will use include a series of debates among Taiwan intellectuals focusing on the "nostalgic sentiments" in Taiwan, Hou Xiaoxian’s movie "Good-bye, South, Good-bye" (Zaijian nanguo, zaijian), and the alternative music produced by the Magic Rock Records.

Daisy Sheung-Yuen Ng, Yale University

In recent years, nostalgic accounts of "Hong Kong’s old way of life" and photograph albums of "historical Hong Kong" have become a fad in the publishing world. The last few years have witnessed the increasing popularity of a new genre of writing which tells the story of "how we grew up in Hong Kong." These memoirs are generally written by cultural elites whose life experience is professed to be representative of the collective experience of growing up in Hong Kong in the 60’s and 70’s. The object of nostalgia in these memoirs is not the autobiographical subject’s past, but the historical experience of Hong Kong people. These memoirs straddle the generic conventions of autobiography and ethnography, hence I would call it "autoethnography."