Women, War, Domesticity: Shanghai Literature and Popular Culture of the 1940s

WOMEN, WAR, DOMESTICITY

CHINA STUDIES Published for the Institute for Chinese Studies University of Oxford

EDITORS:

GLEN DUDBRIDGE FRANK PIEKE

VOLUME 6

WOMEN, WAR, DOMESTICITY Shanghai Literature and Popular Culture of the 1940s

BY

NICOLE HUANG

BRILL LEIDEN • BOSTON 2005

On the cover: Wen Xiang, “Pens en Lipsticks,” The Miscellany Monthly 15. 2 (May 1945): 71.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISSN ISBN

0928–5520 90 04 14242 8

© Copyright 2005 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill Academic Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910 Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

For John and Ethan

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements …………………………………………………... vii Prologue

Travels of Scarlett O’Hara ……………………… 1

Chapter One

Introduction: Written in the Ruins ……………… 18

Chapter Two

Fashioning Public Intellectuals: The Emergence of a Women’s Print Culture …... 50

Chapter Three

Image Studios: The Art of a Women’s Magazine ………………. 84

Chapter Four

Written on Water: Eileen Chang and the Modern Essay ………….. 122

Chapter Five

Ethnographies of Wartime: Autobiographical Fiction by Su Qing and Pan Liudai ………………………………… 159

Chapter Six

Garden of the Ruins: Shi Jimei’s Domestic Fiction …………………... 191

Epilogue

Travels of Eileen Chang ……………………….. 209

Plates

………………………………………………….. 234

Bibliography

………………………………………………….. 253

Index

………………………………………………….. 272

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book represents my long-time fascination with literary and cultural manifestations of human experiences through war and tyranny. It has been long in the making and thus builds on much support and generosity over the years. I must first acknowledge those who taught me to think critically and to value what I think. I would not be at the current stage of my career without the steadfast guidance and intellectual generosity of Leo Ou-fan Lee, who has, at various moments in the past decade, encouraged me to dare to disagree with my teachers, particularly himself. Theodore Huters has been a most constructive reader and critic of my writing; his comments on earlier versions of this book have been instrumental to its final completion. Lydia H. Liu has been a mentor in many different ways—her own scholarship sets a fine example and her advice on highlighting the connection between war and literature was most rewarding. Miriam Silverberg lent me a fresh new perspective ten years ago. She taught me how to integrate literary analysis and historical inquiries, and played a major role in the initial conception of the project. Many funding agencies, institutions, mentors, colleagues, and friends have supported my research and writing over the years. A graduate student research grant from the Committee for Scholarly Communication with China funded a year of substantial research and study in China. Before my departure for China, Edward Gunn phoned me and provided advice on how to do research in China. Till this day, I remain grateful to his kindness and intellectual generosity. In China, many members of the Chinese Department of Beijing University welcomed a former student of theirs back, making sure that I once again felt at home and all my research needs were met. Among them, I would like to acknowledge in particular Professors Sun Yushi, Qian Liqun, and Wen Rumin. In Shanghai, meetings with the late Wei Shaochang, Ke Ling, and Shi Zhecun were instrumental both to the completion of this particular project and to my long-term intellectual growth. Kong Haizhu facilitated these meetings and has remained a wise mentor and loyal friend ever since.

viii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I began the long process of turning my dissertation into a publishable book manuscript during a year of postdoctoral research at the Center for Chinese Studies of UC Berkeley in 1997-8. Long considered to be the center of Shanghai studies, Berkeley was the most intellectually stimulating place I could hope to be. I benefited greatly from the comments and criticisms by various participants of the Wartime Shanghai workshops, held first in Berkeley and then in Lyon France, including Wen-hsin Yeh, Frederic Wakeman, Paul Pickowicz, Sherman Cochran, Joshua Rosenzweig, and Joshua Fogel. In particular, I thank Wen-hsin Yeh for her guidance and the superb example of her historian’s craft. Years ago, Jeffery C. Kinkley provided detailed comments on an early version of Chapter Four. His encouragement kept me going at a rather difficult stage of my life and career. I am also grateful for Catharine R. Stimpson, who read my entire manuscript and provided a long list of comments and suggestions. Over the years, I benefited from ongoing conversations with many wonderful friends and colleagues. Among them, I wish to thank Yomi Braester, Madeleine Yue Dong, Andrew F. Jones, Sabina Knight, Wang Lan, Sylvia Li-chun Lin, and Kate Phillips for their wisdom and friendship. Major research for the project was conducted at the East Asian Collection of the Hoover Institute, the Library of Congress, the Shanghai Library, the National Beijing Library, and the Beijing University Library. I wish to thank staff members at these institutions for their capable help. Since my arrival seven years ago, Madison, Wisconsin has been a warm and nurturing place despite the long, and often dreary, winters. I must express my deep gratitude to William H. Nienhauser Jr., who tirelessly read two draft versions of this book and offered numerous insights and criticisms. This book would not have been published in its present shape without his generous input. Other members of my mentoring committee at the Department of East Asian Languages and Literature, including Robert Joe Cutter, Naomi McGloin, and James O’Brien, have also supported me in various ways. The Graduate School Research Committee at UW-Madison never failed in their assistance of junior faculty members. Over the years, the Committee funded several summer trips to China that helped further substantiate my research and writing. Edward Friedman and Susan Stanford Friedman shared hot meals, long conversations, and their numerous insights on war, revolution, women, travel, and border-crossing. Julia Murray, Mary Layoun, Julie

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ix

D’Acci, David Bordwell, and Pamela Potter have been wonderful mentors and friends. Charo D’Etcheverry, Mark Csikszentmihalyi, and Junko Mori shared laughter, intellectual pleasures, and passion for good food and fine stories. Parts of the book have been presented at various campus forums. I am grateful for the friendly and stimulating intellectual community in Madison. I must express my deep appreciation to Professor Glen Dudbridge and two anonymous reviewers of the original manuscript. Without their constructive and insightful criticisms, this book would not have been published in its present form. Sarah Lin Allen, who probably does not know what a talented writer and editor she is, lent me a tremendous amount of editorial help during the last stage of writing and revising. At Brill, Albert Hoffstädt and Patricia Radder have guided me with enthusiasm and patience, and Lindsay Zamponi has been a very capable and conscientious copyeditor. They have all made me a better writer. The unwavering love and support of my parents, Shan Jiang and Huang Zhongying, and my grandmother, Li Yiyin, has sustained my life and work in diaspora. My parents-in-law, Ricky Kao and Margaret Kao, have showered me with love and helped with childcare. My nuclear family endured this project on a daily basis with grace and humor. My husband, Weiyuan John Kao, the anchor of my life, has been a steady source of respect, love, and companionship. Ethan, our eighteen-month-old son, was born in our wartime, and is a delightful reminder that perhaps peace is indeed around the corner. It is to them that I owe the greatest debt. An earlier and shorter version of Chapter Two was previously published under the title “Fashioning Public Intellectuals: Women’s Print Culture in Occupied Shanghai (1941-1945),” in Christian Henriot and Wen-hsin Yeh eds., In the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Shanghai under Japanese Occupation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). A shorter and different version of Chapter Four is being published as the introduction to a collection of essays by Eileen Chang entitled Written on Water (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

PROLOGUE

TRAVELS OF SCARLETT O’HARA I was alone on the dusky balcony after Su Qing left. Suddenly I noticed a tall building in the distance, on whose edge hung a great swatch of rouge-like redness. At first I thought it was the reflection of the setting sun on the windows, but on a second glance, I saw a full moon, rising crimson above the city. I murmured to myself, “so this is what they mean by turbulent times.”1

This observation was made by the writer Eileen Chang ઠื߆ (19201995) in an essay published in April 1945. As viewed from her private balcony at dusk, the city of Shanghai was colored a deep, saturated red as though stained by the ongoing war and turmoil. One senses that even greater destruction lurked in the looming darkness of the night. Chang made her impressionistic sketch of the Shanghai cityscape in the eighth year of a full-scale cataclysmic Sino-Japanese war that devoured much of eastern China and threatened the great hinterland. It was also the fourth year of Shanghai’s era of total occupation by the Japanese. A mere four months later, in August, the war and occupation ended with the surrender of Japan and the return of the Nationalists to reclaim the occupied territories. However, historical records on modern China tell us that much of 1945 consisted of hunger, death, scarcity, blockades, air raids, social unrest, personal tragedies, and political suppression. Shanghai under Japanese occupation is considered to be the darkest period in the collective memory of a city with a complex history of colonialism and cosmopolitanism. This complex history began in the mid-nineteenth century during the Qing Dynasty. Following the arrival of the British after the first Opium

All Translations are mine unless otherwise specified. 1 See Eileen Chang, “Wo kan Su Qing” Ӎ ߡ ᙨ ‫( ی‬The Way I Look at Su Qing),

Tiandi yuekan ˭ ϙ ̇ ̵ (Heaven and Earth Monthly) 19 (April 1945); reprinted in Zhang Ailing sanwen quanbian ઠ ื ߆ ಞ ́ η ሆ (A Complete Collection of Essays by Eileen Chang) (Hangzhou: Zhejiang wenyi chu banshe ), 256-73.

2

PROLOGUE

War (1839-42), the bustling regional town, located on China’s central coast, in the prosperous lower region of the Yangtze River, was swiftly transformed into a major harbor and treaty port. By 1937, on the eve of the outbreak of the war, Shanghai, dubbed “the Paris of Asia,” was portrayed in various visual and verbal media as an exhilarating cosmopolitan metropolis that was China’s financial, commercial, and industrial capital, and the center of its burgeoning modern print culture. Some described Shanghai as one of the most glamorous cities in the world. Many more referred to it as an ‘anomaly’ or a ‘trap,’ since the very name ‘Shanghai’ was synonymous with adventure, exotic pleasures, wanton indulgence, and danger. When Chang and others like her began writing, they embraced a city of shifting divisions and borders. For decades, the central city area was designated as the British-dominated International Settlement and the French Concession. Later, North Americans joined Shanghai’s international community. Concessions were occupied by the Westerners— called the ‘Shanghailanders’—who enjoyed ‘extra-territoriality,’ that is, a guarantee of freedom from prosecution under Chinese law.2 The glamorous and wealthy concessions were arenas of power and prestige, with tree-lined boulevards and avenues, glitzy hotels, bars, cafés, department stores, and an array of mansions and other edifices built in the neoclassical or Art Deco style. Many Chinese writers and intellectuals chose to live in the concessions for their proximity to the amenities of modern life, and for their privileged access to channels of expression. Chinese in the concessions typically resided in one of Shanghai’s numerous shikumen row houses—vernacular dwellings built of brick, wood, and cement. These were situated around a small quadrangle known as tianjing , or ‘well of the sky,’ and set away from the city’s main thoroughfares.3

2 For a stud y of the legal and political cultures within Shanghai’s foreign co mmunities, see R. A. Bickers, “Death of a Young Shanghailander: The Thorburn Case and the Defense of the British Treaty Ports in China in 1931,” Modern Asian Studies 30. 2 (1996): 271-300. Also see Nicholas R Clifford, Shanghai, 1925: Urban National ism and the Defense of Foreign Privilege (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, 1979). 3 For a study of Shanghai’s unique vernacular architecture within the conce ssions,

see Lu Hanchao, Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Cen tury (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 138-85. Also see Zhang

TRAVELS OF SCARLETT O ’HARA

3

For decades, Shanghai was represented to the rest of the world as an alluring icon characterized by the crisscrossing main streets and alleyways of the concessions. However, the concessions were not isolated, but were surrounded by a Chinese city, built in the typical South-of-theYangtze style of vernacular architecture—clean white plastered walls, black tiled roofs, carved railings, and engravings. As in the rest of China, poverty and civil unrest reigned in the Chinese city of Shanghai. By the 1940s, much had already been written about Shanghai as an enigma and a city of contradictory worlds. This literature formed a complex textual labyrinth, comprised of Chinese, Japanese, and Western sources, through which Chang and young women of her generation had to navigate before they could begin to write. 4 When Chang and her contemporaries did begin to write, they chose an extraordinary time in history. It was marked by the beginning of the Pacific War, in December 1941, which divided the eight years of Japanese military presence in Shanghai into two short, yet distinctive, phases: the Orphan Island Era and the Occupation Era. By the early 1930s, Japan had already displaced Great Britain as the paramount foreign power in China. Following the seizure of Manchuria (China’s Northeast) in 1931 and the reinstatement of China’s last emperor as head of the puppet state Manchukuo a year later, Japan proceeded to colonize the rest of the country. Up until December 1941, the International Settlement and French Concession in Shanghai were still controlled by Westerners. Like an island, the two concessions were encircled by the Japanese army stationed along the borders of Shanghai and much of eastern China. The term Gudao ‫࣑׃‬, or Orphan Island, provides a topographical analogy of a particular historical moment, conveying vividly both the spatial organization and political dynamics within and surrounding the city of Shanghai. For readers familiar with Shanghai’s unique history, this analogy aptly defines the geopolitical position of the city in a longer process. The term captures Shanghai’s antagonistic relation to the rest of China throughout the city’s one-hundred-year history of cultural Xichang ઠ Ꭷ ‫ ؤ‬and Zhang Wei ઠ ⒥ , eds., Lao longtang Ч Ҿ ੫ (Old Alleyways) (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian chubanshe, 2001). 4 For an overview of Shanghai’s changing cityscape in the first few decades of the

twentieth century, see the vivid descriptions in Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Mod ern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945 (Ca mbridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 3-42.

4

PROLOGUE

hybridity: Shanghai had always been an ‘orphan’ and an ‘island’ in a peculiar sense. Events at the end of 1941 were to radically change the region’s existing spatial dynamics. The island would cease to exist as borders were redrawn, and a new era would begin. Textbook descriptions of the importance of this year in the history of Shanghai, and of China, are mostly identical. On December 7, 1941, Japanese planes bombed the American fleet moored at Pearl Harbor, Hawai’i, signifying the formal outbreak of the Pacific War. In the early morning on December 8, 1941, the Japanese army attacked American and British military forces stationed around Shanghai on the Huangpu River and raided the International Settlement, thereby taking control of the city and ending the Orphan Island Era.5 Chang’s vision of a Shanghai bathed in red functions both as a commentary on the immediate historical situation at this time, and as an insight into the social and cultural transformations of the city in the preceding one hundred years. More importantly, her observation serves as a prelude to an ingenious vision of her time and place, to a pressing need to write and publish, and to narratives of innermost memories of war, tyranny, and personal growth. Her description of Shanghai underscores the violent context against which she and others used writing and publishing as a means of survival, a path toward a better life, and a crucial tool for self-representation. In the same 1945 essay, Chang describes Su Qing ᙨ‫( ی‬1914-1982), a fellow woman writer of her time, as a luanshi jiaren ෩̛՞ʆ, meaning “a beauty at a turbulent time.” This is a term that appears in the Chinese rendition of Gone with the Wind , the 1939 Hollywood blockbuster based on Margaret Mitchell’s best-selling novel. 6 Against the

5 For a thorough historical overview of the period, see Wen-hsin Yeh, “Prologue:

Shanghai Besieged, 1937-45” in Wen-hsin Yeh, ed., Wartime Shanghai (London: Routledge , 1998), 1-17. 6 Margaret Mitchell’s (1 900-1949) thousand-page novel Gone with the Wind was

written between 1926 and 1929 but was not published until 1936, on the eve of World War II. The book broke sales records, and Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937. Gone with the Wind (1939) was directed by Victor Fleming, and starred Clark Gable as Rhett Butler and Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara. It was one of the glories of the studio era—the golden age of Hollywood cinema. For a study of both the novel and the film, see Richard Harwell, ed., Gone With the Wind as Book and Film (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1983). For an analysis of the novel as both litera-

TRAVELS OF SCARLETT O ’HARA

5

dismal backdrop of a war-torn city, Chang’s allusion places in the foreground a woman’s image that transcends national, ethnic, and cultural boundaries. Hunger, death, scarcity, blockades, air raids, social unrest, personal tragedies, and political suppression are pushed into the background. Highlighted as a legend of her time, Su Qing exemplifies an individual who survives and thrives against all odds. As I will illustrate throughout this book, the theme of a woman surviving the turbulence of her time is the defining characteristic of the women’s print culture that Chang and her contemporaries championed. This print culture boldly engages traditions of writing women, and traditions of writing about women, in China, Japan, and the West. It defines a unique wartime popular culture that took shape during the nearly four years of Japanese occupation, and also into the postwar years, of Shanghai. This image of a woman illuminated by the fires of war is a composite emerging from everyday imagination, fostered by the popular culture of Shanghai of the late nineteenth century through the 1940s. Chang’s reference to the well-known fictional and cinematic motifs of Gone with the Wind , and her description of a fellow writer in the context of a continuous appropriation of these transmitted texts suggest the lasting impact of early twentieth-century Anglo-American popular culture in the decades of Shanghai cosmopolitanism, with Hollywood cinema being a representative force in this cultural traveling. 7 The power of transcultural visual media such as cinema is evident here, and so is the interaction between visual forms and other cultural genres, particularly popular literature. Chang readily manipulates these slippery boundaries and, in doing so, exemplifies the radical subjectivity of a writing woman who swiftly rises to fame as an important voice of her time. Chang’s playful use of a popular literary and cinematic motif is, most of all, an attempt at self-positioning. In her historical imagination, the publishing world in 1940s Shanghai was nothing less than a stage set up against an extraordinary background, a stage upon which women writers, editors, and publishers fashioned themselves into legends, and their efforts in self-representation and mutual promotion constituted the high drama of the era. ture and history, see Darden Ashbury Pyron, ed., Recasting: Gone with the Wind in American Culture (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1983). 7 For a discussion of the impact of Hollywood cinema on Shanghai popular cu lture of the 1930s, see Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern, 96-106.

6

PROLOGUE

The primary task of this book is to construct a wartime narrative that examines the brief careers of Eileen Chang, Su Qing, and other women who wrote, published, and, to a certain extent, dominated the cultural scene of occupied Shanghai. Contrary to the popular conception that normal social and cultural life was nearly wiped out during Japanese control of the entire city, Shanghai popular culture during the first half of the 1940s flourished, and a new generation of urban writers emerged on the scene. These writers were acutely aware of their abilities and limits. They were more aptly equipped than any of their predecessors to challenge the boundaries between life and work, and to appropriate all literary and cultural discourses available to them. The emergence of Eileen Chang and her generation of urban Shanghai writers was a peculiar product of political suppression. During the Orphan Island Era, a group of leftist writers and some of the famous Shanghai modernists rallied together Orphan Island literary forces. They took refuge within the concessions and produced literature and art that aimed to strengthen nationalist sentiments, and to mobilize the masses to participate in China’s war of resistance. This Orphan Island literature is generally regarded as the standard model for resistance literature in wartime China. Ke Ling ‫ޅ‬᝞ (1909-2000), who was a highly esteemed leftist writer/editor of the Orphan Island Era, a survivor of the occupation regime, and a spiritual leader among a small group of leftist writers who remained in Shanghai throughout the war period, preserved many memories of the group in his essays. Ke’s collection of memoir essays entitled Zhu zi shengya ೹ϪΆତ (My Life-long Journey Toiling with Words) provides us with a vivid account of how he and his circle of intelligentsia continued to produce social commentary and political criticism in the form of fiction, essays, and drama, within the confines of the concessions from 1937 to 1941. 8 In the literary and cultural history of Shanghai, the 1941 divide signals the suppression of the Orphan Island literary resistance. After December 1941, the Japanese also launched an assault on the cultural and social front, curtailing local voices of defiance in Shanghai’s cultural scene. Many Orphan Island writers compared the political and intellectual atmosphere in post 1941 Shanghai to that of a suffocating prison cell. Many either went underground or moved to the hinterland. New

8 See Zhu zi shengya (My Life-long Journey Toiling with Words) (Taiyuan: Shanxi renmin chubanshe, 1986).

TRAVELS OF SCARLETT O ’HARA

7

channels of expression had to be sought and new textual strategies had to be devised in order to continue voicing defiance under Japanese rule. The Shanghai cultural scene changed radically under Japanese occupation. Along with voices of resistance, Anglo-American influences were eliminated in the popular media, while words and images promoting a “Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere”—the crown jewel of Japanese colonial ideology—flooded popular culture. Many newspapers and journals were either shut down or taken over by the Japanese and turned into organs of their political machine. The biweekly journal Wenyou ́˩, or Literary Companion, and the monthly Wenxie ́փ, or Literary Association, were two key literary publications inaugurated by Japanese cultural agencies of the occupation regime. They were indicative of the verbal and visual rhetoric this political machine typically employed. 9 On the cover of the August 1, 1943 issue of Literary Companion, a watercolor by a Japanese artist portrays a wavy-haired Chinese woman, dressed in a sleeveless cheongsam, or qipao , set against a festive Shanghai. The drawing is entitled “Celebrating the Return of the Shanghai Concessions.” The setting is the Bund—a strip of foreign embankment, facing the Huangpu River, that was the embodiment of Shanghai’s complex history of colonialism and cosmopolitanism. In the drawing, the familiar image of the Bund is dramatically transformed by flags of the Republic of China and banners that read “China Participates in the War” and “Defeat Britain and America.” On the right corner is the Customs House, rebuilt in 1928, regarded as a symbol of the British Empire, with its clock replicating London’s Big Ben. In the drawing, this architectural landmark is pushed into the corner and adorned by a Republic of China flag, a symbol that is overshadowed by the haunting presence of the overarching ideology of the Japanese colonial empire [Plate 1]. The visual order of this drawing implies that the Republic of China had inevitably become part of the “Greater East Asian Co-prosperity

9 Literary Companion was a biweekly journal edited by Zheng Wushan ቷ ѳ ʱ and remained in publication from May 1943 to July 1945. Literary Association Monthly was a monthly journal edited by the Shanghai branch of the Sino-Japanese Cultural Associat ion, a key player in the movement known as the “Greater East Asian Literature,” which was a key political organ in the Japanese propaganda machine. The journal was in publ ication from November 1943 to September 1944.

8

PROLOGUE

Sphere” in a common battle against the West. 10 The symbolism of this cover image was repeated throughout the journal’s three-year history. Chinese women, wearing either everyday clothing or dramatic costumes, were featured in symbolic depictions of “Pan-Asianism” and “anti-western imperialism” and adorned most of the magazines’ covers. The cover of the November 1944 issue of Literary Companion, featuring two mannequin-like female figures dressed in Qing Dynasty costumes, is one other example [Plate 2]. These images illustrate how the Japanese propaganda machine typically used images of Chinese women as symbols of Chinese collaboration with its regime. In addition to its print culture, Shanghai’s film industry, by then regrouped and financed by the Japanese, together with the Manchurian film industry, shouldered the task of producing images that would compete with those produced by Hollywood.11 On December 8, 1941, the first day of full occupation, the Japanese Imperial Army ordered Shanghai’s movie houses to open for regular business and show both Chinese and Hollywood films. This was the occupiers’ way to insinuate that Shanghai’s cultural prosperity could and should continue within a new colonial order. But the situation soon changed and Hollywood films were banned. The Imperial Army began to propagate the ideology of a “Greater East Asian Film Sphere” to transform and assimilate the film and fan cultures of Shanghai. Once again, images of Chinese women were used as figures of collaboration in cinematic productions of the time. The goal, key players in the regrouped film industry claimed, was to produce “high-quality” and “all-Chinese” feature films to “win back”

10 Wang Jingwei, the head of the collaborationist regime, took over the government after Chiang Kaishek and his troops retreated to the hinterland in 1937. Wang vowed to uphold the Three People’s Principles (Nationalism, People’s Rights or Democracy, and People’s Livelihood) of Sun Yatsen, who had founded the Re public of China in 1911. Wang intended to continue the state-building process inter rupted by the outbreak of the war, but Japanese control denied him any auto nomy. Pan-Asian ism and Sino-Japanese collaboration were added to his state-building ideology. See David P. Barrett, “The Wang Jingwei Regime, 1940-45: Continuities and Disjunc tures with Nationalist China” in David P. Barrett and Lawrence N. Shyu, eds., Chinese Collaboration with Japan, 1932-1945: The Limits of Accomm odation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 102-15. 11 See “Guochan dianying bianju zuotan” ੢ ୕ ྐ ᅬ ሆ ᄶ ࣙ ሾ (A Roundtable

Discussion of Screenwriters of Chinese National Cinema), Zazhi yuekan ᕺ ბ ̇ ̵ (The Miscellany Monthly) 12. 2 (November 1943): 72-7.

TRAVELS OF SCARLETT O ’HARA

9

the local audiences who had for two decades been lured to imported films, particularly Hollywood productions.12 A chameleon-like figure reigned over the cinematic scene of the new colonial order. Li Xianglan Ө࡜ᚱ (Ri Ko-ran or Yamaguchi Yoshiko, b. 1920), a Japanese woman raised in Manchuria by a Chinese family, grew up to become the brightest film star and popular icon of Manchuria. She traveled between Manchuria and Shanghai as a cultural ambassador in an effort to propagate the cause of Japanese colonialism, and to instill a new system of political ideologies and popular symbolism into the cultural industry of occupied China. Li’s ties to Shanghai’s film industry were further strengthened following the May 1943 release of the big-budget historical epic film Wanshi liufang ໗̛‫ڤޟ‬, or Eternity , set during the Opium War of 1839-1842. In Eternity , Li Xianglan plays Fenggu, a young woman who urges her lover to participate in the antiopium campaign launched by Lin Zexu. Li’s star presence is enhanced in the film by her theme song, “Mai tang ge” or “The Candy Seller’s Song,” a tune Fenggu sings in front of an opium den while selling a type of candy reputed to curb opium addiction.13 In the two years following the box-office success of Eternity , Li’s frequent visits to Shanghai were documented in both words and images. Her last visit on July 21, 1945 was particularly well-covered. Local media promoted her, along with a group of young popular women writers. Eileen Chang, the most brilliant literary star of the time, was featured together with the queen of Pan-Asian cinema in a photograph [Plate 3]. 14 In a provocative study on the correlation between the shap12 See Bai Xin Ύ ˻ , “Yinian lai de Zhongguo dianyingjie” ɾ ϶ գ ‫ ڄ‬ˀ ੢ ྐ ᅬ

ߍ (The Chinese Film Industry over the Past Year), Huawen meiri ൡ ́ ӵ ̅ (Everyday Chinese, the Chinese weekly edition of Mainichi shinbun ) 10. 1 (January 1943): 11-2. 13 For an analysis of the film, see Poshek Fu, Between Shanghai and Hong Kong:

The Politics of Chinese Cinemas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 110-18. 14 See “Naliang hui ji” ঢ ଘ ๡ ৩ (A Gathering for Summer Cooling), The Miscellany Monthly 15. 5 (August 1945): 67-72. For a study of Shanghai’s film indu stry under Japanese occupation, see Poshek Fu, Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinemas, 93-132. See also Shelley Stephenson, “The Occ upied Screen: Star, Fan, and Nation in Shanghai Cinema, 1937-1945,” unpublished Ph. D. dissertation, University of Ch icago, 2000.

For a historical survey of the star system and operational mechanisms of Man’ei or Manying ျ ᅬ (Manchurian Film Cooperative), see Hu Chang and Gu Quan, Man-

10

PROLOGUE

ing of Japanese modan (modern) culture and the process of colonial expansion, Miriam Silverberg precisely defines Li Xianglan’s role in the production of Pan-Asian images: “Not only did Ri Ko-ran have two identities (Japanese and Chinese), but she had two tasks. She made entertainment movies aimed at pacifying the colonized Manchurians and introducing Japan to them, but she also made very different movies for the Japanese audience, celebrating the Japanese conquest of the continent through the melodramatic symbolism of the romantic conquest of the Chinese maiden by the dashing Japanese hero.” 15 It was within this context that both the novel and the film versions of Gone with the Wind were localized. Despite key historical events of December 1941 that changed the course of Shanghai’s urban history, popular culture continued at its own pace. The dissemination and reproduction of Hollywood-style images, as well as other images labeled as ‘Western’ or ‘American,’ never ceased in the four decades of Shanghai cosmopolitanism. As popular as she might have been with the Shanghai audience, Li Xianglan and her images did not dominate the cultural scene. “A beauty at a turbulent time” and other Hollywood references persisted in the everyday imagination of men and women living in the city, even though, on the surface, any direct references to Anglo-American popular culture were eliminated. Both the Japanese occupiers and their Chinese counterparts took the terrain of popular culture and daily life seriously. In many spin-off narratives, Scarlett O’Hara of occupied Shanghai continued, disguised, to compete with an array of Pan-Asian images, such as that of Li Xianglan and the fancifully dressed women from the covers of Literary Comying: guoce dianying mianmian guan ျ ᅬ í ੢ യ ྐ ᅬ ࡒ ࡒ ᝳ (The Ma nchurian Film Studio: A Comprehensive Look at a Cinema of National Policies) (Be ijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1990). For a study of cinema as a mechanism of Japanese colonial expansion, see Michael Baskett, “The Attractive Empire: Colonial Asia in Japanese Imperial Film Culture, 1931-1953,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA, 2000. A special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique deals with visual propaganda produced by the Japanese colonial empire during the 1930s and 1940s. See Visual Cultures of Japanese Imperialism, positions 8. 3 (Winter 2000). 15 See Miriam Silverberg, “Remembering Pearl Harbor, Forgetting Charlie

Chaplin, and the Case of the Disappearing Western Woman: A Picture Story,” posi tions 1 (Spring 1993): 24-76. For another study of Li Xianglan’s role in Japan’s co lonial film industry, see Shelley Stephenson, “‘Her Traces Are Found Everywhere’: Shanghai, Li Xianglan, and the ‘Greater East Asian Film Sphere’” in Ying jin Zhang, ed., Cinema and Urban Culture in Shanghai, 1922-1943 (Stanford: Stan ford University Press, 1999), 222-45.

TRAVELS OF SCARLETT O ’HARA

11

panion. The migration of the story line and images of Gone with the Wind from American popular culture to the literature and cinema of occupied Shanghai highlights the fact that the cultural scene became a hotly contested ground. It also illuminates a process of cultural translation that took its own course alongside the waves of social and political turbulence characterizing the first four decades of twentieth-century Chinese history. The theme of Gone with the Wind first came to the Chinese urban audience in fragmented form around the late 1930s. With the Shanghai première of the film in spring of 1940, the majority of this audience learned the entire plot and central personalities. The première was a major event by any standard. While most first-run Hollywood films were expected to be screened for no longer than a week to ensure a fast turnaround, Gone with the Wind remained in theaters for several months, breaking box-office records. The popular Dian sheng ྐᑵ (Movietone) magazine, which prided itself on maintaining rigorous critical standards for imported films, gave its one and only top rating for the film, which surpassed that of Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 classic Modern Times . This enthusiastic review was overshadowed by a tabloid report on the entangled relationship of the film’s leading lady, Vivien Leigh, with Laurence Olivier.16 For the Shanghai audience in the spring of 1940, Vivien Leigh was Scarlett O’Hara, and stories both inside and outside the film blended together in the audience’s collective reception of the imported images. 17 In several observers’ accounts, the sensational response generated by the film among its Shanghai audience was unprecedented in the four decades of Chinese cinematic history since 1897, the year when cinema was first introduced into China.18 Immediately after the movie’s première, public attention also turned to the original novel, which began to circulate as a standard English16 See Dian sheng (Movietone) 19 (1940): 385-6. Coverage of Vivien Leigh and

Laurence Olivier’s emotional entanglement and a critical review of the film Gone with the Wind appear on the same page. 17 See Xin Ying ๘ ᅬ , “Fei Wenli chenggong zhuan” ඗ Ԍ ᘰ Ͼ ̷ ෭ (The Suc-

cess Story of Vivien Leigh), Shanghai shenghuo ʕ ऺ Ά ‫( ޥ‬Shanghai Guide) 4. 8 (1940): 41. 18 For a brief account of the introduction of cinema in China, see Lee Daw-Ming, “How Cinema Came to China: Some Theories and Doubts” in Law Kar, ed., Early Images of Hong Kong and China: The 19th Hong Kong International Film Fest ival (Hong Kong: Urban Cou ncil, 1995), 33-6.

12

PROLOGUE

language textbook.19 Several versions of abridged translations also showed up on the market. The novel became an essential text for avid middlebrow readers who were constantly concerned about maintaining their ‘cultured’ appearance. In various 1940s works of fiction, stylish female characters are found reading copies of Gone with the Wind in public spaces, such as inside streetcars, apparently positioned within the gaze of others. Pauline, the female protagonist in the woman writer Shi Jimei’s ‫ݯ‬ᐡࠀ (1920-1968) story entitled “Yecao” ௴ৎ (Wild Grass), falls in love with the world inside Gone with the Wind . Often seen with a copy of the novel in her hand, Pauline is fashioned as a typical middlebrow reader in the story, a mirror image of the middlebrow readership that followed literary writing by Shi and other women of the time. After repeated readings, Pauline declares that she can see both Melanie Hamilton and Scarlett O’Hara in her own moral character and will have to make a difficult choice in her emotional life, between the restraint and quiet strength of the former and the charm and blind passion of the latter. The world of Gone with the Wind thus entered the daily vocabulary of Shanghai’s middle-class readers and made personal dilemma fashionably complex.20 The title of the 1939 film was first translated literally as Sui feng er qu ᎲࡘЩ̓ (Gone with the Wind), but was later changed to Luanshi jiaren (A Beauty at a Turbulent Time) at its première. The latter rendition played an effective role in instilling the film with cultural relevance for the Shanghai audience, and thus contributed to the success of the film in the Chinese market. Indeed, the expression “a beauty at a turbulent time” is tinged with elements of sensationalism from China’s own literary past, invoking prevailing themes in the long tradition of romance narratives, beginning with Tang dynasty (ninth-tenth centuries) classical tales, in which a beautiful woman is often situated in an improbable position, torn between passion, love, dignity, and social recognition.21

19 Fu Donghua, “Yi xu” ᙲ Һ (Translator’s Preface) in Piao (Gone with the Wind)

(Shanghai: Guohua bianyi she, 1940), 1. 20 Shi Jimei, “Yecao” (Wild Grass), Ziluolan yuekan ാ ᗘ ᚱ ̇ ̵ (The Violet Monthly) 1 (April 1943): 56. 21 For a definitive study of the representation of women in Tang classical tales, see

Glen Dudbridge, “Beautiful Creatures” in The Tale of Li Wa (London: Ithaca Press, 1983), 67-80.

TRAVELS OF SCARLETT O ’HARA

13

In the southern dramas of the late Ming and early Qing (sixteenthseventeenth centuries), with Hong Sheng’s ‫( جޞ‬1605-1704) Chang sheng dian ‫ۂ‬Ά๸ (The Palace of Lasting Life, 1688) and Kong Shangren’s ˱‫׋‬έ (1648-1718) Taohua shan थ‫( ࣮ګ‬Peach Blossom Fan, 1699) being the most representative works, a beautiful woman often meets her challenge against the backdrop of a war-torn era. 22 This narrative tradition continued in the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century fictional romances and social commentaries, the most emblematic of all being Wu Jianren’s ѹ₡ʆ (1866-1910) novel Hen hai ‫( ऺݒ‬The Sea of Regret, 1906), in which the female protagonist Dihua shoulders all of the burdens and complexities of her era, traveling from north to south through much of a China trodden by wars, disasters, and tragedies.23 The early twentieth-century production of urban popular fiction included a sizable enterprise known as Yuanyang hudie pai ᏚᏗሪራާ, or ‘Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School,’ of which Wu Jianren was considered to be one of the predecessors. “A beauty at a turbulent time” continued to sum up key aspects of this narrative tradition.24 Finally, the story of Scarlett O’Hara was translated into the Chinese context, becoming an exotic version of the archetypal Chinese beauty narrative—a story about the beautiful heroine, her entangled relationships, and the era that betrays her. The term and its many connotations entered into the public vocabulary, contributing, together with other translated words and images, to the shaping of the everyday imagination of men and women living in wartime Shanghai. The transplantation of Scarlett O’Hara’s story from the red clay soil of rural Georgia to the concrete of Shanghai’s bustling streets entered its next stage with the publication of a complete translation of the novel as 22 For a study of Kong Shangren and other playwrights of his time, see Richard

Strassberg, The World of K’ung Shang-jen: A Man of Letters in Early Ch’ing China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 23 Patrick Hanan, “Introduction” in The Sea of Regret: Two Turn-of-the-Cen-

tury Chinese Romantic Novels (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995), 1-17. 24 For a discussion of fictional motifs in Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies li tera ture, see Perry Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early TwentiethCentury Chinese Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). Also see Rey Chow, “Mandarin Ducks and Butterflie s: An Exercise in Popular Readings” in Women and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East (Minnesota and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 34-83.

14

PROLOGUE

an authoritative correction of earlier publications of abridged editions. Fu Donghua ఔ‫ز‬ൡ (1893-1971), writer and renowned translator of Anglo-American literature, penned this complete translation. In his preface to the translation, Fu sounds genuinely surprised by the strong reaction of Shanghai audiences to the film version and states that several friends of his have convinced him of the urgency of undertaking a ‘proper’ translation of the novel—that is, one that will do full justice to the literary value of the original text. Fu completed the task a mere few months after the film’s première, and his translation was warmly received by the Shanghai readership. Fu decided not to use “A Beauty at a Turbulent Time” as the title of his translation. Perhaps as an elite scholar, he wanted to maintain some distance between his work and the context in which his work was to be received. The phrase “a beauty at a turbulent time,” or luanshi jiaren , would appear too sentimental, too ornate, and therefore too middlebrow for his ‘highbrow’ taste. He named his translation Piao ᚂ, a monosyllabic word that means ‘floating’ or ‘drifting away,’ which to him was a clear-cut rendition that was much closer to the title of the original novel. With Fu’s meticulous translation, Scarlett O’Hara became known to Chinese readers not just as a masquerading Vivian Leigh, but also as Hao Sijia ਋‫݋‬࿂, or “Hao jia daxiaojie” ਋ࣁʨʮֹ (the oldest daughter of the Hao family). Tara, Scarlett O’Hara’s fictional home, became Tao Le ంᆪ, both characters tao and le implying happiness, ease, and comfort. Fu’s sinicization of personal and place names made the American South of the Civil War era much less foreign and more culturally accessible to a Chinese readership.25 Two years later, during the occupation era, there also emerged a stage adaptation that furthered the process of sinicization championed by Fu Donghua’s translation. This adaptation was penned by none other than Ke Ling, the leading leftist writer/editor of the Orphan Island Era. In Ke’s rendition, Tara is a small village south of the Yangtze River, and the war that breaks out is no longer the American Civil War, but the Chinese Civil War (1926-9). Scarlett O’Hara is portrayed once again to the Chinese audience as a Hao Sijia, the oldest daughter in the Hao family, one of the largest clans occupying a small farming village in south China that is hit hard by war and civil unrest. The descriptions make strong references to the on-going Sino-Japanese 25 Margaret Mitchell, Piao (Gone with the Wind), translated by Fu Donghua (Shanghai: Guohua bianyi she, 1940).

TRAVELS OF SCARLETT O ’HARA

15

war, which was on an even larger and more destructive scale than the Chinese Civil War, but Ke Ling’s choice not to set the story in the immediate present protected his work from being banned by the Japanese censors. This was one of the key strategies adopted by Orphan Island writers who remained in occupied Shanghai in order to continue producing literature of defiance. The play marked Ke Ling’s first attempt at scriptwriting. His willingness to work with a popular theater and audience also signaled the leftist writers’ recognition of the fundamental role popular culture played in an era of harsh political suppression. The play was soon performed at the Shanghai Paris Theater, on October 10, 1942. The choice of the date was intended to commemorate the anniversary of the founding of the Republic of China (October 10, 1911), a daring gesture considering that Ke’s every move at the time was being monitored by the Japanese.26 Scarlett O’Hara’s travels in Shanghai began with the film’s initial screening in 1940, proceeded to a discovery of the full text of the novel through Fu Donghua’s introduction, and culminated with a stage adaptation that transformed the original story and characters into something uniquely Chinese. The original storyline of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind covers a twelve-year span. At the beginning of the novel, in 1861, Scarlett O’Hara is a sixteen-year-old girl about to enter adulthood. Twelve years later, she will have experienced Secession, Civil War, and Reconstruction. On a personal level, she will have experienced love, 26 The production also marked the inaugural performance by the new Kugan

ࠚ ห (Hard Work) Theater Troupe, a group of progressive performing artists under the leadership of the veteran filmmaker and dramatist Huang Zuolin ෦ ы ᒂ (19061994), who chose to stay in occupied Shanghai after the outbreak of the Pacific War. At the time, Huang asked Ke Ling to produce new scripts for the troupe. Ke Ling’s scriptwriting during this period demonstrates a fixation on the theme of a beauty set against a turbulent time. Naturally Ke also went back to China’s own fictional trad itions to search for models of narrating war and individual tragedies. For instance, he adapted Wu Jianren’s 1906 fictional masterpiece The Sea of Regret into a stage play. Ke suggested that the brightest spot in the story is the female protagonist Dihua, who is the crystallization of all the pain, suffering, and voices of defiance of her time. Dihua’s story under Ke Ling’s pen becomes a variation of the Scarlett O’Har a narrative. Ke Ling’s Gone with the Wind was not formally published until 1944 when Huang Zuolin brought it to the Nationalist-controlled hinterland. See Ke Ling, Piao (Gone with the Wind) (Chongqing: Meixue chubanshe, 1944). For an account of the fate of Ke Ling’s work, see Yao Fangzao, Ke Ling zhuan ‫ ޅ‬᝞ ෭ (A Biography of Ke Ling) (Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe, 2001), 181-5.

16

PROLOGUE

marriage, death, betrayal, childbirth, and material loss, with her destiny entangled between two Southern families. The Chinese Scarlett O’Hara experiences as many ordeals as her American counterpart, and Ke Ling’s final adaptation maintains the most important aspect of the original novel—turmoil in individual lives is set parallel to tribulations in the larger context. Without the war and its drastic impact in the background, Scarlett O’Hara’s story would have lost most of its luster, whether in America or China. The journey of Scarlett O’Hara in occupied Shanghai produced yet another episode. The most ingenious manipulation of the story and themes from Gone with the Wind was executed by none other than Eileen Chang in her attempt to blend filmic images with her assessment of the emergence of a new brand of writing women. Chang went a step further than Ke Ling in her indigenization of the story, characters, and themes. She saw in the Scarlett O’Hara’s narrative not only the potential for a historical commentary, but also a crucial opportunity to redefine the persona of a woman writer, and a radical subjectivity. By dubbing her fellow writer as “a beauty at a turbulent time,” Chang further exploited the fictional and filmic texts in order to carry out something that she never openly admitted to doing—to seek channels of self-expression at an adverse time, to tell a different sort of wartime story, and, most importantly, to challenge the existing literary hierarchy and establish a new literary order. Compared to writers of the Orphan Island Era, such as Ke Ling, Chang was much less concerned about the voices of resistance as a collective response, and even less interested in the theater or cinema as means of mass mobilization. She set out to channel the potential of the Scarlett O’Hara narrative in a strikingly different direction—toward a highly personalized way of narrating war, history, trauma, and individual growth. Chang hinted at the key to the success she and others achieved over a brief period of time under the Japanese occupation. Their success stories indicate that there were different ways to address the presence of war, and that wartime narratives could be constructed figuratively and thus more pervasively. The Japanese propaganda machine might have used images of women as symbols of Sino-Japanese collaboration and as vehicles of the ideology of a Pan-Asianism, but the same construction of a woman and her city could be subverted to serve different purposes. Literary transformations took on political meanings, and discursive subversions took place within a highly controlled printed space.

TRAVELS OF SCARLETT O ’HARA

17

Traditional fictional motifs had persisting allure in the twentieth-century imagination; Chang and others assimilated them in a new context and charged them with brand new meanings, in the same fashion that imported words and images had been processed in decades of transculturation since the late nineteenth century. Textual strategies were employed as everyday coping tactics in the manufacturing of individual responses to an adverse time and a fleeting moment in modern Chinese history. The woman writer fashioned herself into an authoritative commentator on the events of her time. She traveled freely through an intricately woven intertextual world—the accumulation and intersection of centuries of literary and cultural discourses on women and popular culture, in China, in Japan, and also in the West.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION: WRITTEN IN THE RUINS From the quintessential American Southern belle to an enduring icon of wartime Shanghai, the adaptation of Scarlett O’Hara signifies the resilience of the city’s middlebrow culture and the persistence of those who cultivated it. Some of the most enthusiastic advocates of this wartime middlebrow culture were women who began writing and publishing after Shanghai fell completely under Japanese control. Contrary to popular belief, everyday life in Shanghai did not grind to a halt with the outbreak of a full-scale war and complete occupation. Instead, a generation of innovative and resourceful young authors continued the process of cultural mediation that had begun decades earlier. These women rose to fame by writing literature and producing fine art, and they dominated the cultural scene of occupied Shanghai. As in both the novel and the film version of Gone with the Wind , the collective wartime story told by a new generation of Shanghai writers highlighted three important and intertwined themes: women, war, and domesticity. War and related atrocities framed daily life in occupied Shanghai, but popular culture engaged primarily with the domestic space. Women writers in particular used domesticity as a crucial tool for political intervention, and, in turn, fashioned themselves into a new brand of writing women, who did not follow the calling of the time— they were not interested in becoming spokespersons for national salvation. Rather, after occupying a space inside the political pressure cooker, they actively fostered and engaged a middlebrow readership. During the nearly four years of Japanese occupation, cultural life in the war-trodden city was sustained by popular fiction writers, essayists, and their editors and publishers. Many young women began writing and publishing in occupied Shanghai. Eileen Chang, who belongs to this group, became a cultural icon and, in recent years, has become regarded as one of the most important writers of twentieth-century China. A few other writers, including Su Qing, Shi Jimei, Pan Liudai ᇃ‫ގ‬ᓰ (b. 1922), and Guan Lu ᘕᛎ

INTRODUCTION

19

(1908-1982), also enjoyed brief periods of fame and celebrity status, but their positions in literary history pale in comparison to Eileen Chang’s fame. Also included in the larger group of wartime women writers are a number of artists who expanded their creative repertoire to encompass both literature and the fine arts. All members of the Shanghai School of Fine Arts, these artists include Chen Xiaocui ௾ʮႚ (1902-1968), Zhou Lianxia ֟ຕᓝ (1909-?), and Wu Qingxia ѹ‫ی‬ᓝ (b. 1910). In addition to painting flowers, birds, and beautiful maidens, they occasionally wrote and published poetry and personal essays, and made public appearances with other women writers and artists of their time. There was also a range of more obscure writers in this period. They include Cheng Yuzhen ദԮॲ (b. 1921), Wang Liling Ӿᘰ߆, Tang Xuehua ೢఆൡ, Yu Zhaoming ‫اݲۥ‬, Lian Yuanxiu ሀ˔ԣ, Zhang Jing ઠጨ, Shi Jiying ‫ݯ‬ᐡࠡ, Wu Yingzhi ѹᏮ˃, Zheng Jia’ai ቷࣁᐽ, Yang Xiuzhen ๫῁߇, Zeng Wenqiang ಫ́ડ, and Zhou Ling ֟߆. Most of these women only enjoyed a fleeting presence on the wartime popular culture scene, with a limited number of works. In most cases, it has been difficult to piece together their basic biographical data. Whether they were well known or obscure, the rationale for grouping together these women, who wrote and published in occupied Shanghai, goes beyond their obvious historical and geographical connection to one another. They were all closely associated with the enterprise of popular journals that targeted a middlebrow readership and continuously supplied both entertainment and essential knowledge for everyday wartime living. Women writers in occupied Shanghai shared a concern about the complexities of the urban family structure and attempted to address the issues of daily survival. Most importantly, they manipulated textual strategies in order to compose wartime narratives in the guise of domestic and personal narratives. WRITING WAR

Women’s literature and popular culture in 1940s Shanghai were first and foremost products of wartime conditions. Women helped shape a culture of reading and writing that was a direct response to the war and occupation. Some of these women felt an urgency to write and publish because of an acute sense that the wartime era was but a fleeting moment in human history. Materializing their experiences into words

20

CHAPTER ONE

and images was viewed as a method of survival, and as the only means of leaving behind a more permanent legacy. A convenient explanation for the shift to women-dominated literature and popular culture is that political forces suppressed the cultural resistance camp during the occupation period, while voices outside of the political realm found channels of expression that were free from any ideological control. The present study will demonstrate that this explanation is fundamentally flawed. Works written by active wartime popular-cultural figures can easily be labeled as forms of ‘escapism’ or ‘comfort literature’ in order to explain the emergence of such literature in a political pressure cooker. To view the phenomenon as a natural consequence of the wartime occupation system of political control would, however, downplay the role of human agencies and the inner mechanisms behind the promotion and marketing of women writers and artists of the period. It would also underestimate the importance of popular culture as a hotly contested political field. The proper approach is to place this peculiar product of war and occupation back into the currents of history and to examine the internal connections between this emergent culture and the preexisting textual traditions, particularly the canonized literary mainstream called the ‘New Literature’ ( xin wenxue ๘́ዕ), developed since the early decades of the twentieth century; the much marginalized Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School of urban popular literature; and the ever-developing discourses on women and domesticity, initiated in the late nineteenth century. By highlighting the theme of cultural reconstruction, this study emphasizes the recurring narrative of an individual, particularly a woman, who lives and works in a fallen metropolis. She struggles there to survive, to succeed, to lead a better life, to emerge from the ruins of history, and to leave behind a personal narrative that can serve as an ethnographic account of her entire generation. Women’s cultural practices in wartime occupied Shanghai were characterized by an entanglement between women’s self-representation and their persistent, though often implicit, attempt to come to terms with immediate wartime experiences, and to piece together a vision of history in a world that was otherwise incomprehensible. By introducing women as a significant component of the history of wartime Shanghai, and by emphasizing the unique experiences of urban women during this period of political unrest and national crisis, the present study constructs a wartime narrative that is different from the standard conceptualiza-

INTRODUCTION

21

tion, which has been typically dominated by themes of death, hunger, scarcity, destruction, and social instability. In her 1944 preface to the second edition of her short story collection entitled Chuanqi ෭֮ (Romances), Eileen Chang observes: “An individual can afford to wait, but an era is transient. Things are being torn apart, and an even larger destruction is on its way….” Noting that she is living during extraordinary times, Chang exclaims: “Make yourself famous as early as possible! If success comes too late, it will not be as enjoyable… Hurry! Hurry! Otherwise it will be too late! Too late!” 1 These short, choppy sentences deliver a sense of urgency that seems to echo the sentiments of other Shanghai women writers: the imperative to achieve fame, derived from an urgent need to ‘occupy’ a space in a swiftly diminishing landscape and to hold onto a moment that was slipping away. This passage by Chang highlights a uniquely personal moment at a time when the war threatened to shatter individual voices, the fragments of which would eventually be lost among the ruins of history. Contrary to conventional belief that war and occupation silenced most people, the women studied in this book realized the added importance of having access to modes of self-expression. More than at any other time, there was an urgent need to write, to publish, and to tell a different brand of wartime story. These same sentiments are also expressed in “Zhongguo de riye” ˀ੢‫( ֬̅ڄ‬Days and Nights of China), an epilogue Chang wrote for her 1946 edition of Romances : “…the dust of this world is piling ever higher, to know that not only will hopes turn to ash, but anything and everything one touches will ultimately crumble to nothingness.” 2 Written one year after the end of the war, these lines vividly convey a sense of impending danger and transience that permeates all of Chang’s works of the 1940s. Writing and publishing was her way of rising from the ruins and resisting being swept into oblivion. 1 See “Chuanqi zaiban de hua” ෭ ֮ ι ‫( ༼ ڄ ٳ‬Preface to Romances, Second

Edition), first published in Chuanqi zaiban ben ෭ ֮ ι ‫( ʹ ٳ‬Romances, Second Edition) (Shanghai: Shanghai zazhi she, 1944); reprinted in A Complete Collection of Essays by Eileen Chang , 186-9. 2 See Chuanqi zengding ben ෭ ֮ ᅍ ࠴ ʹ (Romances, Enlarged Edition) (Shang-

hai: Shanhe tushu gongsi, 1946), 391. Translated by Andrew F. Jones. This rendition is included in Written on Water: A Collection of Essays by Eileen Chang , translated by Andrew F. Jones, co-edited and introduced by Ni cole Huang (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming).

22

CHAPTER ONE

To the more prominent women writers of the time, the individual need to survive both the war and the era was of equal importance to the shared need to establish a new literary order in which an alternative form of wartime story would be taken seriously. This new literary order would recognize an alternative brand of wartime story that did not fit in with the already mythologized Orphan Island mode of resistance literature. Chang and her fellow women writers made it very clear that they were not interested in using literature and popular culture as means of mass mobilization. Their fascination with Scarlett O’Hara’s story suggests that they were instead working toward a highly-personalized mode of narrating war, history, trauma, and individual growth. How exactly did the war, which seemed to leave no room for creativity and personal growth, figure into the women’s literature and print culture of occupied Shanghai? The high degree of pressure felt during the war actually compelled individuals to express themselves more, and literature and art became of greater importance. Eileen Chang’s 1943 short story “Fengsuo” ܱᕬ (Blockade) provides the best example for illustrating the kind of wartime sensibilities examined in the present study. The title of the story directly names a wartime phenomenon that also envelopes the story. The opening paragraphs highlight the complex experience of living in the space of occupied Shanghai during the time that it is being sealed off: The streetcar driver drives the streetcar. Underneath the big sun, the tracks look like two glistening eels crawling out of the water, stretching and shrinking, stretching and shrinking, moving forward. These long, long eels, soft and slippery, going on and on, on and on… the driver’s eyes are fixed on the glistening tracks; he will not go mad. If there were not an air raid, if the city were not blockaded, the streetcar would go on forever. But a blockade is taking place. The emergency bell rings. Ding-ling-ling-ling-ling-ling. Every “ling” is a cold little dot; many little dots amount to a dotted line, slicing across time and space.3 3 “Blockade,” first published in Heaven and Earth Monthly 2 (November 1943):

43-8. See Romances, Enlarged Edition, 377. Here I opt to use my own translat ion of the passages . In Karen Kingsbury’s published translation of the story, the title is rendered as “Sealed Off.” See Joseph S. M. Lau and Howard Goldblatt, eds., The Columbia Anthology of Mod ern Chinese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 188. I have chosen to translate the title literally as “Blockade” because the blockade frames the story and should be interpreted as a metaphor for the con fined time and space particular to the besieged city during the years 1941 to 1945.

INTRODUCTION

23

The blazing “big sun,” translated literally here, hints at the symbol of Japan’s rising colonial power and the omnipresence of political suppression. Not only was the imminent threat posed by air raids and other mechanisms of modern warfare experienced by the population of Shanghai, but it also permeated an individual’s basic senses, causing a heightened awareness to things such as texture and temperature. These first few lines of the story describe this condition, when an individual is particularly vigilant and experiences everything with the entirety of his or her being. Life does go on, like the two streetcar tracks, which seems to extend indefinitely. The streetcar driver wills himself not to go mad; perhaps maintaining one’s sanity during a highly chaotic time is already a struggle, but the danger of a major catastrophe also lurks in the story’s background. Still, it is the driver’s fixation on everyday life, however difficult it might be, that appears in the foreground of the story. This streetcar, caught in the middle of a citywide blockade, conveniently provides the spatial and temporal frame for the reader to imagine what it must have been like to be living in Shanghai from 1941 to 1945. Additionally, the story deals with the subject of war more in a figurative sense. War takes the form of the blockade, which functions as a device of isolation, creating a specific moment in both time and space. Various borders and divisions that have already cut across the urban space are further sharpened because of the intrusion of war. Silence reigns as the hustle and bustle of the city recedes into the background. Sensory awareness is sharpened and magnified in this frozen moment. The “lingling-ling-ling” sound is nearly ear-piercing, highlighting the violent nature of various boundaries, both figurative and physical; the presence of war strengthens and intensifies one’s sense of the urban as well as of the everyday. In essence, Chang’s story deals with the theme of urban alienation set in an even more suffocating environment, that of war and occupation. The time and space that has been symbolically carved out in this story also outlines a new set of realities that are to serve as the backdrop for other writings by Chang and her contemporaries. Chang’s essay entitled “Tan yinyue” ሾࡖᆪ (Talking about Music) is another good example to illustrate the type of wartime narrative examined in the present study. In this essay, Chang describes an urban symphony of sounds she overheard one night while sitting in her apartment: Late one night, the sound of music from a dancehall came floating through the air from afar. A sharp, thin female voice was singing: “Roses, roses, blooming everywhere!” In all of Shanghai, there was

24

CHAPTER ONE

hardly anyone left with their lights on, and the night seemed all the more empty and vast because of it. I still hadn’t put out the lights. A row of windows with dark blue velvet drapes pulled shut, like the “heavy curtains of night” of literary cliché. The velvet curtains fluttered in the wind, their edges splattered pale and dusty gold by the light of the lamp. A strange sort of car tore hurriedly down the street, perhaps in pursuit of thieves, wailing as it went, like the steam whistle of a passenger ship. With its sad, attenuated whistle—wa… wa… wa… wa—the ocean seemed to appear just outside my window. Departure aboard an ocean liner, a tale of fateful separation to chill one’s very soul. The “wa… wa…” sound gradually moved into the distance. On such a cruel night, a night so big and so broken, it was impossible to imagine that any roses would be blooming. And yet this woman, in a tiny and determinedly optimistic voice, was insisting that they were. Even if all that was really blooming were imitation silk flowers—ornamenting a mosquito net, a lamp shade, the brim of a hat, a sleeve, a pair of shoes, or a parasol—the fragile satisfaction they offered had a certain intimate, lovable charm.4

This is one writer’s conceptualization of war as a daily/nightly experience. The quiet night is in fact full of motion: impending danger is on its way and there is the omnipresent threat of massive destruction. The aesthetic order of the balcony scene from Chang’s 1945 essay “The Way I Look at Su Qing” is also present here.5 The fluttering velvet curtain and the whistle of the police car both add rhythm to the orchestrated sounds of the darkness, suggesting a sense of anticipation as well as an awareness of the underlying disturbance that could, at any moment, knock the otherwise quiet, deep night off-balance. However, the most memorable sound in this scene is the female singing voice drifting up from a local dance hall. Chanting a romantic tale, the singer is immersed in a sentimental state far removed from the world outside. Here, Chang’s vision of wartime life is caught between the territory of historical reality (war, turbulence, blockade, hunger, death, and scarcity) and the domain of imagination (fantasy, emotional yearning, and artistic creativity). Like the driver who wills himself not to go mad, the 4 First published in Kuzhu yuekan (Bitter Bamboo Monthly) 1 (November 1944);

collected in Liuyan (Written on Water) (Shanghai: Zhongguo kexue gongsi, 1945), 216-7. Translated by Andrew F. Jones in the forthcoming Written on Water: A Collection of Essays by Eileen Chang . 5 See “Prologue,” 1.

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persistence of the voice singing on a “cruel night” that is “so big and so broken” is of course Eileen Chang’s own reading of an individual’s relation to the larger, at times overwhelming, historical reality. Instead of writing about how the war disrupted daily life, she chose to focus on how the experience of urban life was in fact intensified despite the fact that the outside world was gradually being shattered. The silk flowers that adorn the details of a woman’s wardrobe take on additional charm when set against a harsh and hollow background. The meticulous attention an individual pays to these seemingly trivial details of life then takes on subversive meanings. On “a night so big and so broken,” the writer’s inquisitive eyes and vigilant ears persistently search for signs of life pressing through the darkness. There is an additional dimension to Chang’s vision of war represented in the above passage. It can be interpreted as her definition of the role of literary and artistic creation in a time of war and turbulence. In Chang’s use of literary allusions, there is a sense of sheer self-referentiality: literary and artistic representations shape an individual’s everyday experiences, rather than the other way around. Sights and sounds all refer back to various textual moments. A sense of autonomy fuels Chang’s world of words, images, and sounds. This world rises above the cruel, bloody historical reality and transcends the boundaries of the nighttime darkness, as well as the political strictures of the immediate present. Persistence and longing resonated in writings by other women authors who were Chang’s contemporaries. In the postscript to her 1945 essay collection, Yinshi nannü ෢࡚ԝʩ (Food and Sex), Su Qing steers clear of any allusions and directly states: Food and Sex has now been published. Some people asked me why I had to write in this war-trodden era? Their way of thinking is just the contrary to mine…. The world has gone crazy. Distress, agitation, depression, and a bizarre joy characterize our mental state. Sometimes it is like dancing on top of a mountain, and other times it is like building a jade palace on thin ice. I know only too well that everything is going to collapse soon, but I still hope to grasp this moment and seek serenity and fulfillment right away! Otherwise what am I going to do with these few surviving moments? So I have chosen writing and publishing to consume my time. I feel completely at ease with my choice. I have never hurt anyone, and I do

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my best to keep anyone from hurting me. I want to survive my time. I want to live, and I want to live in a way that most satisfies myself!6

Herein lies the gist of the wartime narrative to be reconstructed in the present study. Throughout the literary careers of many women writers in 1940s Shanghai, publishing during a turbulent time was not only a means of survival, but also, more importantly, a symbolic gesture of cultural protest. The present study seeks to decipher the implications behind being a writer, which was the public identity assumed by many women. It poses the following question: What does it mean to talk about the cultural reconstruction by urban women in a historical moment that is conventionally characterized by voices of national crises and salvation? In this context, ‘cultural reconstruction’ pertains primarily to the flourishing sphere of literary writing and other forms of cultural production, such as popular journals. Additional fundamental questions posed in this study are: To what extent can this culture be identified as women-centered? Further, was this culture a fictional construction, as some might argue, that had little to do with the actual daily experiences of men and women living in the occupied city? If not, in what way did this culture engage with the lived experiences of war and tyranny? In addition to the social and political impact of the so-called wartime occupation, what is its cultural significance? Is it possible to address the cultural significance of wartime occupation by considering how it might open up a previously unexplored spatial/temporal dimension in which a different kind of cultural landscape and way of life took shape? This inquiry into occupied Shanghai has been informed by a large body of scholarship on occupied France, particularly the rich information available on the Vichy regime (1940-4). Needless to say, the myth of a dignified people struggling to resist the Germans and the collaborationist regime still has compelling power in France and in other previously German-occupied countries. However, in recent decades, there has been an upsurge of revisionist works investigating the details and extent of France’s collaboration with the Nazis under the Vichy regime. A good example of such scholarship is an edited volume entitled Collaboration and Resistance: Images of Life in Vichy France, 1940-1944 . It is a collection containing hundreds of photographs accompanied by com6 Originally published in Su Qing, Food and Sex (Shanghai: Tiandi chubanshe, 1945). See Su Qing sanwen jingbian ᙨ ‫ ی‬ಞ ́ ႅ ሆ (A Complete Collection of Essays by Su Qing) (Hangzhou: Zhejiang wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 529 .

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mentaries by prominent French historians such as Denis Peschanski, Yves Durand, Dominique Veillon, Pascal Ory, Jean-Pierre Azema, and Robert Frank. Many photographs depict casual and, at times, even comfortable interactions between the French and their occupiers, which can seem even more shocking and troubling than images of brutality. There is an abundance of other works that enhance our understanding of German occupation. In his book, France the Dark Years, 19401944, Julian Jackson challenges the interpretative paradigm of juxtaposing grass-roots resistance against political repression. Furthermore, he asserts that the repressive policies enforced by the Vichy Regime could very well have their intellectual roots in the social and cultural discourses brewing in France before the war era. Other noted studies on Vichy France include Philippe Burrin’s France Under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise , Henry Rousso’s The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944, and Robert Paxton and Kenneth Waltz’s work entitled Vichy France. The latter echoes Julian Jackson’s assertion that the Vichy regime’s detestable policies were not simply imposed by the Germans, but were actually carried out by members of the regime as a conservative backlash against liberal changes of the preceding decades. A growing body of scholarship on women, gender, and war has also informed this study of women’s print culture of occupied Shanghai. Miranda Pollard, in her book Reign of Virtue: Mobilizing Gender in Vichy France, provides a chilling account of how discourses of gender conservatism were employed by the collaborationist regime in exercising political control and enforcing social order in the occupied territories. In Vichy and the Eternal Feminine: A Contribution to a Political Sociology of Gender , Francine Muel-Dreyfus provides another nuanced study of how previously-rejected gender politics were reinstated to serve as the fundamental basis of the Vichy Regime’s laws and policies. There are many studies, typically oral history-based, that depict women’s reactions to the Second World War and associated tyranny, as well as their participation in war efforts. A representative work is Hanna Diamond’s Women and the Second World War in France, 1939-1948: Choices and Constraints, in which the author incorporates personal narratives of ordinary women on how they coped with the hardships, turmoil, and contradictions of wartime occupation. There are, additionally, numerous accounts of how women participated in underground organizations to resist the Nazi occupation, such as Margaret Collins

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Weitz’s book, Sisters in the Resistance: How Women Fought to Free France, 1940-1945 . While the cultural and intellectual history of the Second World War has been covered in considerable detail, it appears that a crucial narrative is missing in our cross-cultural understanding of individual responses to war and tyranny. Not only must the shared knowledge of a violent century incorporate the wartime experiences of people from different continents and cultures, but a different set of inquiries is needed to further enhance our understanding of war and occupation as a cultural and intellectual experience. In terms of women’s responses to war, it is necessary to address whether women had any means of responding on a discursive level to those adverse times. Much postwar-era arts and literature pertains to shared memories of war and tyranny—but were these memories being shaped by women even before the war era ended? If so, who took the initiative to shape them? While postmemory has been a focus of many recent studies on visual cultures in postsocialist or postholocaust societies, 7 it is equally important to address the mechanisms, such as women’s cultural practices in occupied Shanghai, of materializing and restructuring personal memories before the end of an era. In the case of Vichy France, if notions of motherhood and womanhood were promoted as tools of gender conservatism, a number of questions must be asked: Did women resist these forms of gender ideologies on a discursive level? How did women of various backgrounds receive such messages on a daily basis? Was a counter-discourse produced within the confines of censorship and ideological control? In other words, in addition to coping daily with pressing demands and participating in various underground resistance organizations, were there any other ways that women engaged critically with their lived experiences of war? Were there any possibilities for women to forge their responses culturally and intellectually? If so, within the confines of wartime occupation, what were some of the possible strategies and tactics employed by women to preserve their own voices? Further research into the history of German occupation might indeed conclude that such an account is absent, or that existing accounts are not substantial enough. If so, the case of occupied Shanghai would be a unique addition to the collective knowledge of a century of wars and revolutions. 7 See, for example, Marianne Hirsch’s Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997) and Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001).

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The present study has also been informed by decades of historiography on modern China. One early source is a 1985 volume edited by Peter Duus, Ramon H. Myers, and Mark R. Peattie, entitled The Japanese Informal Empire in China, 1895-1937 . This volume presents an example of historical research on Japanese military aggression and its cultural policies in China. In this volume, a group of Japan historians attempts to show the increasing interactions between the Chinese and Japanese, beginning with the first Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895. They argue that the impact of such interactions, both cultural and economical, far surpassed those between China and the West. Chinese responses to Japanese colonial aggression, however, are not addressed. As Albert Feuerwerker, a China historian, suggests in his commentary to the volume, since “China’s modern history... was significantly shaped by its interaction with Japan,” any historical account of Japanese colonialism must include a delineation of the role China played during this whole process. Feurwerker states that the dynamics of such interactions should be examined. Thus, it is clear that a historical account of the Japanese informal empire in China must include the varied social/cultural/political responses of different areas of China, and that it must explore how the Chinese reacted on each of these levels toward Japan’s implementation of its “Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere” program.8 China historians have since taken up Feuerwerker’s suggestion and produced a range of book-length studies on Chinese responses toward war and occupation. This body of important scholarship has, until very recently, followed the aforementioned French paradigm, in which individuals who lived through the war era were divided into three separate camps: resistance, collaboration, and compromise/non-resistance. With his book War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937-1945 , Chang-tai Hung produced the first study on the political impact of popular culture during the Sino-Japanese War. Hung’s analysis focuses on resistance efforts in regions controlled by the 8 See The Japanese Infor mal Empire in China, 1895-1937 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 437. For a more recent work that specifically examines Japan’s cultural policies in its colonial expansion, see Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On ‘Japan’ and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). For an analysis of the philosophical basis of a “Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere,” see Naoki Sakai, “Imperial Nationalism and the Law of Singularity on Specific Identity and Cultural Difference,” Tamkang Review 1-2 (1995): 77-120.

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Nationalists and the Communists, which were not occupied by the Japanese. In his book, Hung argues that to mobilize the masses and generate support for the war effort, the Chinese resisters made use of a variety of popular cultural forms such as drama, cartoons, and newspapers. Chang-tai Hung’s study highlights the importance of wartime popular culture, but it does not address cultural responses in the occupied territories. Poshek Fu addresses this gap in his important study entitled Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration: Intellectual Choices in Occupied Shanghai, 1937-1945 . Fu’s study examines a body of historical texts that previously had not been systematically dealt with in academic discourses: newspapers, journals, and literary texts produced in the Orphan Island and occupied Shanghai eras. In delineating individual and intellectual choices of wartime history, Fu consistently relies throughout his study upon the French model of resistance, collaboration, and non-resistance, which he renders as passivity. Interestingly, it is Fu himself who, ten years later in his second book, undermines this very model. This later book, entitled Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinemas, forms an interesting contrast to Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration both in structure and perspectives. In the concluding remarks to the chapter on occupation cinema, Fu calls for a rethinking of “the simplistic dichotomy of resistance and collaboration that has structured conventional historical narrative of wartime Chinese life in general and occupation cinema in particular.” He then goes on to argue that “the historical experience of occupied China was fluid and heterogeneous, defying the either/or binarism of the nationalist discourse.” 9 In recent years, many French historians themselves have challenged rigid model of resistance and collaboration. Robert Gildea’s Marianne in Chains: In Search of the German Occupation, 1940-45 is the most recent book to reveal that under German occupation, the majority of France’s population existed outside the perceived paradigm of wartime living and failed to conform to the stereotypes of “good,” “bad,” and “not good, yet not really bad.” Gildea’s work is provocative since it goes beyond any of the other revisionist histories by fundamentally challenging the prevailing modes of interpretation in the scholarship on Vichy France, even the studies that have proposed a more complicated look 9 Poshek Fu, Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cine-

mas, 130-1.

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into the nature of collaboration. Gildea’s book indicates a new direction that this body of scholarship will head toward in the years to come, which is to transcend the model of collaboration, resistance, and compromise/non-resistance by further diversifying individual responses to war and occupation. In the case of occupied Shanghai, the present study will stress that the French paradigm has little interpretative power when gender becomes an indispensable critical category; when the boundaries between so-called ‘serious’ and ‘popular’ literature break down; when so-called ‘popular’ culture is considered to be a significant participant in the process of memorializing war and related trauma; and when the focus of the study is on how war and turbulence were experienced on a daily level by ordinary people. Furthermore, if it does become necessary to invoke ‘resistance,’ ‘passivity,’ and ‘collaboration’ as critical categories in assessing cultural production of the period, then the presumptions behind these notions should first be challenged. Even though many of the women writers, editors, and publishers of the period had to work within the political boundaries set in place by the occupation forces, and, in most cases, their literary representation did not reflect or directly deal with the larger political and historical events, their shared attempt to come to terms with their experiences of war and turbulence must be regarded as a form of cultural resistance. This, of course, is a new characterization. Women’s cultural practices of this period have until this point never been linked with the notion of resistance, for in modern Chinese history and the studies of wartime literature of Shanghai, the word ‘resistance’ has always been reserved for the characterization of Orphan Island literature. Perhaps the very concept of ‘Orphan Island’ and the very notion of ‘resistance’ should be called into question. In a recent substantial volume entitled In the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Shanghai under Japanese Occupation, the editors Christian Henriot and Wen-hsin Yeh argue that Gudao was “a term that shielded its inhabitants from the accusation of collaboration and absolved them of the guilt of survival.” They continue to argue that “like ‘Résistance’ in postwar Gaullist France, gudao has to be deconstructed in order to engage in a historical re-assessment of the Japanese occupation in

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Shanghai.” 10 These two scholars have suggested that we examine how Gudao became mythologized in both the wartime and literary histories of China. If the term ‘resistance’ is released from the possession of the tradition of Orphan Island literature, then it is possible to look at women’s cultural practices in occupied Shanghai in a fresh new light, and to begin to view textual strategies as effective expressions of defiance. Typically, in women’s literary writings of the time, when war was mentioned, it was often an event that took place at a different time and geographical locale, such as the Hong Kong Battle of 1941. Nonetheless, such an attempt should be read as an effort to conceptualize the immediate war and to assign meanings and forms to a present, which would otherwise be incomprehensible. In other words, if ‘resistance’ is indeed being employed as a critical category in addressing this history, it is necessary to first recognize that this ‘resistance’ took place on different levels. The present study will address the complicated set of textual strategies that women employed to forge their cultural resistance. These textual strategies are equally as important as the actual representations of war and its effects on individuals, and it is necessary to understand that they take on profound political significance in this context. As demonstrated in the discussion of print culture in Chapter Two, this study emphasizes how women writers, editors, and publishers transformed certain literary and cultural traditions for their own use, insisted on using their own methods of writing and publishing, and thereby resisted the literary conventions and political strictures of their time. If the term ‘resistance’ must be deconstructed, the term ‘passivity’ has even less redeeming value. This term is so vague that it works to eclipse much more complex personal choices that could be both politically and culturally subversive. 11 For example, Shi Jimei, a writer examined in Chapter Six, which addresses ‘boudoir fiction,’ was known for her seemingly apolitical sentimental domestic fiction. In the conventional model, she would comfortably fit in the ‘passivity’ camp—a large gray zone, where most survivors of the war and tyranny would be placed. To 10 Christian Henriot and Wen-hsin Yeh, “Introduction” in Henriot and Yeh,

eds., In the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Shanghai under Japanese Occ upation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 6. 11 Similar vague terms include “compromise,” “constraints,” “lack of resistance,”

and “non-resistance.”

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use the term ‘passivity’ to describe Shi’s literary practice of the time would obscure the subversive intent in her eulogies of war, which were disguised as writing about the domestic realm. An even better example of concealed sentiments is found in women’s essay writing. During this period, most essayists reminisced about past glories, such as the group of male writers who contributed to the journal Gujin banyuekan ͅˑ̵̽̇ (Past and Present Biweekly). However, women writers, such as Su Qing and Eileen Chang, used modern essay as a means of engaging with the immediate present, to intervene in the discussions of social issues concerning both women and men, to explore tactics for daily survival under harsh conditions, and to promote themselves as the most important cultural commentators of this era. A culturally sensitive analysis is imperative for teasing out the well-concealed subversive intent imbedded in their writing. As Chapter Four, on Eileen Chang’s essays, will demonstrate, even though women’s essay-writing did not directly address the ongoing war, the sense of immediacy it conveyed indicates that this particular form of prose should be regarded as an alternative form of history writing. The issue of ‘collaboration’ remains highly complicated and some of the recent studies on wartime China have succeeded in further questioning the notion.12 With regard to women’s popular culture, the concept of collaboration is the least effective among the three that are presented by the French model. The case of the writer/editor Guan Lu, which is discussed in Chapter Three, provides a good example of this. As an underground Chinese Communist Party member, Guan Lu’s association with the Japanese-sponsored collaborationist journal Nüsheng ʩᑵ (Women’s Voices, 1942-5) defies any rigid political or moral categorization. The significance of her writing and editorial work must be defined apart from her identities as both a ‘collaborator’ and an ‘underground fighter.’ Guan Lu joined many other writers and intellectuals, including Su Qing, in juggling a variety of political and cultural roles during the 12 For an earlier study of Chinese collaboration with Japan during the war, see John Hunter Boyle, China and Japan at War, 1937-1945: The Politics of Collaboration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985). For a recent study, see David P. Barrett and Larry N. Shyu, eds., Chinese Collaboration with Japan, 1932-1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). For a collection of studies that specifically examines the Chinese responses on all levels, see the articles, including one by the present author, in Henriot and Yeh, eds., In the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Shanghai under Japanese Occupation.

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occupation era. According to Poshek Fu, Su Qing’s position is defined by her association with the literary journal Past and Present Biweekly , which he categorizes as a collaborationist journal. However, a writer’s association with a journal that members of Shanghai’s collaborationist government sponsored and were actively involved with does not necessarily indicate that the writer’s own cultural activities during this period should be labeled as a form of collaboration. Labeling Su Qing as a collaborator forecloses the possibilities of cultural criticism. As will be argued in Chapter Five, Su Qing’s choice to enter the publishing field and her subsequent success in becoming a self-made entrepreneur, represents a crucial coping strategy. In other words, by working within the existing political strictures, women not only took the initiative to shape their own culture, but they also devised ways of recording it. Labeling writers as collaborators would prevent us from uncovering the complex system of symbolism and parody they employed to subvert many social and cultural conventions. Consequently, it is necessary to propose a different mode of historical inquiry and interpretation than that prevalent in scholarly discourses on both occupied France and wartime China. Women, War, Domesticity paints a different picture of everyday life during wartime occupation. While wartime histories have long focused on distinguishing heroic, passive, or villainous acts, an alternative narrative presented in this book will trace how imaginative, creative, and resourceful individuals pursued new relationships, new forms of life, and new tools of self-representation against all odds. More specifically, it depicts the formation of a new cultural arena that was established by a group of women who not only wrote, edited, and published, but also took part in defining and transforming the structure of modern knowledge. Furthermore, by discussing this knowledge in various print-media-related public forums, they promoted themselves as authoritative cultural commentators of the era and took into their own hands the task of recording their own personal journeys through war and occupation. WRITING DOMESTICITY

Chapters Two and Three focus on the new cultural arena championed by women writers in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. The former provides an overall picture of this emerging culture by first examining how a generation of young women writers emerged on the cultural scene. It con-

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tinues with a discussion of how they fostered a growing middlebrow readership around several key journals by eventually becoming leaders in writing, editing, and publishing; and it examines how they fashioned themselves into public intellectuals of the era. Chapter Three offers a case study of the mechanisms behind one of the most popular women’s magazines of the time, to illustrate how cultural reconstruction often took place within the social and political strictures characteristic of wartime occupation. Furthermore, it illuminates the unprecedented shared attempt by the journal’s writers and editors to meticulously delineate the various aspects of everyday wartime life in the city. The distinctive trademark of women’s cultural practices in occupied Shanghai is the focus on the realm of the domestic. It is commonly believed that under Japanese control, although war and politics were forbidden themes in literary representation, Shanghai women writers had considerable freedom in articulating ‘apolitical’ themes such as events in individual lives, including love, marriage, and family relations. The present study, however, works against this presumption. As demonstrated in Prologue, both the occupiers and their Chinese counterparts took popular culture and daily life seriously. The metamorphosis of Scarlett O’Hara in wartime Shanghai illustrates how popular culture was a hotly contested political field. The same can be argued for representations of domesticity. As many feminist scholars have argued, the ‘home’ remains an unstable construction, the discursive battle over the public and the private never ceases, and it is imperative that we continue to regard the domestic as a contested site.13 Women writers’ discussions of the domestic in the 1940s had the added complexity of taking place amidst war and occupation. Discourses on domesticity became a medium in addressing war and its impact on individuals. Innovative writers in occupied Shanghai transformed a variety of literary and cultural forms to write the experience of war and domesticity into their new urban mythologies. Based on this, their focus on the domestic should be viewed as a means of subverting

13 See, for instance, Susan Stanford Friedman, “Geopolitical Literacy: Interna-

tionalizing Feminism at ‘Home’—The Case of Virginia Woolf,” in Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (Princeton: Princeton Uni versity Press, 1998), 108 -31. Also see Linda McDowell, Gender, Identity, and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies (University of Minnesota Press, 1999); and Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender(University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

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the system of political control and engaging the crucial political dialogues of the time. For decades, the notion of domesticity has been used as a critical category in assessing a historically and culturally specific writing tradition. Viewed today, the received wisdom of gender-sensitive literary criticisms in the Anglo-American world is still very much relevant. In this body of scholarship, domesticity is defined as being closely related to the female body. It is a conceptual creation, similar to how the female body is analyzed as an emotional, social, political, linguistic, and metaphysical construct, rather than as a physical entity. Domesticity is therefore defined by its cultural marginality and a wide range of the socalled ‘feminine details,’ as well as by the subversive implications derived from these notions. In literary criticism, domesticity is presented as a set of counter-discourses—that is, as representations constructed apart from the public space or the male-dominated domain. As many have collectively argued, representations of domesticity are the linguistic manifestation of a marginal community.14 Domesticity as a critical category has been prevalent in modern Chinese studies ever since the publication of several pioneering works, particularly Rey Chow’s Woman and Chinese Modernity . In her chapter on Eileen Chang, Chow delineates a strong connection between Chang’s femininity and “irrelevant details.” According to Chow, ‘detail’ is distinctly feminine and can be defined as “the sensuous, trivial, and superfluous textual presence that exists in an ambiguous relation with some larger ‘vision’ such as reform and revolution.” Chow argues that Eileen Chang constructs a different vision of modernity and history through “a release of sensual details whose emotional backdrop is often 14 A classic example is Jane P. Tompkins’ s study of Uncle Tom’s Cabin . Tompkins defines the political subversion in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, arguing that Stowe reorganized culture from a woman’s point of view and established “a new matriarchal order” with domesticity at the center. Arguing against equating domesticity with triviality, Tompkins asserts that sentimental novels such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin , in fact, embody powerful political implications. See Jane P. Tompkins, “Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Politics of Literary History,” in Elaine Showalter ed., The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 81-104. Other classic examples include Catharine R. Stimpson, “The Somagrams of Gertrude Stein” in Susan Rubin Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 30-43; and Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

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that of entrapment, destruction, and desolation.” Eileen Chang’s understanding of culture, therefore, carries a “powerfully negative affect.”15 Central to Chow’s argument is her assertion that Chang’s “dramatization—the cinematic blowing up—of details is a kind of destruction,” for it destroys “the centrality of humanity that the rhetoric of Chinese modernity often naively adopts as an ideal and a moral principle.” 16 Here, Chow has established Eileen Chang as a model of “anti-language,” which she believes “stands as the opposite extreme of the ‘revolutionariness’ that we often associate with modernity in the Chinese literary context.”17 A new type of femininity is classified in Rey Chow’s provocative categorization of Eileen Chang: it is a femininity that is characteristically intimate, domestic, sensuous, pre-rational, trivial, and obsessed with its sexual being, yet it embodies subversive strength and transgressive potential. This seemingly fresh and autonomous femininity, however, takes for granted the association between the female, the domestic, and trivial details. Rey Chow’s emphasis on feminine detail may have endowed Eileen Chang’s writing with a critical power deriving from the marginal position in which she is inscribed, but what if Chang was not a marginal figure in her own time? What if Chang was very much in the mainstream and she and others like her were the principal architects of a unique wartime popular culture? Are there any other ways to define the significance of Chang’s domesticity without resorting to the “powerfully negative affect”? To fully understand Eileen Chang as an innovative writer and a historical figure, we need to place her back within the social discourses and aesthetic traditions of her own time. The significance of her writing, as shall be demonstrated throughout the present study, must be defined in relation to the unique political, social, and cultural context of wartime occupied Shanghai. Within the cultural context of 1940s Shanghai, women writers’ detailed descriptions of everyday life cannot be defined as merely a refutation or a reexamination of earlier discourses on modernity and individuality. Simply put, domesticity was not a marginal discourse; rather, it was very much situated in the center of public life. 15 Rey C how, Woman and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East (Minnesota and Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 85. 16 Ibid., 114. 17 Ibid., 120.

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To fully understand this unique cultural landscape, the rich implications in the meticulous descriptions of clothes, food, furniture, and all types of spatial forms, such as mansions, apartments, elevators, bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens, balconies, streets, shops, cafés, movie theaters, and vegetable markets have to be teased out of women’s writing from the 1940s. A material setting can often be interpreted as the crystallization of the past, present, and future, all channeled into one continuous moment in the present. Food, clothing, and accessories are already the most visible cultural elements, so descriptions of them can be read as cultural commentaries of the time, or as the epistemology of the culture. Chapters Four, Five, and Six of this present study emphasize the immediacy of the literary writings of Chang and her contemporaries. Through describing certain types of goods, such as food, clothing, and furniture, women writers in occupied Shanghai constructed an intelligible universe and mapped a conceptual realm that was sensible, meaningful, and deeply cultural all at the same time. The fascination of women writers with ‘irrelevant’ details was a direct response to the era in which they lived. Although the domestic realm is usually seen as an enclosed space, the significance of the notion of domesticity constructed by women writers in occupied Shanghai is that it penetrated the entire cultural realm. Women writers depicted the formation and stabilization of the urban family, and the negotiation of gender relations within the domestic space, as well as shifting boundaries between the private and the public. The central concern of the present study is how women’s literary and cultural practices of the period transcended various boundaries, both inside and outside the domestic realm, by making full use of the freedom and capacity of literary language, as well as the space of the print medium. In their own personal lives, most of the women writers in 1940s Shanghai moved from traditional inner chambers to modern apartment buildings. Their daily activities included both traditional household duties and a new variety of urban pastimes, such as department store shopping, movie-going, frequenting cafés, attending public gatherings, and most importantly, publishing, editing, and contributing to the women’s print culture that was taking shape. The new urban spaces these women occupied were often a crossover between the traditional domain of home and the previously male-occupied public spaces. The discussion in Chapter Four on Eileen Chang’s representation of apartment living provides an example of the melding of private and public spaces. ‘Domesticity’ became the label for a wide variety of issues

INTRODUCTION

39

that were the subject of public discussions, and these discussions later evolved into a public discourse. No longer merely representative of a completely enclosed structure, domesticity instead became something situated at the center of an individual’s political life. While the boundaries between the public and the private domains were further blurred, and domestic issues were discussed in every major media space, the domestic was extended into the public realm. Women’s writing of the period therefore constructed a notion of domesticity that was not limited to the private space; instead, it reorganized daily experiences of women and became the center of public dialogues in 1940s Shanghai. When Eileen Chang, Su Qing, and other women writers first stepped into the limelight in the early 1940s, they were fluent in the language of domesticity and often employed the first-person voice or the autobiographical mode to relate their rich narratives. As the most authoritative cultural commentators of the era, they demonstrated a fascination with everyday matters, an uninhibited desire to talk about their own life experiences, and a superb ability to manipulate the hazy boundaries between the authorial voice and the narrative self. Readers felt a personal connection to the authors, whose personal lives had been an integral part of their public personae from the very beginning of their careers. In turn, the writers tended to employ systems of references that middlebrow readers, with their insatiable desire to learn more about the authors’ private lives, could conveniently identify as both personal and intimate. This explains why the autobiographical fiction and informal essays were two of the most prominent literary genres of women’s writing in Shanghai during the 1940s. In their representations of the domestic, women writers manipulated the public’s fascination with their personal lives. Biographical contingencies were employed to fashion new public personae and to rebuild an intelligible universe atop the ruins of the war. Specifically, these writers demonstrated a rare sophistication in their manipulation of narrative distance. Sometimes the authorial voice speaks through the thin veil of a first-person narrative and instills real-life instances into a fictional reality. Fine examples of this technique are found in Eileen Chang’s autobiographical essays, as well as in Su Qing and Pan Liudai’s autobiographical novels. At other times the authorial voice is hidden deep beneath an allegory of the time. This is exemplified by Eileen Chang’s short stories, Su Qing’s social critiques, and Shi Jimei’s domestic fiction. Chapters Four, Five, and Six, which focus on literary transformations, consistently address the tension between the authorial voice and

40

CHAPTER ONE

narrative self so prevalent in women’s writing of this period. Chapter Four provides a close reading of Eileen Chang’s experiment with the modern essay genre. Chang recognized the power of the modern essay in her efforts to constantly redefine the boundaries between life and work and between fiction and reality. Chapter Five considers how two other equally popular writers from the same period, Su Qing and Pan Liudai, produced ethnographical accounts of wartime survival and personal growth in the form of novels, by manipulating the autobiographical voice and their Shanghai readers’ unquenchable thirst for more details about their complex personal lives. Finally, Chapter Six analyzes Shi Jimei’s so-called ‘boudoir style’ short stories. Though her literary reputation paled beside the fame of Eileen Chang and Su Qing, Shi Jimei’s persona in Shanghai during the 1940s was unique: it was pieced together by her thinly-veiled wartime allegories masquerading as domestic fiction and by elements of her own tragic life that were circulated for public consumption. Her complex persona points to a fundamental paradox in wartime popular culture; in speaking the language of domesticity, Shi and others constructed their own wartime narratives. Read together, Shanghai women’s representations of domesticity became a unique war memorial in their own right. WRITING WOMEN

How, then, did women in occupied Shanghai successfully render their wartime and domestic experiences into different forms of writing? How did they transform a Chinese tradition of writing women that had been shaped in previous decades? When this generation of women began writing against the backdrop of battle fire, they also found themselves situated at an important cultural crossroads where several discursive forces converged. This convergence included discourses on women and modernity dating back to the late nineteenth century and the May Fourth constructions of freedom, individual rights, and women’s liberation. Women’s print culture in 1940s Shanghai boldly engaged traditions of writing women and those of writing about women. This generation of women writers proved more able than any of their predecessors to appropriate all of the literary and cultural discourses available to them. Resulting from their efforts was the shaping of a new brand of women writers who would not follow the calling of their time and refused to be

INTRODUCTION

41

moralized. Instead, they chose to engage contemporary popular culture and insisted on being at the center of a burgeoning middlebrow culture. It was this middlebrow culture that truly sustained a cultural life in wartime China. Women writers in occupied Shanghai served as the pillars of that unique society, shouldering the responsibility of supplying ‘spiritual food’ to a readership starved for nourishment and security. To be sure, the so-called ‘woman question’ has been a focal point in the construction of modernity and of the Chinese nation-state since the late nineteenth century. The ever-changing body image of the Chinese woman in the past one hundred years was indicative of the widespread, and often violent, social and political transformations that took place. In the first half of the twentieth century, the woman question served as an anchor or as a point of departure for the formation of modern nation-state discourses; the May Fourth discourses on freedom and individual rights; and the construction of urban modernity in the 1930s. While various approaches to the woman question have emerged, the primary approach appears to define a woman’s identity in two general ways: as historically-based and as socially/politically oriented. Intense interest in the woman question dates as far back as late imperial China, most notably from the 1890s to the early 1900s. During this period, self-examination and self-strengthening became urgent imperatives for many Confucian intellectuals following a sequence of national crises. Kang Youwei છЉ޴ (1858-1927) and his fellow reformers, who were a group of such intellectuals, expressed a strong interest in women’s issues when they led the “natural foot” ( tianzu ˭Լ) movement in 1894. Their task was to arouse public resentment against footbinding by linking it to the weakening of China as a nation. They argued that the fate of a new nation-state and various impending socio-economic reforms required the elimination of such ‘antiquated’ practices as footbinding. 18 Since the late nineteenth-early twentieth century, the so-called woman question has become a crucial discursive site where various political, economic, philosophical, cultural, and aesthetic debates have taken place. May Fourth discourses originating from the early decades of the 1900s were, to a large extent, founded on the constant 18 For a detailed account of how late Qing reformists discussed the oppression that Chinese women experienced under Confucian ideologies, see Ona Kazuko, Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution, 1850-1950, edited by Joshua Fogel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989).

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CHAPTER ONE

reformulation of the woman question. There was not a single iconoclastic May Fourth intellectual who did not at least proclaim to be genuinely interested in women’s issues. From time to time, the woman question seemed to be a battleground where numerous social and political issues were raised and debated, and where new political faith was shaped and secured. Very often, it served as a point of departure for a new generation of Chinese intellectuals to strive for the cultural legitimacy of a new body of political and social institutions/practices. Such new institutions and practices included building a modern nation-state, emphasizing individual rights and freedom, as well as reforming marriage laws, familial structures, and educational systems. Since the earlier decades of the twentieth century, theoretical attempts to redefine the connotations of ‘woman’ ( nüxing ʩ‫ )׷‬or ‘women’ ( funü ੴʩ) and the essence of womanhood/ motherhood were often accompanied by reconceptualization attempts at other interrelated discursive sites, such as ‘revolution,’ ‘nation,’ ‘family,’ and ‘literature.’ 19 Within this larger picture, the image of woman produced in various political and cultural discourses seems to always symbolize something other than woman. Instead, it always points to a larger and seemingly more encompassing political or social structure. For example, nineteenth-century Western missionaries regarded a Chinese woman with bound feet as crippled, pathetic, and in need of emancipation. Late Qing reformers consequently adopted this image as a suggestive metaphor for a nation deep in crisis. 20 To contrast this, the reformers employed the image of a Chinese woman with ‘natural feet’—that is, a liberated mother-body—as one of the most fundamental players in establishing the new nation-state of modern China. One cannot find a more powerful May Fourth symbol than the image of a daughter who left her patriarchal family in pursuit of free love, the ability to choose her own husband, and economic independ-

19 See, for instance, Tani Barlow, “Theorizing Women: Funü, Guojia, Jiating

(Chinese women, Chinese state, Chinese family),” Genders 10 (1991): 132-60. 20 For a historical account of the role of Western missionaries in late imperial China, see Jane Hunter, Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turnof-the-Century China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), and Pui-lan Kwok, Chinese Women and Christianity, 1860-1927 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992).

INTRODUCTION

43

ence.21 Rejecting any traditional role assigned to her, this ‘father’s daughter’ embodies the essence of May Fourth iconoclasm. Images of rebellious daughters appear in short stories by Lu Yin ᖧᓙ (1898-1934) and Feng Yuanjun ෤ӼѼ (Gan Nüshi ଼ʩʦ) (1900-1974), as well as in the early fiction of Ding Ling ʀ߆ (1904-1986) and Mao Dun ࠗߢ (1896-1981). 22 These constructed images of women illustrate much more about the ideological interventions of those who created them than about the experiences of the real women they represented. How, then, did women writers in 1940s Shanghai transform the tradition of writing about women? And what was the relationship between the formation of a women’s print culture and the attempt of women writers to come to terms with the experience of war? The best answers to these questions are in the texts themselves. Once famously depicted as a romantic heroine in an essay by Eileen Chang, Su Qing, in her own essay entitled “Lun hongyan boming” ቈ߹ᖄᒆ֡ (On Radiant Face, Early Demise), reveals the fictional and composite nature of hongyan , or ‘radiant face,’ which is a highly mystified female image that has prevailed in Chinese popular imaginary for many generations. Like Su Qing’s other writing, a sense of irony permeates this essay: There are many beautiful women around us. I spot so many of them on the streetcar that runs down the Avenue Joffre… If there happened to be a prince on the same bus, and he happened to fall in love with one of these beautiful girls, her admirable reputation would be talked about by all of Shanghai, or China, or even the entire world. Unfortunately, an honorable prince would never ride the same bus with us, nor would any brave warrior or wealthy gentleman….

The author goes on to contend that the ‘radiant face’ narrative is indeed a mythical construction:

21 See Meng Yue ׂ ࣬ and Dai Jinhua ᐁ Ꭻ ൡ , Fuchu lishi dib iao ि ̳ ገ ͑ ϙ ‫( ڷ‬Emerging From the Horizon of His tory) (Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chubanshe, 1989). Meng and Dai define women of this period as “fathers’ daughters” and refer to the first two decades of the century as a period of “the death of the father.” 22 For a detailed account of the representation of women i n the writing of Lu Yin, Feng Yuanjun and Ding Ling, see relevant chapters in Meng Yue and Dai Jinghua, Emerging from the Horizon of History. Also see Wendy Larson, Women and Writing in Modern China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).

44

CHAPTER ONE

If a beautiful woman was born into an ordinary family, and lived an ordinary life, she would never become famous, and nobody would inscribe black characters on white paper to praise her ‘radiant face’… Without the endorsement of emperors, kings, imperial officials, heroes, or gifted scholars, no matter how fabulous she was, few people would know of her beauty.23

Though Su might not have intended it, these paragraphs can be read as responses to Chang’s legendary characterization of her as a “beauty at a turbulent time.” Here Su subtly refuses to be turned into a romantic heroine or a legend. For Su Qing, the formation of the “radiant face, early demise” narrative best illustrates how female experiences have been continuously generalized throughout China’s prolonged textual traditions. Through her ironic vision, she highlights the discursive power embedded in this mythical construction, which has become somewhat of a fixture in literature. In other words, she emphasizes how it has been sustained by its frequent appearances throughout the centuries in historical accounts, literary representation, and folklore culture. She argues that this Chinese beauty, along with the many variations of legends surrounding her, is deeply rooted in conceptions of womanhood and femininity, and, to a great extent, still defines and organizes many aspects of life in the modern urban world of Shanghai. By revealing the inner mechanisms of how a myth takes shape and operates on the discursive level, Su Qing’s critique serves as a social commentary on the gender/power relations that surfaced in Shanghai in the 1940s. Further, by indicating that a modern ‘radiant face’ need not suffer an ‘early demise’ like her predecessors, Su Qing is also suggesting a way of defying the times: to take charge of one’s own life in a city that is overrun by foreign powers and suspended in an existential state between life and death. Eileen Chang’s characterization of Su Qing and Su’s own refutation of the tragic legend provide two contrasting, yet complementary interpretations of the ‘radiant face’ motif. Arguably her most acclaimed work, Chang’s novella Qingcheng zhi lian ෯‫˃ܗ‬ᜣ (Romance from the Ruins), is another important attempt at retelling the Chinese beauty narrative. The title alludes to an ancient tale, in which the beauty of a woman is blamed for the collapse of a kingdom ( qingguo qingcheng ෯੢෯‫)ܗ‬. Chang’s modern tale shares with the ancient legend the sense that war and turbulence are always 23 Originally published in Past and Present Biweekly 26 (July 1943). See Su Qing,

Huanjin ji (Washing Brocade) (Shanghai: Heaven and Earth Press, 1944), 37-41.

INTRODUCTION

45

lurking in the background, eventually emerging as destructive forces and, ironically, completing the romance narrative. The beginning of Chang’s novella finds the female protagonist, Bai Liusu Ύ‫ޟ‬ᙨ, at odds with the world inside her parents’ home, which is a spatial composition that invites allegorical readings: Liusu feels that she herself has become a character in the couplet, floating in the air. The Bai residence is somewhat like a cave of a supernatural being: one day in the house is equal to one thousand years in the outside world. But even if one thousand years did finally elapse inside the house, it would not be any different from the passing of one single day, for every day is as lusterless and gloomy as ever … Are you still young? It does not matter. You will get old in a matter of two years. Youth is not cherished here. They have plenty of youth—kids come to the world one after another, each with new bright eyes, fresh red lips, and budding wisdom ….24

This old house of her parents epitomizes a decaying culture built upon flat, passive images of women. The house also appears to be a discursive construction in which the same old story is produced over and over, with women either absent from the picture, or reduced to pure representation. The allegorical effect of this spatial construction is similar to that of a classic beauty narrative. Both are structures of enclosure that inscribe the female image in a certain position and strive to keep her there. Eileen Chang’s novella is about how this mythical construction gradually crumbles. The female protagonist herself initiates its destruction. It is she who refuses to succumb to the same old story and fate by deciding to take control of her own destiny. Her vivid process of selftransformation is highly dramatized: Liusu suddenly lets out a cry. Covering up her eyes, she hurries upstairs, fleeing back to her own room. She switches on the light, runs to the mirror, and examines her image. Not bad: she doesn’t seem too old yet. She has the kind of petite figure that can conceal age: an ever-slender waist and a girlishly burgeoning bosom. Her complexion used to be as pure as porcelain, but now it resembles jade—a semi-transparent shade with a tint of pale green. Her chin had once been round and full, but now has grown thinner and more angular, making her small face more shapely and pleasing than ever. Her cheeks are narrow, but her eyes are set wide 24 Originally published in two installments in The Miscellany Monthly 11. 6 (Sep-

tember 1943) and 11. 7 (October 1943). See Romances, Enlarged Edition, 158.

46

CHAPTER ONE

apart. And those eyes of hers, clear and moist, full of girlish charm. Out on the balcony, Fourth Master starts playing the huqin (Chinese violin) again. Following the long and winding tune, Liusu tilts her head to one side, her eyes cast a subtly seductive look, and her hands start to make gestures too. Now that she has entered into her role in front of the mirror, the huqin tune is transformed into something else, as if an entire orchestra of strings and flutes were weaving together a dance melody inside a solemn temple. She paces toward the right, then to the left. Every step she takes seems to be tracing some lost rhythm of an ancient melody. Suddenly she smiles, a treacherous and gloomy smile. The music halts abruptly. The huqin tune continues outside, but it is now telling some tale of morality, nothing to do with her any more.25

Within the relatively private space of her room, Liusu is temporarily free of intrusion. There she painstakingly searches for her true self and learns to build confidence from within. Her “treacherous and gloomy smile,” gestures, and pacing in front of the mirror all foreshadow the action she will take, which is to step out of her assigned role and act out a brand new legend. Su Qing’s social commentary and Eileen Chang’s novella both evoke the history of the continual presence of the Chinese beauty narrative throughout many generations, from Tang dynasty classical tales to the dramatic romance and vernacular fiction of the Ming and Qing dynasties, as well as from the archetypal May Fourth construction of a liberated “Nora” or “father’s daughter” to the 1930s version of an enchanting, yet menacing Chinese femme fatale. 26 These two works also situate the story of a legendary Chinese beauty within the concrete everyday existence of 1940s Shanghai. In other words, they have released the notion of ‘woman’ from the elitist constructions of womanhood and motherhood and invite it into the middlebrow culture of 1940s Shanghai.

25 Ibid., 158-9. 26 In China, Ibsen’s portrayal of Nora was reconstructed by Chinese intellectuals during the May Fourth era to represent progressive modern womanhood. The image of ‘Nora’ (pronounced Nuo-la in C hinese) was transformed into a May Fourth icon. She came to represent all the possibilities of women’s liberation in early twentieth-century China. Nora’s departure from her husband’s family signifies a clear-cut solution for the Chinese woman: eventually every Chinese woman will have to abandon her father’s home and her hopeless past. Nora’s act of slamming the door behind her has been used to symbolize the complete destruction of traditional domestic order.

INTRODUCTION

47

Su Qing searches for modern ‘radiant faces’ on Shanghai’s streets and in its streetcars, which at that time were the two most common urban places for watching people. She then reveals the persistent discursive power embedded in this image, which to a large extent, still manipulates the everyday imagination of men and women in Shanghai. Eileen Chang, on the other hand, creates a fictional world in which the mythical construction that confines the protagonist—her parents’ home—eventually falls apart. Here the beauty herself turns the war and turbulence into an opportunity for starting a new life. It is also she who initiates the process of demystifying the traditionally tragic beauty narrative. What makes these textual strategies particularly important is the fact that the destabilization of a classic myth and subsequent creation of a new urban legend took place precisely at the center of the social and political strictures resulting from the wartime occupation. The urgency that many women writers felt to construct a new cultural realm went hand in hand with their keen sense of the impending large-scale destruction. Their creativity was affected, as well as enhanced, by a historical moment that is typically characterized by themes of disruption, agitation, and transitoriness: The more turbulent our era becomes, the more outstanding one’s personality appears; distinctions between individuals are thus magnified… The more tribulations she [Su Qing] encounters, the better for her. The more branches on a tree, the more flowers are in bloom.27

Here Eileen Chang’s portrayal of Su Qing as “a beauty at a turbulent time” can be understood as her attempt to define the function of literary creativity in relation to the larger historical milieu and social/political context. A unique aesthetic vision of life is also promoted here: the chaos resulting from war can, in fact, become an extraordinary opportunity to initiate a new kind of cultural reconstruction. While turbulence on a social and political level is accompanied by the constant negotiation between different cultural and intellectual forces, it is possible for new forms of literature and the arts to emerge from a shattered system of thoughts, beliefs, and aesthetic principles. In Chang’s portrayal, it is only in the most tumultuous of times that women like Su Qing are able

27 See Chang, “The Way I Look at Su Qing,” in A Complete Collection of Essays

by Eileen Chang , 270.

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CHAPTER ONE

to demonstrate their talents and personalities, something they would not be able to do during peaceful times. In Romance from the Ruins , Chang’s effort to establish a unique aesthetic order in her fictional world is represented by the image of a dark, heavy wall standing on a beach, as well as by the recurring image of ruins. The basis of life in this world is dark, gloomy, and constant, like the imposing wall. Within this aesthetic order, life continues as it did before the war, and is filled with lighthearted moments. Pessimism and decadence exist in Chang’s writing because of an aesthetic need to establish a dark, solid background to offset brilliant images in the foreground. Those brilliant images include women’s faces, costumes, gestures, and brightly lit skies. Life’s foundation here is war and other types of massive destruction that are normally considered to be periodic, terrible events in history. Eileen Chang’s most ingenious attempt at manipulating the era and the environment in which she lived was to admit war and occupation into her aesthetic order as the background, not the foreground, of the story. While conventional wartime histories place everyday life in a distant background, Chang’s wartime narrative works to familiarize her readers with everyday themes all over again. Eileen Chang’s sentiments are echoed in the writing of other women who contributed to journals during this time. Many of these women were not known as writers; they were mostly professional women who chose to recount their stories, such as office workers, doctors, and lawyers. For instance, an author named He Jiashui щ༕̐ wrote an essay entitled “San qian” ʒት (Changing Jobs Three Times), in which she repeatedly uses the phrase ‘turbulent time’ and highlights the image of an individual thriving amidst adversity: The editor might want the contributors to describe their miseries, but I have no miseries to come to terms with. I know I am expected to recount the unequal treatment I have experienced, but I have been treated well anywhere I have been, much better than I deserve. This is a turbulent time; the conflicts between evil and good forces are certainly fiercer than in normal times. There are cannibalistic elements in human relations, but there are also friendship, integrity, and generosity. Like the other day we read in our daily newspaper about how an editor of a literary supplement proposed to set up a fellowship fund, and how in no time readers donated thousands of dollars. This could not have happened during peaceful and prosperous times. During a turbulent time, talents are in great demand, and few can complain that they have no opportunity to make use of their talents. Talented people definitely have opportunities; even people who are not that talented still have opportunities.

INTRODUCTION

49

Womenoftentake great advantage of this particular time. For some reason, men of our time feel sorry and are obliged to respect women’s rights. In any case, conscientious people can always find a way to be constructive for [the good of] society. Isn’t this enough reason to feel optimistic about our time? [Emphasis added]28

Here is a woman celebrating the times—not the destruction brought by the war, but the opportunities. For her, individuals who rise up against challenge can thrive even in an immensely adverse environment. While previous literary traditions of representing women are juxtaposed against the density of urban life and the disruption of modern warfare, not only is the beauty narrative being retold here, but a new kind of urban mythology is also being pieced together. Whether they were known or unknown, and whether they embellished their real life story in their writing is inconsequential: women in occupied Shanghai who took up their pens and wrote significantly transformed the way literature represents women, war, and history. Women writers such as Eileen Chang and Su Qing rewrote the Chinese beauty narrative against a several-decades-old history of representing and theorizing women. The fact that this effort of rewriting and reconstruction took place in wartime occupied Shanghai further complicates the way in which this body of women’s literature is studied. Therefore, the purpose of the present study is two-fold. By presenting this body of women’s literature as a form of cultural reconstruction that took place amidst massive destruction, it considers the notion of ‘women’ as a critical category in the study of twentieth-century China. Moreover, by introducing the category of ‘women’ into this examination of wartime popular culture, the study questions and critiques the received premises and basic narrative structure of war in twentieth-century China. By asking how the experience of war can be narrated differently when focus is placed on urban women’s cultural activities amidst social and political turbulence, Women, War, Domesticity pieces together a cultural history that emphasizes the crossroads of many conflicting discourses that are crucial to our understanding of that particular moment in Chinese history, including the transformation of modern print culture and the shaping of domestic discourses in public dialogues of the time.

28 In Wanxiang yuekan ໗ ඐ ̇ ̵ (The Phenomena Monthly) 4. 4 (October

1944): 8-13. This was published in a special issue on career women.

CHAPTER TWO

FASHIONING PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS: THE EMERGENCE OF A WOMEN’S PRINT CULTURE New visions of war and domesticity emerged in literary and cultural production of occupied Shanghai. Using the print medium to subvert boundaries set between the private and public realms, writers, editors, and publishers took the opportunity to represent their own wartime experiences, and Shanghai women transformed the popular culture of their time. The body of words and images they created constituted a unique literature and popular culture, one that was championed by women, directed toward women, and set within the confines of wartime occupation. One crucial textual strategy shared by many women writers and artists who initially rose to fame during this brief period of time was the technique of recording wartime experiences in the guise of writing and picturing the domestic. The task of this chapter is to explain how these Shanghai women transformed the space of the print medium, reshaped the knowledge of domesticity, rewrote the experiences of war and turbulence into their new urban mythologies, and fashioned themselves into public intellectuals of the era. The discussion begins, once again, with Eileen Chang. “Whenever she had time, my friend’s mother would put on her glasses, stand in front of the window, and look out onto the streets,” writes Chang, in a 1945 essay entitled “Qi duan qing chang” मഠશ‫( ۂ‬Short on Dignity, Long on Emotion). The author continues: There used to be a column called “Window to Life” in the English language Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury,1 filled with trivial details from everyday life. This was a very interesting column, and quite indicative 1 The Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury was an English language newspaper that was in circulation from 1929 to 1949. Starting from 1933, a Chinese edition was published concurrently with the English edition. Chinese readers were more familiar with its Chinese title, Da Mei wanbao ʨ ࠀ ૴ ే (The Great American Nightly News).

FASHIONING PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS

51

of the urban milieu of the time. My friend’s mother would write one paragraph per day for such a column. There was one day she saw a man on the street, dressed respectably, like someone from the educated class. He was beating a woman. Many bystanders felt sorry for the woman and instructed her: “Send him to the police station!” The woman cried: “I don’t want him to go to the police station, I want him home!” She then pleaded to the man: “Please come home with me—you can beat me there!”2

In this brief episode, the reference to the newspaper evokes the texture and rhythm of everyday life in urban Shanghai. Chang’s essay is written in the style of the informal essay, or, literally, ‘minor writings’ ( xiaopin wen ʮ‫)́܇‬, a kind of prose form that emphasizes the eclectic and fragmentary nature of language, challenges narrative expectation, and undermines the coherence of narrative structure. The kind of language employed here also combines elements of the social documentary style ( xinwen xieshi ti ๘ႝᅝ࿧ᝂ) 3 and the so-called ‘tabloid style’ ( xiaobao ti ʮేᝂ), both of which some literary historians have described as prominent in popular print media in Shanghai during the 1930s and 1940s.4 If a different writer were to describe a scene in which a man is beating a woman on the street in broad daylight, he or she might capitalize on its shock value to use it as a platform for social criticism, and to 2 First published in Xiao tiandi ʮ ˭ ϙ (Small World Monthly) 4 (January 1945); reprinted in A Complete Collection of Essays by Eileen Chang , 229-34. 3 The documentary style of prose writing is represented by a new literary genre

prevalent during the period—literary reportage (baogao wenxue ే Ѿ ́ ዕ ). Luo Chuan ީ ʲ (Yao Luochuan ూ ީ ʲ ) was the most representative reportage writer at the time. His writing combined fierce social criticism with a thorough understanding of intricat e layers of urban life. See, for instance, “Guoji yule jie” ੢ ᄑ ࢴ ᆪ ർ (The International Street of Entertainment), The Miscellany Monthly 12. 2 (November 1943): 122-8. Little is known about Luo Chuan except that he was hired by The Miscellany Monthly as a reporter in 1943. Some sources claim that he died in Shanghai prior to 1949. See Chen Qingsheng ௾ ‫ ی‬Ά , Kangzhan shiqi de Shanghai wenxue ӏ ዢ इ ಭ ‫ ڄ‬ʕ ऺ ́ ዕ (Shanghai Literature of the Sino-Japan ese War) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chu banshe, 1995), 267. 4 The term xiaobao ti was a derogatory term used by mainstream writers, particularly the leftists, to downplay the importance of urban popular writers. The latter were said to lack a historical vision in their writing. Fixated on trivial details of daily life, the xiaobao ti writers were said to merely intend to please their readership. Interviews with Ke Ling and Wei Shaochang, Shanghai, May 1994.

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CHAPTER TWO

highlight the urgent need to heighten women’s social consciousness and challenge the state of gender inequality. However, Chang’s essay presents the scene as one of the many unimportant and unconnected episodes in life. Read carefully, the essay speaks more about the framing of the episode than about the actual event itself. Observed from a distance—that is, through the inquisitive eyes of “my friend’s mother”—the event is enveloped by several layers of perspective. There might be many episodes such as this taking place in any city on a day-to-day basis; Shanghai’s daily newspapers and mosquito press were filled with daily reports as of this kind. However, seen from the perspective of “my friend’s mother” and inscribed within a newspaper column figuratively described as “Window to Life,” the central event takes on a different set of meanings. Chang’s account is more accurately read as a comment on how urban experiences are saturated with, and consequently shaped by, modern print media. Life becomes comprehensible only when placed within the framework of a printed space, and literary writing is the product of a further fragmentation of daily life, which is already flattened and fragmented—that is to say, already textualized. Without any direct reference to the ongoing war and occupation, Chang’s essay can, nonetheless, be read as a comment on the state of cultural production in an occupied city. The essay was written toward the end of the eight-year Sino-Japanese War, and at the height of what can be termed a ‘women’s print culture’ that took shape in the midst of the turmoil. It is then pertinent to ask the following questions: In what ways can Chang’s essay be read as a product of her time? What makes the cultural production of this period unique, as compared with that from the previous decades? How did the experiences of war and occupation affect the reading practices of the Shanghai populace? Finally, what was the relationship between war, women, and urban print culture? The relation between war and the development of urban print culture can be best illustrated by a moment in Eileen Chang’s 1943 short story “Blockade.” “Blockade” depicts a brief encounter between a man and a woman on a streetcar during an air raid, when all motion within the city comes to a halt. The following episode can be read as a figurative comment on the larger cultural context of the time: He starts reading a newspaper. It seems that everyone else on the streetcar is following his example. Those who have a paper handy start reading; others take out their cash receipts, brochures, or name cards; and those who have no printed texts with them look out of the window at

FASHIONING PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS

53

billboards and signs on the streets. They have to read something to fill up this dreadfully empty space, otherwise the mind might start spinning. To think is painful.5

If ‘blockade’ is interpreted as a metaphor for a confined time and space particular to the besieged city during the years 1941 to 1945, then in Chang’s depiction, the practices of reading (newspapers, magazines, bestseller fiction, billboards, signs, and window displays) helped shape the everyday experience of an average reader residing in occupied Shanghai. The story is to be read as a trope of the state of cultural production during this brief moment in modern history. Print culture worked to assign meanings, a sense of stability, and structure to a life that was constantly undermined by outside forces. More questions then follow: What kind of meanings or substance was being offered, through the print media, to an average reader in Shanghai who had to confront the presence of war in the forms of air raids and blockades on a daily basis and, as the damage of the war deepened, had to confront the increasingly pressing issue of daily survival? And, more importantly, to what extent was this wartime print culture gendered? How exactly did the notion of ‘women’ fit into the picture? Other scholarly discourses have highlighted the continuity of a Shanghai cosmopolitan culture throughout the Republican Era. A representative work is Leo Ou-fan Lee’s Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-1945 , in which the author defines the significance of Eileen Chang as “draw[ing] a kind of allegorical closure by bringing to an end an entire era of urban culture that had nurtured her creativity—an era that began in the late 1920s, reached its height of urban glory in the early 1930s, and thereafter declined until its demise in the early 1950s….”6 While acknowledging the elements of continuity, the present study stresses the uniqueness of popular culture in occupied Shanghai. Most notably, women in occupied Shanghai took over the existing print space and mechanisms, defined a fresh focus on an array of issues particular to women’s interests, and, most importantly, acquired the skills of manipulating the frame, the tone, the pace, and the structure of media representations. Simply put, for the first time in the history of modern print in China, women became the principal architects in this arena. By using 5 See “Blockade” in Romances, Enlarged Edition, 377-87. 6 Lee, Shanghai Modern, 269.

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the term ‘women’s print culture,’ the present study depicts a cultural formation initiated by a group of women who not only wrote, edited, and published, but also took part in defining and transforming the structure of modern knowledge, and discussing it in various public forums surrounding the print media. In doing so, they promoted themselves as authoritative cultural commentators and public intellectuals of the era. THE STAGE

The emergence of a women’s print culture went hand in hand with the revival of the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School of literature toward the end of the Orphan Island Era. In fact, it was the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies writers, editors, and publishers that first started the society-wide promotion of a new generation of urban writers, mainly, young women authors just out of college. This close connection with a preexisting print mechanism, literary school, readership, and urban popular culture sets these women apart from other cultural interests of the wartime period, and sheds light on why their particular kind of print culture emerged during the occupation era. To refer to the period between 1941 and 1945 as one of revival for the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School does not mean that writers in the group were silent during the preceding periods. The Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School of popular fiction and the journals that it was associated with never faded from the cultural imagination of Shanghai readers throughout the first half of the century. However, the most glorious days of the School were back in the 1910s and 1920s, when many of the Butterflies writers were themselves entrepreneurs in a burgeoning publishing industry. These individuals were the first group of professional writers who were pushed to the center stage of urban life by the ever-flourishing urban commerce shaped since the late nineteenth century. 7 Among the veteran writers of the school, Bao Tianxiao ̸˭ক (1876-1973), for instance, worked as a reporter for the daily newspaper 7 For a detailed study of the formation and activities of the School, see the aforementioned book by Perry Link titled Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies: Popular Fiction in Early Twentieth-Century Chinese Cities. For the activities of representative figures in the School, see individual biograph ies collected in Wei Shaochang, ed., Yuanyang hudie pai yanjiu ziliao Ꮪ Ꮧ ሪ ራ ާ ߧ ԥ ཊ ऄ (Research Material on the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School) (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1962).

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Shibao इే (The Times) for an extended period of time and also served as the Editor-in-Chief for the journal Xingqi ‫ݶ‬ಭ (The Weekly) in the early 1920s.8 Zhang Henshui ઠ‫( ̐ݒ‬1895-1967) edited newspapers during his earlier years before he went on to become the most prolific writer of the School with representative works including Ti xiao yinyuan ఩ক‫ܪ‬ሇ (Destinies in Tears and Laughter, 1930) and Ping Hu tongche ͦ၇௢Ծ (Shanghai Express, 1935). 9 An even more persuasive example is Zhou Shoujuan ֟ᇚᖚ (1895-1968), who, between April 1920 and December 1932, edited the “Ziyou tan” бΊሾ (Unfettered Talk) column for Shenbao Όే (The Shanghai Daily) before the position was taken over by Li Liewen ኲ्́ (1904-1972) and Li subsequently introduced Lu Xun’s ኬՃ (1881-1936) fiery critical essays to his readers. Zhou Shoujuan also served as the Editor-in-Chief for the weekly magazine Libailiu ᔩ‫( ˗ݛ‬Saturday), a landmark publication that earned the movement its other derogatory name—the “Saturday School” ( Libailiu pai ᔩ‫ )ާ˗ݛ‬soon after it was labeled as the “Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School.” 10 Both terms were coined in the midst of fierce denunciation by writers and critics from the leftist camp

8 See Bao Tianxiao, “Wo yu zazhi jie” Ӎ Ⴉ ᕺ ბ ߍ (The Magazine World and I), The Miscellany Monthly 14. 5 (February 1945): 7-12. Also see Fan Boqun, “Bao Tianxiao jiqi liupai guishu” ̸ ˭ ক ˪ մ ‫ ާ ޟ‬ᔏ ᚙ (Bao Tianxiao and the Literary School He Belonged to) in Minguo tongsu xiaoshuo yuanyang hudie pai ͺ ੢ ௢ ۞ ʮ ი Ꮪ Ꮧ ሪ ራ ާ (Popular Fiction from the Republican Era: Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies) (Taipei: Guowen tiandi zazhishe, 1990), 131-52. 9 For a study of Zhang Henshui’s fiction writing, see Rey Chow, “Mandarin

Ducks and Butterflies: An Exercise in Popular Readings” in Women and Chinese Modernity: The Politics of Reading Between West and East (Minneapolis and O xford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 34-83. 10 The term “Mandarin Ducks and Butterfly School,” Perry Link explains, “was

first used in the late 1910s to refer disparagingly to the classical-style love stories of a small, but very widely read, group of authors who made liberal use of the traditional symbols of mandarin ducks and butterflies for pairs of lovers.” See Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies , 251-2. Denise Gimpel, in her detailed study of a popular fiction magazine from the 1910s, explains in further detail how the term became instrumental in a fierce battle over legitimation and territory between the so-called ‘old-style’ literati writers, most of whom were based in Shanghai, and a group of ‘new-style’ writers and intellectuals who strove t o define modern Chinese literature as a ‘new literature’ that was socially engaged and politically edged and came to regard popular fiction writers as their opponents. See Gimpel, Lost Voices of Mod er nity: A Chinese Popular Fiction Magazine in Context (University of Hawaii Press, 2001), 220-7.

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and they were constant reminders of how the field of popular culture had always been a political battlefield throughout the Republican Era.11 Among many 1920s journals that Zhou either served as the Editor-inChief or was associated with were his own favorites Ziluolan ാᗘᚱ (Violet) and the pocket-sized Zilan huapian ാᚱ‫( ̕ګ‬Violet Petals), as well as the biweekly publication entitled Banyue ̽̇ (Half Moon). Cultural production by this group of writers, editors, and publishers began to lose ground during the 1930s as a new generation of urban writers emerged on the horizon. Key figures in the group were categorized as “old-school literati” ( jiupai wenren ᕄާ́ʆ) as a contrast to those of the “new-school” ( xinpai wenren ๘ާ́ʆ), that is, a younger group of Shanghai writers and publishers who were more informed by Western literary and cultural trends and more in tune with the changing patterns of urban consumption of cultural commodities. 12 11 See Zhou Shoujuan, “Xianhua Libailiu” ෈ ༼ ᔩ ‫( ˗ ݛ‬Chatting about Sat ur-

day ) and Ping Jinya, “‘ Yuanyang hudie pai’ mingming de gushi” Ꮪ Ꮧ ሪ ራ ާ ֡ Ϗ ‫ ݭ ڄ‬Ֆ (The Story of the Naming of the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School). For the leftist attack of writers and publications from the Saturday school, see a series of articles by Xi Di о ፸ (Zheng Zhenduo ቷࣴ ᛈ ) (1898-1958) published in the early 1920s, including “Sixiang de fanliu” ‫( ޟ ˫ ڄ ึ ݋‬A Reactionary Intellec tual Trend, 1921), “Xinjiu wenxue de tiaohe” ๘ ᕄ ́ ዕ ‫ ڄ‬ቆ ֜ (The Negotiation Between New and Old Literature s, 1921), “Xue he lei de wenxue” л ֜ ର ‫ ́ ڄ‬ዕ (Lit erature of Blood and Tears), “Xiaoxian?” श ෈ î (Leisure?, 1921), “Zhongguo wenren duiyu wenxue de genben wujie” ˀ ੢ ́ ʆ ࿬ ‫ ́ ؠ‬ዕ ‫ ڄ‬घ ʹ თ ༱ (The Ch inese Literati’s Fundamental Misunderstanding of Literature), and “Wen chang” ́ ࡳ (Lit erary Prostitution, 1922). All of the above essays are collected in Research Material on the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School. Also see Gimpel, Lost Voices of Modernity, 220-7. 12 Liang Desuo’s Liangyou huabao (The Good Companion Pictorial) i s a good example of the difference between, as well as the merging trends of, the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ in urban publishing. The Good Companion was a Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies journal when it first appeared in 1926, edited by Wu Liande and Zhou Shoujuan successively. When Liang Desuo took over as the Editor-in-Chief, in March 1927, he initiated a series of reforms and turned the jou rnal into a ground-breaking publciation. A painter, art historian, photographer, and essayist, Liang was a true entrepreneur in the field of modern commercial publishing. In the 1930s and 1940s, his pictorial-style magazine became the norm in the co mmer cial printing of Shanghai.

For a comprehensive study of trends in urban commercial publishing of the 1920s and 1930s, see Wu Fuhui ѹ ၰ ቨ , “Zuowei wenxue (shangpin) shengchan de Haipai qikan” ѕ ޴ ́ ዕ ă ੋ ‫ ܇‬Ą Ά ୕ ‫ ާ ऺ ڄ‬ಭ ̵ (The Shanghai School of Journals Produced as Literary Commodities), Zhongguo xiandai wenxue yanjiu congkan 58 (February 1994): 1-15.

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The prevalent linked-chapter style of fiction writing ( zhanghui xiaoshuo ఈϖʮი) in Butterflies journals also began to lose more of its readership in its competition with the 1930s Shanghai modernist literature represented by the experiments of a group of French influenced writers surrounding the journal Xiandai ୏̩ ( Les Contemporains ). By the 1940s, the existing readership, along with most writers from this allmale school, was rapidly aging. To incorporate a younger generation of urban writers, particularly young women authors just out of college, into the camp then became the central strategy adopted by key figures such as Zhou Shoujuan and Chen Dieyi ௾ራн (b. 1907) in their efforts to appeal to more Shanghai readers and thereby to reclaim the important position the School and its cultural products had always occupied in the leisure life of urban Shanghai. Thus, to refer to this period as a revival of the School then is to acknowledge the fundamental role Butterflies journals of the period played in discovering and promoting young women authors; redefining popular literature and reestablishing its importance; sustaining and incorporating previous literary traditions; and maintaining and widening the reading public. The Butterflies School played a leadership role in constructing a wartime culture that was primarily centered around practices of reading, writing, and publishing—that is, the space of modern print—during a period of time when other forms of modern life were being smashed to bits. The mainstream media in Shanghai had already anticipated the revival of the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School of writing during the Orphan Island Era. In 1940, there was a demonstrated interest among members of the leftist camp in renewing their earlier attacks on the Butterflies School. In an essay entitled “Libailiupai de chongzhen” ᔩ‫ڄ˗ݛ‬ ࡌࣴ (The Revival of the Saturday School), the author Ye Su །ছ notes recent attempts by some writers and editors of the Butterflies School to return to the Shanghai cultural scene. But “what kind of revival is it,” asks Ye, “and how does it fit into the larger social context?” He then offers a criticism that is squarely in line with the tone and rhetoric shared by leftist critics and intellectuals of earlier decades. The so-called absence of a sense of reality in Butterflies literature is once again highlighted. In his essay, Ye Su sounds enraged by this popular literature’s lack of response to the larger historical context, namely, the war and the looming national crisis, and its indifference to the political significance of Shanghai as an isolated island within the rest of China. This gener-

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alization is based on his reading of the first two issues of the journal Xiaoshuo yuebao ʮი̇ే (The Fiction Monthly), which started publication in October 1940. “In these two thick volumes,” Ye writes, “we can hardly find any smell of gunpowder or blood. For those writers, the world was still a peaceful place. Even if there is some mentioning of war, that war belongs to a distant past, not our present struggle in pursuit of survival and freedom….”13 The revival of the Butterflies School that so alerted the author Ye Su soon took on a new direction that the mainstream media had not predicted. Ye Su’s worries were not completely unfounded. The occupation era that immediately followed was proven to be the era of a last sprouting of Butterflies Literature. The most important Butterflies journal published during the occupation era was the acclaimed Wanxiang yuekan ໗ඐ̵̇, or The Phenomena Monthly —the most long-lasting literary journal of the war years. Scholarly analysis on the cultural production of this period tends to divide the publication of this journal into two distinctive phases marked by the switching of editorship in 1943 from Chen Dieyi, a veteran writer of the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School, to Ke Ling, a leftist writer and editor who had established his literary reputation during the preceding Orphan Island Era. During the first two years (1941-3), Chen Dieyi served as the Editorin-Chief and published mostly Butterflies fiction and works by other urban popular fiction writers such as Yu Qie ˅̝ (Pan Yuqie ᇃ˅̝) (1902-1989) and Tan Weihan ᗲાፖ (1913-1994). 14 However, when Ke Ling took over the editing duties in 1943, The Phenomena Monthly was transformed into a platform that brought back old writers from the 13 In Shanghai zhoubao ʕ ऺ ֟ ే (Shanghai Guardian) 2. 26 (December 1940): 668-9. Ye Su was possibly the pseudonym of a leftist writer. 14 Chen Dieyi joined the camp of the Butterflies School later than most of its vet-

eran members. He was one of the editors for a 1930s fan newspaper Mingxing ribao ‫( ే ̅ ݶ ا‬Star Daily), one of the major Butterflies publications of the period. Aside from his prolific publishing career, Chen was also known as a prominent song-writer. He supplied lyrics for nearly three thousand popular songs, some of which remained favorites among his audiences across several generations. In recent years, the Chinese popular music world has organized concerts to pay tribute to Chen’s lifetime of work, with several generations of pop singers from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland China coming together to perform his songs. See Jiang Li, “Jiushiwu sui de dangao” ʃ ʏ ˉ ๶ ‫ ڄ‬஻ ፉ (A Birthday Cake for a Ninety-five-year Old), Peo ple’s Daily (overseas edition), December 6, 2002.

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‘New Literature’ camp, such as Wang Tongzhao ̙஀ຖ (1897-1957) and Lu Yan ኬ݂ (1901-1944), and promoted young writers such as Zheng Dingwen ቷ‫( ́׆‬1923-1945) and Shen Ji Ӻ઀ (b. 1924), who were considered to be followers of the tradition of the ‘New Literature.’ Scholarly analysis tends to highlight Ke Ling’s resistance efforts during the occupation era. He is often praised for transforming or singlehandedly correcting a Butterflies journal and incorporating it into the mainstream literary tradition that highlights social and political consciousness in literary representations.15 A more historically accurate way of positioning The Phenomena Monthly is to recognize the fact that it remained a Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies publication even under the editorship of Ke Ling. Many Butterflies writers continued to publish their work in the journal. The veteran writer Cheng Xiaoqing ദʮ‫( ی‬1893-1976), dubbed the “Chinese Conan Doyle,” continued to publish his series of stories about a private detective named Huo Sang Ꮈट, assisted by a character named Bao Lang ̸ࡇ, who solved one difficult case after another, in The Phenomena Monthly and several other Butterflies journals. War and occupation did not prevent the Chinese Sherlock Holmes and Watson from solving their cases. When the war ended, Cheng was able to publish all of his stories in a hefty thirty-volume edition entitled Huo Sang tan’an quanji Ꮈटૉकηූ (Huo Sang Solves Cases: A Complete Collection).16 The Phenomena Monthly also continued to embrace other popular fiction writers. For instance, Yu Qie, whose urban tales were all the rage from the late 1930s to the 1940s, was a key contributor. The success of the journal The Phenomena Monthly relied heavily on the fact that it was and had always been a popular journal, and that it had persistently catered to “the popular taste for amusement.” 17 This is also the reason

15 See, for instance, Ying Guojing ᏻ ੢ ྒྷ , “Wuni zhi zhong de jielian— Wanxiang ” Й ِ ˃ ˀ ‫ ڄ‬ᆸ ም í ໗ ඐ (The Phenomena Monthly : A Pure Lotus in the Midst of Dirty Mud) in Xiandai wenxue qikan manhua ୏ ̩ ́ ዕ ಭ ̵ ၃ ༼ (Essays on Modern Literary Periodicals) (Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 1986), 401-5. 16 See Hu Dalu, “Zhentan xiaoshuo dajia: Cheng Xiaoqing” ਲ਼ ૉ ʮ ი ʨ ࣁ í ദ ʮ ‫( ی‬A Master of Detective Fiction: Cheng Xiaoqing), Shanghai tan 60 (December 1991): 6-9. 17 Here I am referring to Poshek Fu’s discussion of the importance of Ke Ling and the journal under his editorship: “Ke Ling succeeded within a few months in turning

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why it not only survived, but also launched a successful major marketing campaign during the war and the occupation. Furthermore, Ke Ling’s attempt to bring in writers of ‘serious’ literature (as opposed to ‘popular’ literature) did not run contrary to the agenda laid down by Chen Dieyi when the journal was previously under his editorship. To maintain the distinction between the two phases in the publication of the journal is to naively hold onto the age-old-belief in the division between the so-called ‘serious’ literature (literature that carries on the May Fourth tradition of social intervention and political engagement) and ‘popular’ literature (literature that aims to entertain and to please the popular taste). In the case of 1940s Shanghai, this arbitrary divide was constantly challenged and eventually blurred in a success story such as that of The Phenomena Monthly . In other words, “the popular taste for amusement” and the “forum of symbolic resistance” were not necessarily mutually exclusive.18 The intervention by Ke Ling did not change the function of The Phenomena Monthly in the context of the popular media; rather, the changing faces of this journal, as well as of other Butterflies journals from the period, represented the new direction toward which Butterflies writers and editors were moving in their efforts to challenge the literary mainstream, to test the boundaries between the ‘serious’ and the ‘popular,’ and above all, to use the print medium as a way to reinvent life in wartime. The story began in 1942 when Chen Dieyi organized two special forums, published in the fourth and fifth issues of The Phenomena Monthly , initiating a so-called “movement of popular literature” ( tongsu wenxue yundong ௢۞́ዕཡੂ). Chen proposed a new kind of urban popular literature that “communicates across the barriers between the new literature and the old literature,” and that “introduces new thought and correct consciousness to the ordinary readers through the medium of popular literature.” He argued that while ‘popular’ literature can benefit from a critical edge and social/political consciousness, ‘serious’ literature also should take into consideration the reader’s tastes. Chen’s acknowledgment of the importance of a sustained readership leads to his editorial strategies to make so-called ‘serious’ literature more urban, and therefore more accessible to Shanghai readers. Wanxiang from the popular taste for amusement into a forum for symbolic resistance.” See Passivity, Resistance, and Collaboration, 62. 18 Ibid.

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According to Chen, the importance of the new kind of popular literature he proposed lay precisely in the fact that it could serve as a bridge between the two rigidly divided camps of the ‘new literature’ and the ‘old literature,’ and therefore create something truly urban and modern. Here, Chen attempted to fight the marginal position that had been assigned to urban popular literature and to formally claim a mainstream status for it. Since ‘popular’ literature can be just as ‘serious’ as the socalled ‘serious’ literature, why, he asked, do we still want to uphold the arbitrary divide between the two?19 Chen Dieyi’s attempt to widen the scope of Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies publications to incorporate a variety of writers and different schools of writing was shared by a younger generation of urban popular writers, who were either absorbed into the school or were associated with it in various ways. The list includes Wu Diaogong ѹቆ˙ (writing under the pseudonym Ding Di ʀ፸) (b. 1914), Zhou Lengqie ֟๮э (writing under the pseudonym Wei Yueyan υ̇ጝ) (1911-1992), Hu Shanyuan ࠍʱ຀ (1897-1988), Yu Qie, and Wu Chongshan ѹઉʱ (writing under the pseudonym Wen Zongshan ́‫ׅ‬ʱ) (?-?).20 What most of these writers, editors, and publishers had in common was their shared attempt to shield their cultural practices from any possible ties to the collaborationist government. They all turned to urban commerce to seek sponsorship and used commercial printing as an effective tool of symbolic resistance. For instance, the aforementioned very popular Fiction Monthly , edited by Gu Lengguan ᛐѣᝳ (?-?), and in circulation between October 1940 and November 1944, was published by an advertising company called Lianhua guanggao gongsi ᑷൡᅩѾ˙ ͌ (Lianhua Advertising Company).

19 See Chen Dieyi, “Tongsu wenxue yundong” ௢ ۞ ́ ዕ ཡ ੂ (The Movement

of Popular Lit erature), The Phenomena Monthly 2. 4 (1942): 130-40. 20 All of these writers were considered to be forerunners of a new generation of urban writers in Shanghai. Prior to his involvement with popular literature, Hu Shanyuan was a participant of the May Fourth movement, and was the founder of the Misa So ciety (Misa she ᏹ ᭸ ‫) ڊ‬, but his literary activities remained on the margin of mai nstream literature. It has been difficult to locate biographical information on other writers. For short descriptions of their literary activities during the period, see Chen Qingsheng, Shanghai Literature of the Sino-Japanese War, 209-70; and Wu Fuhui, Dushi xuanliu zhong de Haipai xiaoshuo ௲ ͤ ဴ ‫ ޟ‬ˀ ‫ ާ ऺ ڄ‬ʮ ი (The Shanghai School Fiction in the Currents of Urban Culture) (Changsha: Hunan jiaoyu chubanshe, 1995), 82-101.

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What these intellectuals and their publications also had in common was their collective effort to incorporate works by young writers to attract a younger and broader readership. The first four issues of The Fiction Monthly mainly featured veteran Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies authors; but starting from the fifth issue, works by Zhou Lengqie, Ding Di, Yu Qie, and young women authors such as Shi Jimei also appeared. In the editorial foreword of the first issue, Gu Lengguan and the journal’s publisher Lu Shoulun ௿ϭࡼ indicate that they do not hold prejudicial views against any literary school or genre: “Everything is welcome, new or old, in a variety of forms.”21 Out of necessity, the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School of writers and editors furthered the cause of what might be called the democratization of literary enterprise. Other successful journals associated with the Butterflies School include Chunqiu yuekan ‫( ̵߲̇ݱ‬Spring and Autumn Monthly), Wansui banyuekan ໗๶̵̽̇ (Ten Thousand Years Biweekly), and Ziluolan yuekan ാᗘᚱ̵̇ (The Violet Monthly). Spring and Autumn Monthly was in circulation from August 1943 to March 1949, making it one of the most enduring literary journals of the 1940s; in fact, it was the only literary journal that continued its publication after 1945. It was edited by Chen Dieyi (after he gave up the editorship of The Phenomena Monthly ), Wen Zongshan, and Shen Ji. Starting from the very first issue, the journal made a conspicuous attempt to enlarge the scope and impact of urban popular literature by simultaneously showcasing works by several generations of urban writers. Ten Thousand Years Biweekly was a relatively short-lived journal, but it demonstrates very well this much shared editorial strategy in wartime popular publishing. Wei Yueyan (Zhou Lengqie), in his editorial foreword to the first issue of the journal, declares that the editorial agenda is to “take care of the reading interests of a variety of readers,” and the journal aims at “taking everything into consideration, satisfying everybody, neither too profound, nor too vulgar, [and creating a journal that can be] appreciated by readers of both the refined and the ordinary.” 22 Even though no women were present during the 1942 discussion of ‘popular literature’ initiated by Chen Dieyi, editors and publishers of popular journals soon discovered that promoting young women writers

21 See Fiction Monthly 1 (October 1940): 1. 22 See Ten Thousand Years Biweekly 1 (January 1943): 1-2. The journal was short-lived, in circulation January-May 1943, with a total of eight issues.

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was the key to the continuing prosperity of their journals. Here, Zhou Shoujuan’s Violet Monthly should be singled out for its marked effort in promoting young women authors from the college student population. Zhou was the one who first discovered the talents of Eileen Chang— Chang’s first short story “Chen xiang xie: di yi lu xiang” ӻ࡜ࣈí୶ɾ ᙊ࡜ (Aloewood Ashes: The First Incense Burning) was published in the second and the third issues of the journal in 1943. 23 The most important contribution of The Violet Monthly was its promotion of a distinctive style of writing represented by a group of young women writers, many of whom were the daughters or disciples of the older generation of Butterflies writers. The list includes Shi Jimei, Cheng Yuzhen (Cheng Xiaoqing’s daughter), Lian Yuanxiu, Wang Liling, Zhou Lianxia, Yang Xiuzhen, Zeng Wenqiang, Yu Shaoming, Zhou Ling (Zhou Shoujuan’s daughter) and Shi Jiying (Shi Jimei’s younger sister). This style of writing bears a distinctively ‘feminine’ label and many ties to the so-called ‘boudoir style’ ( guixiu ti) of prose writing from the 1920s and 1930s, previously represented by women writers including Bing Xin κ˻ (1900-1999), Su Xuelin ᙨఆ‫( ظ‬1899-1999), and Ling Shuhua ࢃ֋ൡ (1900-1990). The difference between the two styles is that the 1940s version appears to be largely popularized and was marketed on a much larger scale in Shanghai. In fact, the revived and reinvented style of writing created by these women authors and their editors was largely responsible for the success of many of the popular journals of the period.24 Among the women writers who published in The Violet Monthly , Shi Jimei was the most successful. Her reputation reached its zenith when a considerable number of Shanghai readers began to call themselves ‘fans of Shi’ ( Shi mi ‫)ਁݯ‬. Shi Jimei, Cheng Yuzhen, and several other young women authors of the time, were graduates of the aristocratic Dongwu University, a Catholic all-women liberal arts college. In fact, their literary careers began when they were still in school and started reading, subscribing, and contributing to popular journals of the time, most of which were Butterflies journals. After they graduated from college, 23 The Violet Monthly was in circulation April 1943-December 1944, with a total of 18 issues. Zh ou Shoujuan’s editorial preface in the journal’s second issue records his first meeting with Eileen Chang and formally introduce to its rea ders this amazingly talented young woman author. See The Violet Monthly 2 (May 1943): 3-5. 24 Chapter Six will examine this style of writing, using the domestic fiction of Shi Jimei as an example.

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around 1943—right in the middle of the wartime occupation, they attained instant success in a print market filled with journals and magazines devoted to a readership craving new voices and new styles of fiction writing. The importance of Butterflies journals was that they provided an existing framework of urban media mechanisms for the showcasing of women writers. The middlebrow culture that had been fostered by the Butterflies writers and their journals subsequently went on to support a new generation of writers, who, in turn, sustained and revitalized this culture and fostered a large community that attached great importance to reading and writing during the war years. With the emergence of women writers came a revival of issues concerning women, and May Fourth discussions of the social positions of women were brought back in a new, and more violent, context. The wartime middlebrow culture of Shanghai became increasingly gendered, while the young women writers forged ahead and played a central role in creating a new version of urban literature and promoting themselves as a new generation of public intellectuals. THE ISSUES

The emergence of a new generation of urban female writers and a new kind of public intellectuals went hand in hand with the transformation of an important cultural genre—the home journal. This three-year period saw massive attention given to domestic issues, a trend that was unprecedented in Shanghai’s modern history of popular print. Here, the so-called Shanghainese mentality or identity was cited as the key to understanding this trend. In her essay entitled “Daodi shi Shanghairen” ռ‫ݵנ‬ʕऺʆ (Shanghainese After All), Eileen Chang sets out to theorize a Shanghainese mentality: “The Shanghainese is a traditional Chinese person fashioned by the high pressures of modern life.” The author goes on to further elaborate what it means to qualify as a Shanghainese; he or she should “incorporate a variety of anomalous byproducts of both modern and traditional cultures. The outcome might not be healthy, but one can perceive a kind of remarkable wisdom here.” 25

25 See Written on Water , 57-9.

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This essay was written just at the moment when Eileen Chang started to enjoy a soaring reputation as one of the most popular young authors in Shanghai. At first glance, the essay can be understood as the author’s unambiguous effort to further court her already-fascinated local audience. However, one can also detect a sense of urgency to define a collective identity that is geographically specific.26 The underlying messages are: first, the so-called Shanghainese identity is a tailored construction; secondly, anyone can assume this identity by simply cultivating oneself and attaining a new body of knowledge. What are the components and standards of this knowledge? In another essay entitled “Daolu yi mu” ལཔ̣Α (Scenes from the Streets), 27 Chang uses the word tong ௢ (suave and knowledgeable) to describe a particular kind of expertise that is a by-product of urban life in Shanghai. This expertise appears to be a kind of proficiency or adeptness in skills, and refinement or sophistication in manners. A person who is tong is a connoisseur of life. Throughout the essay, Chang expresses her amazement at the tong character of the Shanghainese. The one-syllable word tong highlights a new knowledge standard—not entirely measured by book knowledge, but largely indicated by a kind of everyday wisdom accumulated through time and circulated by human contact and the popular media. Chang also demonstrates that a person who is considered tong in Shanghai should also embrace a global vision; at least, he or she should be able to draw a few English words into everyday conversations. The primary source of this everyday knowledge, then, did not come from standard textbooks or canonized literary works; rather, it was popular print media that was offering practical knowledge to its readers. To achieve the state of tong , a Shanghai reader had to be very well read. Print media in 1940s Shanghai not only provided readers with entertainment, but also supplied various essential elements for shaping an urban personality: how to shop smartly, what brands of cigarettes repre26 This urgent need to construct a unique “Shanghainese” identity was also shared

by other intellectuals of the time. See, for instance, “Teji: sanshi nian qian Shanghai tan” ॐ ᎓ í ʒ ʏ ϶ ‫ ۮ‬ʕ ऺ ᛴ (Special Issue on Shanghai of Thirty Years Ago), The Phenomena Monthly 4. 3 (September 1944): 8-45; and “Zhanggu zuotan” ಆ ‫ ࣙ ݭ‬ሾ (A Roundtable Discussion of Anecdote-tellers), The Miscellany Monthly 14. 2 (November 1944): 74-80. 27 First published in Heaven and Earth Monthly 4 (January 1944): 10-2; co llected in Written on Water , 60-6.

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sented social status, what movies to see, what style of clothes were in fashion, and how to handle everyday conversations in appropriately urban diction. This was the core of Shanghai’s middlebrow culture. The popular print media continuously supplied both pleasure and cultured information to its readers, who were “oriented always to the gaze and assessment of others.” 28 In the context in which Chang wrote her essay, however, the urgency to achieve a high level of tong was associated with the pressing issue of daily survival in wartime occupied Shanghai. This marked Shanghai middlebrow culture of the 1940s apart from that of the previous decades. Many popular journals of the period supplied a variety of everyday wisdom at a chaotic time, such as discussions about personal hygiene, strategies to stabilize the family structure, the benefit of buying cotton shoes (both practical and inexpensive), and various other ways to save money and conserve energy in order to run a household efficiently. This alternative standard of knowledge, as highlighted by Eileen Chang, becomes more important when read together with a body of ‘new knowledge,’ as categorized in home journals published during the period. Here the home journal is defined as a cultural genre that evolved from the earliest women’s newspapers and magazines in the late nineteenth-early twentieth century, including Nüzi shijie ʩʪ̛ߍ (Women’s World), Zhongguo nübao ˀ੢ʩే (Chinese Women’s Newspaper), Zhongguo xin nüjie zazhi ˀ੢๘ʩߍᕺბ (A Journal of the New World of Chinese Women), Funü ribao ੴʩ̅ే (Women’s Daily), and Funü zazhi ੴʩᕺბ (Women’s Magazine). These were then followed by a series of popular journals directed at the domestic market published by the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School writers, including Half Moon Biweekly , Violet Petals , and Xin jiating ๘ࣁࣘ (The New Home). 29 These led to the stabilization of home journals as a distinctive cultural genre in the mid-1930s and the 1940s, marked by a sequence of publications bearing the word ‘home’ ( jiating ࣁࣘ) as their essential trademark, including several major newspaper supplements created by a man named Xu Baiyi ࣝР८ (1911-1998) between 1936 and 1941.

28 Janice Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 283 . 29 See editorial prefaces of these journals collected in Research Material on Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School.

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Xu Baiyi was a paramount figure in Shanghai commercial publishing of the 1930s and 1940s. However, he is one of the most overlooked figures in the current scholarly discourse on Shanghai’s pre-revolutionary culture. With a career spanning seven decades, Xu Baiyi has been revered in recent years as a pioneering figure in the field of commercial advertising in modern China, but few recognize him as a critical figure in the transformation of popular journals in the war years, particularly in the genre of home journals. Xu began working in the advertising departments of daily newspapers when he was in his late teens. By the time he was a young man in his early twenties, he already had a successful advertising business. While marketing home products, he became fascinated with family issues and wanted to experiment with publishing home journals. This was a very astute business move: Xu’s home supplements and home journals eventually became the most effective advertising tools that he used to promote home products. Additionally, Xu’s successful advertising business also ensured that his journals continued to be published, even during difficult times, when other journals were forced to fold under financial pressure. Ultimately, his success in advertising allowed him to be able to be pursue a concurrent writing, editing, and publishing career. Xu Baiyi’s sundry experiments in publishing began with editing newspaper supplements in 1936-7, including Dawanbao funü yu jiating fukan ʨ૴ేੴʩႩࣁࣘਾ̵ (The Women and Home Supplement to The Grand Evening News ), Dagongbao xiandai jiating fukan ʨ˙ే ୏̩ࣁࣘਾ̵ (The Modern Home Supplement to Dagongbao), Shenbao yuekan jiating fukan Όే̵̇ࣁࣘਾ̵ (The Home Supplement to Shanghai Monthly ), and Shishi xinbao shidai jiating fukan इՖ๘ే इ̩ࣁࣘਾ̵ (The Modern Home Supplement to The New Daily Times ). These major newspaper supplements represent early attempts at publishing home journals in China. A large percentage of the material that appeared in these supplements was transplanted from home journals published in the United States, such as Good Housekeeping and Lady’s Home Journal. Xu not only served as the editor, but also worked as a translator and writer for all of these supplements. His friend Bian Qini ˧մ⿎ was also among the earliest journalists and writers who were interested in creating a new form of modern journal targeted at the domestic market. 30

30 No biographical information is available on Bian Qini.

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When Xu Baiyi first began his experiments with home supplements, he intended his publication to cater to both genders, but his early attempts were soon interrupted by the war.31 As home journals made a comeback in the early 1940s, they progressively evolved into women’s journals, due to the participation of women writers and journalists such as Su Qing, Pan Liudai, Shi Jimei, and Guan Lu. They also demonstrated an increasing fascination with the materiality of everyday life. In the 1940s, Xu Baiyi also made a comeback. He moved from newspaper supplements to his own trademarked home journals. The period 1943-5 must be regarded as the golden age of Chinese home journals because this brief moment in history saw the simultaneous marketing success of several major publications, including Jiating yuekan ࣁ̵ࣘ̇ (Happy Home Monthly), Jiankang jiatingyuekan ਯછࣁࣘ ̵̇ (Healthy Home Monthly), Jiating niankan ࣁࣘ϶̵ (Home Annual), and Nüsheng yuekan ʩᑵ̵̇ (Women’s Voices Monthly).32 With the exception of Women’s Voices, all of these home journals were edited and published by Xu Baiyi, who also published many of his own essays in the journals and continued to be a prolific writer on domestic issues. Home journals published during the war years also demonstrated their close ties to the consumer product market. For example, as previously mentioned, Xu Baiyi’s company, Hongye guanggao tushu gongsi 31 Xu discusses these earlier experiences of editing home supplements in his

“Zhongguo de jiating wenti” ˀ ੢ ‫ ࣘ ࣁ ڄ‬੕ ᖅ (The Family Problem in China) in Home Annual 1 (1943): 4-10. 32 Happy Home Monthly , edited by Xu Baiyi, published January 1936-October

1945, with a total of six volumes, 72 issues. This was the most influential, popular, and long-lasting home journal published in 1940s Shanghai. It was originally a bimonthly publication entitled Kuaile jiating (Happy Home). The English title remained unchanged even after the Chinese title was changed to Jiating .

Healthy Home Monthly , edited by Lu Boyu ௿ ї Ц , Ding Fubao ʀ ၰ ۘ , Pan Yangyao ᇃ ή ూ , and Mei Fu ଋ ᖍ , and later taken over by Xu Baiyi and Hongye guanggao tushu gongsi, the pub lisher of Jiating yuekan , published April 1939-June 1944, with a total of five vo lumes, 50 issues. Home Annual , edited by Xu Baiyi, published 1943-1948, with a total of five issues. These mega-journals served as source books for the housewives of Shanghai, the same reading community as that of Happy Home Monthly . The first three issues (1943-45) were all reprinted many times to meet enthusiastic demands. For an extended discussion of Women’s Voices, see Chapter Three.

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Ү๣ᅩѾ࿌ए˙͌ (Hongye Advertising and Printing Company), which was an advertising agency devoted to the marketing of household products, published all of Xu’s journals. 33 Hongye later bought the publication rights of Healthy Home Monthly , which was originally owned by Xinya ๘՘, a pharmaceutical company that made a huge fortune because of the surging demand for medicine and medical equipment during the war years. 34 These journals presented to their readers the aspects of material culture that sustained daily life in a war-torn city; they also facilitated the continuity of an emotional and cultural life whose integrity was constantly being threatened by the presence of war and occupation. The monthly journal Women’s Voices, which is the focus of the next chapter, stands out among all of the 1940s publications for its distinctive editorial agenda of addressing a gendered urban readership. The journal appears to be the point of convergence of a variety of cultural and political discourses that emerged since the late nineteenth century. Its enthusiastic call for the need to address the collectivity of ‘Chinese women,’ its persistent effort to tackle a variety of women-related social issues, as well as its declared editorial intention to raise women’s social and political consciousness, are reminiscent of the prevailing rhetoric of the May Fourth and the post-May Fourth discourses on freedom, individual rights, and gender equality. And yet the journal’s endless narration of everyday details, its much-articulated editorial interest in the consolidation and expansion of an urban readership, as well as its witty and lively journalistic style, all effectively demonstrate the journal’s many ties to urban commercial culture and the entertainment industry. These characteristics serve to situate Women’s Voices on the center stage of the flourishing media culture of occupied Shanghai. Describing the period between 1943 and 1945 as the golden age of Chinese home journals is not to suggest that the publication of home journals came to an abrupt end after 1945. In fact, the aftermath of this specific cultural genre sheds light on the impact it had on urban com33 See Zhu Boquan Ќ ї ‫ ޛ‬, “Fakan ci” ച ̵ අ (Foreword), Home Annual 1

(1943): 1. 34 See, for instance, Sherman Cochran’s study of the commercialization of both popular journals and medical products in his “Marketing Medicine Across Enemy Lines: Chinese ‘Fixers’ and Shanghai’s Wa rtime Centrality,” in Christian Henriot and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds., In the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Shanghai under Japan ese Occupation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 66-89.

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mercial printing in Shanghai. A monthly journal called Xingfu ‫ל‬ၰ (Domestic Bliss), 35 which resembled Women’s Voices both in its format and its marketing strategies, is the best example. This publication was marketed as a combination of home journal and popular literary journal. The targeted readership of the first twelve issues of Domestic Bliss was educated middleclass women of different ages, mainly ‘taitai’ ˯˯ (married women) and ‘xiaojie’ ʮֹ (unmarried young women). The journal was one of the few post-1945 publications that strove to carry on the earlier attempt at forging an urban culture centered on women and domesticity. Shi Jimei, the literary star from the occupation era, published most of her post-1945 fiction in Domestic Bliss. Shi’s work, labeled and much admired as the new ‘boudoir style’ feminine writing, was juxtaposed with numerous tips, for urban housewives and aspiring housewives, pertaining to housekeeping, cooking, cosmetics, fashion, pregnancy, childbearing, and numerous household health concerns, represented in the two columns entitled “Xiaojie zhi ye” ʮֹ˃ࡗ (The Misses’ Page) and “Xingfu jiating” ‫ל‬ၰࣁࣘ (Happy Family). The promotion of ‘boudoir style’ writing was often accompanied by the vivid descriptions of a modern ‘guixiu,’ a traditional aristocratic beauty who moved freely between her inner chamber and the limelight of public attention. Among the post-1945 popular journals, Domestic Bliss was unusually long-lasting. The success of the journal was built upon its brilliant promotion of a female lifestyle, described as both a forthright response to the conditions of wartime living and a fantastic celebration of imagined domestic bliss. In the editorial notes of the second issue (May 1946), the editors indicated that they intended to create a “pictorial style magazine” ( huabaoxing de zazhi ഐే‫ڄܓ‬ᕺბ). 36 It is clear that this attempt guaranteed the success of home journals. Though published after 1945, journals such as Domestic Bliss can definitely be included in the category of wartime publications. They made use of the same editorial strategies and addressed the same readership—the kind of readership that was shaped by the golden age of Chinese home journals during the few years

35 Published May 1946-March 1949, edited by Wang Bo Ӿ ٕ (Shen Ji) and Wang Benpu Ӿ ʹ ዹ . 36 The “pictorial style magazine” as a distinctive style can be traced back to the

much-acclaimed publication of Liangyou huabao (The Good Companion Pictorial) edited by Liang Desuo. See Foot note 12.

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under Japanese occupation, and that continued to demand the catering of their ‘spiritual food.’ 37 When imagining, designing, advertising, and marketing domesticity become the dominant themes in wartime popular print, the actual effects of such representations have gone beyond the survival demands particular to the period. What distinguishes home journals of the occupation period from those of the previous periods is that domesticity has been constructed as another kind of reality. War and domesticity, two seemingly exclusive categories of human experience, are brought together within the same space of urban print media. War, the bombarding presence, is dissected into fragments, channeled into the everyday; on the other hand, the experience of the domestic and the everyday is intensified precisely due to the threatening intrusion of the war. THE PLAYERS

What is unique about home journals of the war era is that they not only marketed a massive amount of domestic knowledge, but they also served as major propaganda tools for marketing and promoting women writers, artists, and intellectuals—that is, a new generation of public intellectuals. The dissemination of domestic knowledge, and the creation of an art of homemaking cannot be separated from a society-wide promotion of and infatuation with women writers and artists. In other words, women writers, editors, publishers, and readers played a vital role in defining and disseminating a body of ‘new knowledge,’ taking over the existing framework of modern print, and transforming it into a stage of their own. Following the initial appearance of young women authors in Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies literary journals such as The Phenomena Monthly and The Violet Monthly , women writers went on to ‘occupy’ other urban spaces. In the two-year period of 1944-5, a vast amount of 37 Other post-1945 journals that are similar to Domestic Bliss, mostly short-lived,

include: Shaonü yuekan ˲ ʩ̇ ̵ (The Maiden Monthly), edited by Chen Dieyi and Wei Yin ࡔ ৏ , published by Diyi bianji gongsi, in circulation June 1946-June 1947, with a total of 13 issues; Kangli yuekan Σ ᚓ ̇ ̵ (Happy Couple Monthly), edited by Wu Haohao ѹ Ϧ Ϧ , in circulation June 1946-October 1948, with a total of 29 issues; and Dajia yuekan ʨ ࣁ ̇ ̵ (Ev erybody Monthly), edited by Gong Zhifang ᜠ ˃ ̄ and Tang Yunjing ࢑ ෙ ૱ (Tang Dalang ࢑ ʨ ࡇ ), in circulation April-July 1947, with a tota l of only three issues.

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media coverage, including roundtable talks, interviews, profiles, photographs, cartoons, and tabloid stories, promoted Eileen Chang and Su Qing as two of the most important cultural figures of the era. The extreme amount of attention paid to the personal lives of women writers—their clothes, they makeup, their mannerisms, their voices, their shopping habits, the restaurants and cafés they frequented, the movies they enjoyed watching, and the men whose company they sought—was unprecedented in the history of print culture in modern China. It was also unprecedented that women writers, journalists, painters, and other intellectuals were showcased together with film actresses and popular singers as important cultural icons. 38 The star system that promoted women writers in the same frame as singers and actresses was in place until the last days of the occupation era. On July 21, 1945, in a Sino-Japanese cosponsored event, Eileen Chang was featured together with the singer/movie actress Li Xianglan (a.k.a Yamaguchi Yoshiko), the chameleonlike figure who typified the slippery boundaries of ethnic and national identities in wartime China. In a photo session, Chang is pictured rather reluctantly in the same frame as Li [Plate 3]. The photographer asked that Chang be seated while Li stood at the side, for Chang was so tall that she would have dwarfed her companion. Viewed from any angle, the construction of the photograph is awkward. While Li gazes at the camera attentively with her signature innocent look, Chang’s posture disturbs the power of the camera and upsets the composition of the photograph. Seated sideways, she chooses not to look directly at the camera. Her crossed legs point toward the left while her eyes cast a doubtful look toward the right of the frame.39 38 Other scholars on the cultures of Republican China have studied the form ation of a ‘star system’ (mingxing zhi ‫ ݶ ا‬վ ) in Shanghai during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. The Shanghai ‘star system’ was modeled after that of Hollywood and acted as a media mechanism that produced and promoted film actresses and popular singers for the purpose of urban entertainment consumption. For a rich study of the star system in wartime Shanghai, including that of the occupation era, see Shelley Stephenson, “The Occupied Screen: Star, Fan, and Nation in Shanghai Cinema, 1937-1945,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Ch icago, 2000. 39 See “A Gathering for Summer Cooling,” The Miscellany Monthly 15. 5 (August 1945): 67-72. Su and Chang were oft en showcased together with famous singers, dancers, and movie actresses of the time. See, for instance, “Cui Chengxi wudao zuotan” ઑ ‫ ؀‬ᑏ Ⴋ ᒵ ࣙ ሾ (A Roundtable Discussion of Sai Shoki’s Dance), in which women writers were presented together with the Korean Dancer Sai Shoki and a

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There are different ways to read Chang’s self-positioning in this photograph. One could read her as a most reluctant player in this and other engineered media images of “Greater East Asian Co-prosperity.” Perhaps it is more appropriate to the writer’s personality to consider this as another opportunity seized by Chang for self-promotion. While she seems to be enjoying the celebrity status ascribed to her by a frenzied media, her body language also declares an unspoken statement, that a woman writer is not as easily manipulated by the media as a singer or film actress might be. A woman writer demands, and commands, more public attention. Zazhi yuekan ᕺბ̵̇ (The Miscellany Monthly),40 among other major magazines of the period, stood out for its conspicuous, massive effort both to direct attention to domestic issues and to showcase women writers on center stage. It could be argued that the promotion of women writers served to encourage heated debates over issues concerning the general social status of women. It is also the case that the debates over a variety of social issues provided a forum for the emergence of women writers. The marketing success of popular journals such as The Miscellany Monthly in 1940s Shanghai was built on the fervent promotion of women writers. From the very beginning, the heated discussions on family and marriage were not merely reflections of public interest in social issues concerning women; rather, such discussions were heavily tinted with Shanghai readers’ frenzy over the intimate lives of women who were placed under the limelight. From the very beginning of their writing careers, the personal lives of these Shanghai women writers were an integral part of their public persona. This helps to explain why autobiographical fiction and the informal essay were two of the most prominent literary genres of women’s writing in 1940s Shanghai, since these two genres tend to employ systems of references that an average Shanghai reader could conveniently identify as ‘personal,’ ‘autobiographical,’

Chinese dancer named Wang Yuan ̙ ଫ . Published in The Miscellany Monthly 12. 2 (November 1943): 33-8. 40 The journal was published by Xin Zhongguo baoshe ๘ ˀ ੢ ే ‫( ڊ‬The New China News Agency), in circulation August 1942-August 1945, and edited by Wu Chengzhi ѹ ༻ ˃ , Wu Jiangfeng ѹ Е ๯ , and Fan Jugao ࠖ ൫ ਢ . With a total of 15 volumes and 37 issues, The Miscellany Monthly was one of the most long-lasting and succes sful popular journals during the occupation era.

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and ‘intimate.’ The same group of readers were also inundated with numerous tabloid reports of the private lives of women writers. It is also apparent that public attention was often directed toward the outspokenness of women writers on topics related to the ever-problematized issues of female gender and sexuality. The year 1945 saw the culmination of Shanghai readers’ fascination with women writers, with the publication of a dialogue between Eileen Chang and Su Qing on family and marriage in The Miscellany Monthly heightening the tone of the already heated discussions of women’s issues. The publication of this dialogue triggered a sequence of debates over related concerns, most of which were also published in the subsequent issues of the magazine. The editorial foreword to the Chang-Su dialogue glorifies Eileen Chang and Su Qing as “the most prominent women writers in the literary circle of Shanghai,” and also indicates that female writers are the most qualified discussants of women’s issues.41 Shanghai readers’ infatuation with women writers of the 1940s can be understood as the Chinese reading public’s fascination with issues concerning women surfacing since the beginning of the century. The literary writing and the personal lives of Shanghai women writers of the 1940s became the point of convergence where issues such as women’s liberation and independence, female sexual behavior, gender roles, the mechanisms of urban families, and a variety of other gender and sexuality discourses were once again placed under public scrutiny. Though many of the themes are reminiscent of the May Fourth discussions of family and marriage, the specific social/cultural/political environment ensured that the talk of gender and sexuality by the group of women writers in Japanese-occupied Shanghai would move in a different direction: while the discussion of female gender and sexuality during the May Fourth era served to provoke and deepen the iconoclastic spirit embraced by that generation of intellectuals, women writers in 1940s Shanghai tended to situate these issues within the materiality of everyday life experienced by an average Shanghai woman. The effect was not to shock or to disrupt the social order, but to assign concrete forms to a vision of life that was constantly under threat. Most important to the purpose of the present study is a series of special issues published by The Miscellany Monthly from March to May 41 See “Su Qing Zhang Ailing duitan ji” ᙨ ‫ ی‬ઠ ื ߆ ࿬ ሾ ৩ (Su Qing and

Eileen Chang Talking to Each Other), The Miscellany Monthly 14. 6 (March 1945): 78-84.

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1945, which was triggered by the publication of the Chang-Su dialogue described above. The subsequent special issues of The Miscellany Monthly include contributions from readers of both genders, and from a variety of social backgrounds, from a prominent literary critic to an ordinary housewife. 42 The redefinition of gender and domesticity in women’s literary writing of this period was placed directly in front of the reading public by the print media. These special issues also served to form an ongoing dialogue between editors, authors, and readers, which in turn served to forge a community of social commentators during the war era. In addition to special issues, there were also roundtable talks organized by journals and newspapers featuring women writers and artists, most of which were also published in The Miscellany Monthly . Records of roundtable talks became an important cultural genre during this time period. The roundtable talk was a new form of showcasing women writers by placing words (voices) and images (descriptions of their presence, and photographs) on display. Major newspapers and journals of the period all used this strategy to advertise their publication, to promote their circles of new writers, and to take part in the construction of an expanded community assembled by publishers, editors, writers, artists, and readers. For example, a gathering of women authors on March 16, 1944 was recorded in The Miscellany Monthly in April 1944, in an article entitled “Nü zuojia jutan” ʩѕࣁ႞ሾ (A Roundtable Discussion of Women Writers). Eileen Chang, Su Qing, Wang Liling, Pan Liudai, and Guan Lu all attended the gathering. In the following issue of the journal, indi-

42 In chronological order, these special issues include:

“Teji: Funü, jiating, hunyin zhu wenti” ॐ ᎓ í ੴ ʩ ç ࣁ ࣘ ç ੹ ‫ ܪ‬ቂ ੕ ᖅ (Special Issue on Women, Family, Marriage), The Miscellany Monthly 14. 6 (March 1945): 78-90. “Guanyu funü, jiating, hunyin zhu wenti” ᘕ ‫ ؠ‬ੴ ʩ ç ࣁ ࣘ ç ੹ ‫ ܪ‬ቂ ੕ ᖅ (On Women, Family, Marriage: Special Issue Continued), The Miscellany Monthly 15. 1 (April 1945): 52-63. “Duzhe de fanxiang” ᜃ ‫ ˫ ڄ ږ‬ᛏ (Reader’s Respon ses to the Special Issue on Women, Family, Marriage), The Miscellany Monthly 15. 1 (April 1945): 64-9. “Tamen de yijian teji: Guanyu funü, jiating, hunyin zhu wenti” ϧ ࡭ ‫ ڄ‬ำ Գ ॐ ᎓ í  ᘕ ‫ ؠ‬ੴ ʩ ç ࣁ ࣘ ç ੹ ‫ ܪ‬ቂ ੕ ᖅ (Their Opinions: Special Issue on Women, Family, Ma rriage), The Miscellany Monthly 15. 2 (May 1945): 73-82.

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vidual photos of the women were published in response to requests by the journal’s already fascinated readers [Plate 4]. Here the boundary between the creators of the journals and the reading audience is blurred. The creation of discussion spaces such as special issues and roundtable talks served to include the reading audience in the process of producing and marketing popular journals. For the average Shanghai reader, the reading process became a form of gathering and expressing opinions in public, and therefore of participating in the development of an arena for public debate—and all these could be done without leaving one’s living room. The most successful popular journals managed to consume most of the leisure time of the average Shanghai reader; leisure time became the time for public engagement, instead of merely retreating to the privacy of one’s home. While this could be understood as an invasion of one’s private space by public debate and various political battles, viewed from a different angle, it can also be understood as the ‘privatization’ of public space, the extension of private concerns into public space with the help of modern print media, an opening up of one’s living space, and a restructuring of urban life. Readers of the journals often participated in the process of mythmaking. The popular perception of women writers of the period often cast them in different roles. For example, Eileen Chang was often perceived as a pleasure-seeking flamboyant modern woman, while Su Qing was seen as an all-capable career woman whose entire life was staged in the public eye. This is apparent in three comic portraits of women writers sent to The Miscellany Monthly by a reader self-identified as some Mr. Wen Xiang ́ՙ (literally meaning ‘literary enjoyment’).43 Mr. Wen portrays Eileen Chang, Su Qing, and Pan Liudai, respectively, in three sketches, all showcasing a disproportionately large head with dramatized facial features and expressions. The one of Eileen Chang depicts her adorned with a stylish hairdo, finely manicured eyebrows, heavily painted eyeliner, a trendy outfit, and an issue of Vogue magazine in the crook of her left arm, signifying a public perception of Chang as a cultural celebrity and a harbinger in local fashion culture. The sketch of Su Qing portrays her in a neatly cut career suit, with a briefcase in her right hand and a stack of paper and journals bundled under her left arm. She is depicted as just stepping out of her editorial office, represented by a small desk in the corner of the sketch, covered with piles 43 See The Miscellany Monthly 15. 2 (May 1945): 71.

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of paper and files. Pan Liudai, whose autobiographical fiction will be discussed in a later chapter, on the other hand, is depicted as a snake teaser, with her plump and thick face gleaming with voracity, a taste for adventure, and a sense of mischief. The three sketches were meaningfully titled “Gangbi yu kouhong” ᎦരႩʤ߹ (Fountain Pens and Lipsticks) [Plate 5]. These caricatures attest a set of gendered categories that were used to promote women writers. Many important (male) cultural figures of the time (in addition to the ones associated with the Butterflies School) played an integral part in promoting Eileen Chang and Su Qing as complementary images. Tan Zhengbi’s ᗲ͸ᔞ (1901-1991) article entitled “Lun Su Qing yu Zhang Ailing” ቈᙨ‫ی‬Ⴉઠื߆ (On Su Qing and Eileen Chang) is an example of such promotion. As an authority on women’s literary history, Tan juxtaposes these two women writers of the 1940s with women writers of the previous periods, such as Feng Yuanjun, Xie Bingying ᒧκᇐ (1906-2000), and Bai Wei Ύᒍ (18941987). He finds the two groups of women writers strikingly different. According to Tan, women writers of the earlier periods attempted to represent their struggles against the suppression of women as a collective group, while Su Qing and Eileen Chang only cared about the “freedom” of “a part of human nature” known as “sexual passion” ( qingyu શᅸ); the former group of women addressed the collectivity of Chinese women, while Eileen Chang and Su Qing only represented “individual depression.” Tan goes on to discuss the difference between Eileen Chang and Su Qing: Su Qing’s writing style bears more ‘masculine’ qualities by being “bold and unconstrained” ( nanxing de haofang ԝ‫ڄ׷‬ჟ‫ ;)؞‬in contrast, Eileen Chang is “always feminine” ( shizhong shi nüxing de ֻஉ‫ݵ‬ʩ‫׷‬ ‫)ڄ‬. Tan appreciates Su Qing’s boldness, stating that it is very extraordinary among female writers; but he also thinks that sometimes Su Qing’s direct discussions of topics such as “sexual drive,” “menstruation” and “physical needs” are extreme and might cause physical discomfort ( rouma Э఑). 44

44 Tan’s essay was originally published in Fengyu tan yuekan ࡘ ‫ ۋ‬ሾ ̇ ̵ (Chatter on Wind and Rain Monthly) 16 (December 1944); reprinted in Jing Si, ed., Zhang Ailing yu Su Qing ઠ ื ߆ Ⴉ ᙨ ‫( ی‬Eileen Chang and Su Qing) (Hefei: Anhui wenyi chubanshe, 1994), 44-51. Other important articles that also served to promote the two women include the two 1944 articles written by Hu Lancheng, entitled “Tan Zhang Ailing” ሾ ઠ ื ߆ (Talking about Eileen Chang) and “Tantan Su Qing” ሾ ሾ ᙨ ‫ی‬

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A contemporary reader of Tan’s essay would probably question to whom Su Qing’s direct discussions would cause physical discomfort. Was it to the general readership, or just to Tan himself? At the time, neither Su nor Chang seemed to be bothered by Tan’s categorical discussion of their writing. In fact, it was exactly these gendered categories, verbal or visual, that were used over by women writers themselves in their self-promotion. To be sure, the most important players in this society-wide promotion of women writers and discussion of women-related issues were the women writers themselves. During one of the roundtable discussions hosted by The Miscellany Monthly and attended by a group of women writers, Eileen Chang and Su Qing began to assign a canonical position to each other’s writing. When asked who her favorite modern women writers were, Su Qing answered: “I usually do not read works by women writers, with the exception of those by Eileen Chang.” When the same question was directed at Eileen Chang, she made the following remarks: Su Qing is my favorite modern woman writer. Before Su Qing, there was Bing Xin, whose feminine style was too contrived. Ding Ling’s earlier works were good, but later she was simply not capable of fulfilling her ambitions. Su Qing is the first [woman writer] who can steadily grasp the appeal of life. She embodies a profound simplicity… She understands the commonalties in human nature better than anyone else.45

This mutual promotion continued. In September, The Miscellany Monthly published another transcript of a roundtable discussion on Eileen Chang’s newly published short story collection Romances . On this occasion, Su Qing provided a more detailed appraisal of Eileen Chang’s writing: I am always enchanted by Eileen Chang’s writing. Whenever I read it, I am always drawn into it and eager to read the entire text. It is like an episode of serene and sad music. Even just a fragment of it can move people. Her analogies are very smart and intricate. Although I do not understand some of them, I can still appreciate their beauty. Chang’s writing is also like a painting because she depicts vivid colors. Actually Chang’s heightening of colors in her writing is even more skillful than (Talking about Su Qing) respectively. Hu was the first person to begin to contrast Su Qing’s ‘masculine’ style with Eileen Chang’s ‘feminine’ style. See Eileen Chang and Su Qing, 140-55 and 218-22. 45 See “A Roundtable Discussion of Women Wri ters,” The Miscellany Monthly 13. 1 (April 1944): 49-57.

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that in the best paintings. Maybe there are no such colors in the real world, and Miss Chang is truly a ‘celestial genius.’ I admire her the most, and this is not blind flattery.46

In the aforementioned essay “The Way I Look at Su Qing,” Eileen Chang provides her account of the making of the two companion images in literary history: To underestimate the value of Su Qing’s writing is equal to underestimating the cultural standards of our current era. If women writers are evaluated as a group, I really do not feel proud of being grouped together with either Bing Xin or Bai Wei. Yet I will feel perfectly happy to be placed in the same context with Su Qing.47

Here the reader can observe in this essay Chang’s attempt to undermine the literary canon by regrouping writers and texts, as well as her effort to challenge the coherence of a women’s writing tradition in modern China. The significance of this mutual appraisal, however, goes far beyond the realm of literary writing. In her essays, Su Qing frequently identifies herself as merely a “man/woman of letters” or “a member of the literati class” ( wenren ́ʆ), and sometimes, “a poor member of the literati class” ( qiong wenren ᇴ́ʆ). 48 Eileen Chang also labels herself as someone who makes a living selling her writing. 49 Such statements can be read as a highlighted theme of wartime survival that concerns the daily lives of individual authors, but when the entirety of the women writers’ intimate lives was scrutinized in the limelight, their literary writing often served to supply numerous details needed for the establishment of their public images. More appropriately, the self-referential-

46 This publicized roundtable discussion was a promotional event orchestrated by

The Miscellany Monthly for their celebrity author Eileen Chang and her first short story collection published by the same publisher. See “Chuanqi jiping chahui ji” ෭ ֮ ූ ඄ ৔ ๡ ৩ (A Group Discussion of Romances), The Miscellany Monthly 13. 6 (Sep tember 1944): 150-5. 47 In A Complete Collection of Essays by Eileen Chang , 256. 48 See Su Qing, “Guanyu wo: Xu jiehun shinian daixu” ᘕ ‫ ؠ‬Ӎ í ᚮ ഻ ੹ ʏ ϶ ̩ Һ (About Me: In Place of a Preface to Sequel to Ten Years of Marriage). See A Complete Collection of Essays by Su Qing, 539-50. 49 See Eileen Chang, “You jijuhua tong duzhe shuo” Љ ౦ ͔ ༼ ψ ᜃ ‫ ږ‬ი (Several Things to Clarify for My Readers), in Romances, Enlarged Edi tion , 1-2.

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ity in their writing should be read as a strategic move in their efforts to fashion their own personae. The essay “The Way I Look at Su Qing” demands further analysis. Here Chang also positions the creativity of a woman author (Su Qing) within a historical moment that is characterized by agitation and transience: The more turbulent our era becomes, the more outstanding one’s personality appears; distinctions between individuals are magnified. If she [Su Qing] is in a better mood, no matter how turbulent the era is, she can manage to preserve the brilliance of life. The more tribulations she encounters, the better for her. [Just as] the more branches [a tree has], the more flowers are in bloom.50

The particular historical situation during the occupation of Shanghai is described as a stage, a space for intense performance, a moment of condensed life, and an opportunity to bring out the most brilliant traits in one’s personality. Chang then depicts Su Qing as a “a beauty at a turbulent time.” The life of Su Qing is dramatized, and Chang indicates that she deliberately observes Su Qing from the point of view of a novelist. This dramatization of Su Qing and the fictionalization of history go hand in hand with Chang’s choice of the essay form, which is, as analyzed in Chapter Four, the literary genre most suitable for the representation of the depth and the richness of urban life in a transitional period. In “The Way I Look at Su Qing,” Eileen Chang portrays Su Qing as a romantic heroine in an era that is not romantic at all. She evokes the timeless qualities, or the universality, of Su Qing’s character, which, for Chang, is nothing less than the embodiment of the ideals of modern womanhood: At best, she can create an immense intimacy so that “the remotest corner of the earth feels as close as next door” (tianya ruo bilin ˭ ତ ࠜ ̍ ቶ ). She awakens the omnipresent memory of wifehood and motherhood throughout our history. It is a memory that every one of us is familiar with but tends to ignore. Su Qing is indeed profound. She is ‘woman’; ‘woman’ is she.51

50 In A Complete Collection of Essays by Eileen Chang , 270. 51 Ibid., 257.

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Here we are witnessing a mythical structure in its making. Chang then goes on to imagine the space that might house Su Qing—the newly constructed mythical figure of our modern era: I want to have a Chinese-style house in the future: snow-white painted walls, gold-plated tables and chairs, scarlet cushions, pea-green tea cups, and glutinous rice cakes piled up on the table, each decorated with a carmine dot. A Chinese house usually consists of one bright room and two dark rooms, and this [what I have just described] is certainly the bright one. A room like this carries the style of Su Qing.52

In this passage, Eileen Chang invokes the language of domesticity to define Su Qing’s public identity. In other words, she attempts to define Su Qing, the public figure, in the vocabulary of domesticity. When domesticity becomes a public trademark, discussions of domesticity then become a public discourse, something that is situated at the center of one’s political life and can no longer merely symbolize a completely enclosed structure. While the boundaries between the public and the private are further blurred, and domestic issues are discussed in the space of the modern media, the domestic space is extended into the public realm. It is in Chang’s attempt to capture a spatial moment in an imagined private life that the imagery of a ‘Chinese’ house becomes ‘modern’ at the same time. While transforming Su Qing into a fictional/mythical figure, Chang also places an emphasis on the materiality, the liveliness, and the worldliness ( su ۞) of what Su Qing stands for. In Chang’s picture, Su Qing’s personality is comparable to that of Yang the Prized Consort (Yang Guifei ๫඙ϥ), a female image in history that appears more legendary than historical in the popular imagination. The image of Su Qing is then textualized, and becomes a representation of a fantasized moment: It is reasonable for people of our generation to enjoy and to pursue the materiality of life, which is life itself. To me, Su Qing stands as a representation of that material life.

Sometimes Chang’s portrayal of Su Qing serves to convey her own critique of various aspects of urban material life: We [Su Qing and I] both unambiguously embrace worldly oriented ambitions. Our attitudes toward money are more straightforward than other intellectuals.

52 Ibid., 260.

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However, more often, Chang seems to indulge in the game of assigning Su Qing the role of worldliness while she herself takes on the role of playfulness. She denies that there is any playfulness in Su Qing’s persona and endows her own writing with all the implications of lightness. The existence of the fictional character Su Qing becomes a necessity for Eileen Chang in her effort to enhance her own aesthetic vision. ‘Eileen Chang’ represents what ‘Su Qing’ is not. ‘Eileen Chang’ is everything that ‘Eileen Chang’ is only by standing directly next to ‘Su Qing.’ The following paragraph creates such a contrast through a discussion of the two women’s different approaches to clothes: I used to criticize the way Su Qing wore clothes. But now I can understand her style. For Su Qing, fine clothes are no more than fine clothes. For her, clothes are merely something of use value. On ordinary occasions, clothes should only serve to indicate her social status; but for people she intends to impress, clothes should be alluring. There is very little playfulness in Su Qing’s understanding of life.

Most importantly, by transforming Su Qing into a fictional character, Eileen Chang is able to harness the representation with her own meditations on the dilemmas facing a new generation of Chinese women: Men think highly of Su Qing. They treat her as an equal, constantly forgetting the fact that she is a woman. They allow her to take responsibility for herself. However, she is dissatisfied with this situation. Men around her then conclude that she is self-contradictory. She wants both the freedom of the New Woman and the privileges of the old-style woman. This is the tragic situation of the New Woman characteristic of our era. For Su Qing, we can only say that she herself is responsible for this dilemma. She was born with straightforwardness. She is simply an honest woman. She pursues love while struggling for a living. Yet she is always disappointed.53

In Chang’s depiction, Su Qing becomes a prototype in textualized space. The more mundane Chang makes her fellow writer appear, the more glorified Su Qing’s symbolic position becomes. This is a position that cuts between the psychological burdens of a dependent woman and one that strives for the limelight, between the pursuit of a normal life and the external situations that have rendered it impossible. This public intellectual is gendered as well as age-specific—in her mid to late 20’s, 53 Ibid., 267.

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full of dilemmas, and on her way to an inevitable character tragedy. The most authoritative speaker of the time is also the embodiment of all the problems of the time. Under Chang’s descriptive pen, Su Qing does indeed become this tragic heroine, not unlike Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind , doomed to be a product of her time, which she strives to transcend. To call Su Qing “a beauty at a turbulent time” is indeed a powerful textual strategy. In a way quite similar to Scarlett O’Hara’s transformation into a heroine of China’s very own, in this process Su Qing is made into the spokesperson of the domestic realm, which is constantly crushed by the brutal arms of the ongoing war. The fictional figure of Scarlett O’Hara and her real life counterpart Su Qing are superimposed upon one another, and made legendary and knowable at the same time to their Chinese audience. Here it is in these textual moments that the formation of a women’s print culture in occupied Shanghai can be traced. It is then possible to pinpoint a space where discursive constructions of ‘women’ and the ‘woman question’ were located; where political speech and social interventions by women were made both audible and visible; and where a public arena was shaped, in which women-related issues were identified as the central debates of all public dialogues. The following chapter offers a case study of one of the most popular women’s magazines of the period. The focus will be on the mechanisms behind the editorial production and marketing of popular journals for women, and the political complexities present in the print culture of 1940s Shanghai.

CHAPTER THREE

IMAGE STUDIOS: THE ART OF A WOMEN’S MAGAZINE Subversive and seductive women, with indistinct ethnic and national identities, frequently appeared throughout the pages of Shanghai modernist literature and in the commercial print media of the 1920s and 1930s. Female images often represented the bustling metropolis in stories by writers such as Mu Shiying ጽइࠡ (1912–1940), Liu Na’ou ᄸ҄᜜ (1900-1940), and Ye Lingfeng །᝞ᄨ (1905-1975), who were representative of the literary group associated with the French–influenced journal known as Xiandai , or Les Contemporains (1932-5). Often devoid of flesh and blood, these female images were constructed with physical objects or places. In such stories, male travelers to the city visited hotels, coffee houses, dance halls, neon-lit streets, brilliant shop windows, and, of course, enigmatic women. In a 1933 short story by Ye Lingfeng, the menacing female protagonist is compared to a car and its parts: The streamlined car body, the V-shaped radiator, the well-cushioned seats, the hydraulic shock-absorbers, and the five-speed transmission. Like a 1933 new car, she glides through the street crowds, slippery like an eel, on the asphalt road, in the midst of the orange-colored air of the month of May…. 1 Trapped in an urban maze, a male protagonist confronted a wide range of emotions that included wonder, fascination, anguish, frustration, confusion, and distress. Emerging from these tumultuous emotions was a pieced-together female image of the Chinese modeng nülang

1 See Ye Lingfeng, “Liuxingxing ganmao” ‫ ޟ‬м ‫( ۨ ี ׷‬Flu), Les Contempo rains 5 (1933): 653-8.

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ᆃങʩࡇ or ‘modern girl,’ reminiscent of the moga or ‘modern girl’ of

Taishô Japan.2 In addition to women found in literature, numerous other examples attest a thriving visual culture shaped around these “bewitching female creatures” ( youwu ˳‫)ٵ‬. The cover art of the February 1934 issue of Les Contemporains , created by the modernist writer and cartoonist Guo Jianying ௱ܿࠡ (1907-1979), featured a playful sketch of a fashionable and enigmatic modern woman, who is reminiscent of Hollywood-style portraits of glamorous actresses and stands as a fitting visual testament to the literary figures portrayed in the journal. 3 This prominent image of a menacing woman disappeared and was replaced by a focus on national resistance and salvation, with the beginning of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937. Hollywood images, however, persisted until the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941. The travels of Scarlett O’Hara in wartime Shanghai were indicative of the powerful presence of Hollywood images in day-to-day life in the besieged city. Typically, home journals and women’s magazines published until late 1941 still used Hollywood’s appeal to champion a kind of domestic culture that was both modern and traditionally Chinese. Deanna Durbin’s portrait from the film It Started with Eve (Universal Studio, 1941) appeared on the front cover of the September 1941 issue of Xu Baiyi’s Happy Home Monthly , while a commercial for an opium addictioncurbing stimulant called Endospermin appeared on the back cover. Similarly, the October issue featured a still from Ernst Lubitsch’s film The Uncertain Feeling (United Artists, 1941) [Plate 6] on the front cover and a commercial for Eddy Facial Cream on the back [Plate 7]. 4 These images completely disappeared in the subsequent issues of the 2 The moga or ‘modern girl’ of Taishô Japan could serve as an interesting inter -

textual reference. Miriam Silverberg’s groundbreaking research in her article entitled “Modern Girl as Militant” inspired many scholars to begin considering a cross-cu ltural ‘modern girl’ in all modern East Asian societies. In her article, Silverberg ar gues that the moga was a construct that crossed class, gender, and cul tural divides, and served to displace the militancy of Japanese working women, a new social group that emerged in the 1920s. See Gail Lee Bernstein, ed., Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 239-66. 3 Guo Jianying’s works have recently been collected in Chen Zishan ௾ ʪ െ ed.,

Modeng Shanghai ᆃ ങ ʕ ऺ (Stylish Shanghai) (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 2001). 4 See Chapter Two for a discussion of Xu Baiyi and his home journals.

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journal, published after December 8. Advertisements for Western medicine, however, continued to appear on the promotional pages of home journals, since medicine, particularly the Western kind, was in high demand during the war. As the Japanese took control of the International Settlement in December 1941, subsequently wiping out the concessions’ cultural presence, both the enigmatic ‘modern girl’ and the transnational presence of Hollywood images on the covers of Shanghai’s pictorial publications disappeared.5 Instead, as argued in Prologue, Pan-Asian images dominated the visual culture of occupied Shanghai. Images of women were often featured in collaborationist photographs and drawings, wearing either everyday clothing or dramatic costumes. The cover drawing of the August 1, 1943 issue of Literary Companion, discussed earlier, featured a Chinese woman dressed in contemporary clothing. In the background was Shanghai, celebrating the phantom “Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere” that had replaced the British and the American occupation [Plate 1]. Other cover drawings of Literary Companion also featured identifiably ‘Chinese’ scenes and figures. The same Japanese artist sketched the cover image of the journal’s November 1, 1944 issue as he had previously done for the August issue. This image portrayed two mannequin-like figures dressed in Qing Dynasty costumes. Underneath their elaborate outer gowns, the two petite women wear ‘lotus shoes’ on feet that are apparently bound [Plate 2]. 6 Chinese artists also created an array of neo-classical images on magazine covers. These images contained either a shinü ̦ʩ (graceful maiden) or a huaniao ‫ګ‬఍ (flowers and birds) design; both are dominant motifs in an important style of traditional Chinese painting called gongbi ʳര (fine, detailed brushwork). With a focus on domestic life, graceful aristocratic women were depicted in fine brushwork and great detail. This type of cover art embodied the stylistic traits of traditional figure painting, particularly those of the shinü hua (graceful maiden

5 For an analysis of images of women in the 1930s pictorial magazines, see Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern, 64-7.

A related study also examines the disappearance of American/Western images of women in popular media in Japan following the attack on Pearl Harbor. See Miriam Silverberg, “Remembering Pearl Harbor, Forgetting Charlie Chaplin, and the Case of the Disappearing Western Woman: A Picture Story,” positions 1 (Spring 1993): 24-76. 6 See Prologue for a discussion of these cover images of Literary Companion.

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paintings). 7 Additionally, these modern classical beauties recalled a variety of vivid drawings that emerged on the Shanghai commercial print market during the 1890s. Wu Youru’s ѹ˩Ϩ (1850-1893) works published in Dianshizhai huabao ᓭΔᓲഐే (Dianshizhai Pictorial) were the most representative of these drawings, with their juxtaposition of images of women and domesticity set against the rapidly changing social, political, and cultural landscape of late nineteenth-early twentieth century [Plate 20].8 The reason cover beauties of this period were reminiscent of the two contrasting artistic traditions, one elite and the other ‘popular,’ related to the fact that they were created by a group of female painters who established their reputation during the wartime and who were generally considered to be the successors of the Shanghai School of Fine Arts (Shanghai huapai ʕऺഐާ or Haishang huapai ऺʕഐާ). Major painters from this latter-day Shanghai School included Chen Xiaocui, Zhou Lianxia, and Wu Qingxia.9 Their art was reminiscent of the 7 For a study of the t raditional style of flower-and-bird painting as practiced in twentieth-century China, see James Cahill, “Flower, Bird and Figure Painting in China Today” in Luce Lim, ed., Contemporary Chinese Painting (San Francisco, 1984), 21-7. And for a study of the traditional style of shinü hua , see Huang Qun, Shinü hua de yanjiu yu jifa ̦ ʩ ഐ ‫ ߧ ڄ‬ԥ Ⴉ ӑ ٗ (Studies on the Techniques of Shinü hua ) (Beijing: Beijing gongyi meishu chubanshe, 1988). 8 See Wu Youru, Shijiu shiji Zhongguo fengqing hua ʏ ʃ ̛ ߺ ˀ ੢ ࡘ શ ഐ

(Sketches of Nineteenth-Century Chinese Cultural Milieu) (Changsha: Hunan mei shu chubanshe, 1 998). Also see Wu Youru, “Selections from the Dianshizhai Picto rial,” Renditions 23 (1985): 47-70. 9 Chen Xiaocui, the oldest of the three women, was born in an illustrious family in

1902. Her brother, Chen Dingshan ௾ ‫ ׆‬ʱ (1896-1989), was a popular writer known for his classical-style poetry and informal essays. The siblings’ success was fur thered through association with their legendary father, Chen Diexian ௾ ራ ̫ (1879-1940), at times better known as Tian Xu Wo Sheng ˭ ൳ Ӎ Ά (Heaven Bore Me in Vain), who was celebrated as one of the most successful popular fiction writers in the early Republi can period, and was also a tycoon who made a fortune from his Chinese-brand tooth powder during a nationwide boycott of Japanese imports in the 1920s. In her lifetime, Ch en Xiaocui was known for her exquisite figure paintings and classical-style poetry. In 1968, at the height of the Red Guard Movement, she committed suicide amidst unbearable torture and humiliation. For an account of the Chen family, see Chen Dingshan, “Wo de fuqin Tian Xu Wo Sheng” Ӎ ‫ ̓ ڄ‬፶ ˭ ൳ Ӎ Ά (My Father Tian Xu Wo Sheng), Chun Shen jiuwen ‫ ݱ‬Ό ᕄ ႝ (Anecdotes from an Amorous Shanghai) (Taipei: Shijie wenwu chubanshe, 1954), 179-204. Also see Pat rick Hanan, “Introduction” in Chen Diexian, The Money Demon: An Autobiographical

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golden age of the Shanghai School of Fine Art, which was from the mid-nineteenth century to the early decades of the Republican era. Championed by Ren Bonian έї϶ (1840-1895) and Wu Changshuo ѹ‫ؤ‬ၭ (1844-1927), it consisted of painters known for their symbolic representations of flowers, birds, and human characters and for their efforts to release these images from an elitist tradition, popularize them, and make them more accessible to a larger audience.10 The Shanghai School of Fine Arts combined the elitist fine arts traditions of the pre-modern era with techniques from the late nineteenth century and from contemporary commercial visual art, and generated a hybrid product that was essentially a middlebrow form of art. What better way to popularize traditional images than by placing them directly on the covers of popular journals catering to a large urban audience? With their cover beauties, the 1940s women painters carried on the effort of earlier Shanghai School artists to locate a middle ground between the demands of commercial printing and the intricacies of China’s fine arts traditions. Most representative of these new female images were the cover images of the popular monthly journal Nüsheng ʩᑵ (Women’s Voices, May 1942-July 1945), most of which were created by Wu Qingxia, Zhou Lianxia, and Chen Xiaocui [Plates 8 and 9]. By bringing such complex aesthetic traditions to its covers, Women’s Voices stands as a Romance, translated from the Chinese by Hanan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999): 1-11. Little biographical information was available on Zhou Lianxia, except that she was known for her figure paintings, classical-style poetry, d azzling beauty, and unrestrained manner. Wu Qingxia, who had a longest career among the three women, was known mostly for her paintings of fishes and birds. She has been revered in recent years as one of the last living monuments of the once-thriving Shanghai School of Fine Arts. The city of Changzhou, Wu’s birthplace, plans to build an art institute named after her. See Yun Fuming Ⅷ Ԝ ᄁ , “Wu Qingxia yishu yantaohui zai Changzhou juxing” ѹ ‫ ی‬ᓝ ᗟ ி ߧ ৫ ๡ Ϛ ગ ϳ ᒃ м (A Conference on Wu Qingxia’s Art Held in Changzhou), Xin min wanbao, May 29, 2002. 10 For a general guide to schools of painting and their transformations in Repu blican China, see Julia Andrews and Shen Kuiyi, eds., A Century in Crisis: Mode rnity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth-century China (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1998). For a study of the Shanghai School of painting, see James Cahill, “The Shanghai School in Later Chinese Painting” in Mayching Kao, ed., Twen tiethCentury Chinese Painting (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 54-77.

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testament to how the ethnic and cultural identities of Chinese women and their domestic culture were examined, visualized, and reinforced during the occupation era. Furthermore, it demonstrates how images of women and domesticity became effective tools for conveying a distinctive ‘Chinese-ness’ within the context of a ‘Greater East Asia.’ These images became a trademark that set the commercial printing industry of occupied Shanghai apart from that of the 1920s and 1930s. Based on the significance of the cover art of Women’s Voices, the choice of using this monthly journal as a case study of the women’s print culture in occupied Shanghai is not an arbitrary one. Japan indeed devised strategies to encourage, contain, and incorporate the cause of Chinese nationalism and anti-imperialism into the system of Japanese colonialism and, further, into the larger context of its colonial empire called the “Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere.” 11 As a journal sponsored by the Japanese occupational forces, Women’s Voices effectively demonstrates how Japan’s wartime propaganda machine packaged itself in order to appeal to the popular taste of a gendered local audience and how colonial cultural policies worked hand-in-hand with territorial expansion. More importantly, however, Women’s Voices was the only publication from the period that was edited exclusively by women, featured mostly women writers, and claimed to dedicate itself to serving women readers. No other journal during that era exhibited such a pronounced gender-specific editorial philosophy. Women’s Voices also stands out for its marked success in reaching a wide urban readership, its persistence in defining domesticity and everyday life in intricate detail, and its steadfast promotion of successful modern urban women as a new brand of public intellectuals. Women’s Voices is, therefore, crucial to the study of the formation of the women’s print culture in occupied Shanghai. Selling more than ten thousand copies each month in Shanghai, it was one of the most successful journals of the time.12 While its political complexities help shed light on the extent, depth, and nature of political control in the cultural production of a Japanese-occupied city, what made such cultural recon11 Prasenjit Duara thoroughly examines how the Japanese imperial project went hand in hand with anticolonial nationalisms of other East Asian countries and territories. See Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). 12 See Ying Guojing, Essays on Modern Literary Periodicals , 420.

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struction efforts in Shanghai unique was the fact that they took place within the social and political strictures characteristic of wartime occupation. Women’s Voices was the embodiment of these very strictures, yet it ultimately established important cultural crossroads, where several discursive forces converged. These included the discourses on women and modernity that were continually evolving from the late nineteenth century, to the May Fourth conceptions of freedom, individual rights, and women’s liberation. This journal also incorporated modern traditions of categorizing public knowledge in the space of print media. The most important of all of these discursive constructions was the unprecedented attempt shared by Shanghai’s writers, editors, and publishers in the 1940s to meticulously delineate the various aspects of daily life in a war-torn city. This chapter will provide a detailed analysis of the journal Women’s Voices, with a focus on the inner mechanisms and the cultural/political complexities involved in producing and marketing a women’s popular journal in occupied Shanghai. THE VOICES

After briefly paging through the journal Women’s Voices, a reader’s very first impression will be of the wide range of ‘voices’ featured in the printed space. The editorial board made an effort to market the journal as something truly original. In the editorial foreword of its inaugural issue, Women’s Voices was compared to a newborn baby’s first cry, thus the first issue was referred to as “our first cry.” The exclusiveness of the journal’s imagined readership was defined on the very first page: Our women’s voices are the voices from the world of Chinese women; to put it in a more intimate fashion, they are your voices. There are three meanings to women’s voices: first, they are the voices of women; second, they voice for women; third, they are voiced by women.13

Addressing gender, ethnicity, and nationality, the opening paragraph defined both the creative and receiving ends of this cultural production. Explained in blatant terms, the discourse on women was situated at the very center of the political, social, racial, and cultural discourses of occupied Shanghai. In the editorial forewords of subsequent issues, the same categorical language was employed to further promote the journal’s overall image 13 “Xiansheng” ζ ᑵ (Editorial Foreword), Women’s Voices 1. 1 (1942): 1.

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as a women-centered publication. Ironically, while this oft-repeated message emphasized that the editors and writers were undertaking something truly unprecedented, the rhetoric employed in its editorial forewords, postscripts, and some featured articles was consistent with commonly-used rhetoric in the May Fourth/post-May Fourth discourses on freedom, individual choice, social consciousness, and the liberation of all Chinese women. Moreover, while the journal was known for its all-inclusive usage of the term ‘women’ and its collectivization of ‘Chinese women,’ a careful reading suggests that the concept of women, as employed by the editors and authors, should be more specifically defined as urban women in Shanghai. These women were from a relatively affluent background and had a certain degree of education. They could read, write, and contribute to the print media—in other words, they had access to various means of representation. In the foreword of the second issue, the editorial board declared that each issue of the journal would provide articles suitable for women of all age groups, stages of life, and social backgrounds. The uniqueness of the journal, it stated, lay precisely in the fact that it represented all women: female students still hunting for fiancés, newlyweds, young mothers, and middle-aged women. 14 Women’s Voices contains an all-inclusive discourse on women, which cuts across class, gender, race, and ethnicity. This concept of all-inclusiveness dissolves in descriptions in the journal of groups of women outside Shanghai, particularly rural women. Some articles described life in the countryside, particularly emphasizing the hardships shouldered by the underprivileged ‘sisters’ living there. Accounts of the social positions of rural women and women from geographically, historically, and socially marginalized cultures and societies (such as minority women and women from remote areas inside and outside of China) were only provided to help construct the notion of modern womanhood, which was defined by the everyday material life of urban women in Shanghai. Such descriptions only served to marginalize and alienate the other groups of women featured in the journal. Seemingly far-removed from the countryside, a Shanghai woman sitting in her living room would often read about how their country sisters were “uncivilized,” “backward,” “pitiful,” “superstitious,” “lacking new knowledge,” incapable of gaining self-consciousness, and therefore in 14 See Women’s Voices 1. 2 (1942): 1.

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need of “initial enlightenment.”15 At the same time, the “good qualities” of rural women, such as dedicated mothering, being “hardworking,” and exercising “frugality,” were exemplified and even embellished, and were clearly intended to serve as an example for urban women. According to the editorial board, these “good qualities” had long ceased to exist among Shanghai women, and writing about underprivileged women would emphasize the necessity for Chinese (urban) women to work hard at any social position they occupied.16 Though many urban women were also diligent, frugal, and virtuous, the key to exemplifying the “good qualities” of rural women was to emphasize the distinct differences between the urban and rural environments. To borrow Gail Hershatter’s language, these constructed images of women illustrate much more about the “classificatory strategies” of their inventors than about the real individuals they supposedly addressed. 17 In this manufactured reality, the distance could not be any greater between the urban readers of Women’s Voices and the women represented on its pages. Rural women were contrasted against urban women, who presumably lived in a highly commercialized, and thus ‘civilized’ environment. The lives of these rural women were marginalized and categorized as basic knowledge by the editorial board of Women’s Voices for readers living in Shanghai. While the board argued that it was important for women in Shanghai to obtain some knowledge about the lives of women outside the city, this attempted depiction of reality turned out to be no more than a form of alienation and differentiation. Complexities also arise when one attempts to determine what kind of journalistic style Women’s Voices employed. In the editorial foreword of the first issue, discussed earlier, the journal’s standard language was defined as “relaxing, witty, simple, gentle and serene.” Only the one or two articles in each issue that addressed “relatively serious issues” would

15 See the editorial foreword in Women’s Voices 1. 12 (April 1943). Also See Li Yunbi Ө ᙩ κ , “Jiating funü de richang shenghuo” ࣁ ࣘ ੴ ʩ ‫ ̅ ڄ‬ગ Ά ‫( ޥ‬The Everyday Life of Housewives) in Women’s Voices 1. 1 (May 1942): 2-3. 16 See the editorial foreword and several articles about women’s lives in remote areas of China (such as Changhua and Miaoyao) included in the category entitled “Funü de shenghuo” ੴ ʩ ‫ ڄ‬Ά ‫( ޥ‬Women’s Lives) in Women’s Voices 1. 12 (April 1943). 17 Gail Hershatter, “The Subaltern Talks Back: Reflections on Subaltern Th eory and Chinese History,” positions 1 (1993): 109.

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employ “solemn and precise” language.18 Despite the editorial board’s emphasis on the ‘seriousness’ of its purpose, the journal’s overall playful style of writing often managed to undermine the intended message. The metaphorical use of ‘voices’ appears to have been crucial to the journal’s philosophy. As stated by its editorial board, the fundamental concern of the journal was to create and to encourage the ‘voices of women’; but what exactly did these voices consist of? What did they sound like, and what results were they intended to generate among the readers? Interestingly, the actual description of these voices was quite playful: Sounds (voices) that are pleasant, sounds of raindrops tapping on banana leaves, sounds (voices) of women chatting…. Solemn but not stiff, humorous but not slippery, this describes precisely [what we mean by] ‘voices’ in ‘women’s voices.’19

This description served to undermine the messages delivered in the editorial foreword. The journal’s uniqueness did not lie merely in the fact that it aimed to incorporate women’s voices and that it spoke exclusively for them; more importantly, it was the composite nature of these voices and the eclectic styles incorporated into the journal that set it apart from previous publications designed for a female readership. While arguing for the importance of a heightened social-consciousness among Chinese women, and for the need for strong and independent modern women, much effort and space was devoted throughout the journal to a more culturally specific project: designing and regulating the leisure time and domestic life of urban women in Shanghai during the 1940s. Some voices rang out strongly and articulately, but more often they were the pleasant voices of women casually chatting about things like food, fashion, household arrangements, movies, and the latest forms of urban entertainment. It was this part of the chorus of mixed voices that often overshadowed the editorial board’s stated goal of raising the social and political consciousness of Chinese women. The most distinctive voices in this chorus were the voices of women at play—soft, pleasant, and light-hearted. Their playful banter often drowned out the lower, more serious tone of the May Fourth messages as the journal’s central concern shifted to the leisure-time activities of Shanghai women. 18 “Editorial Foreword,” Women’s Voices 1. 1 (1942): 1. 19 Women’s Voices 1. 1 (May 1942): 38.

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How should these mixed voices and eclectic styles of writing be interpreted? Were the multifarious messages delivered in the journal a popularized version of the May Fourth discourses on women? What, then, was the relationship between the journal and its specific political/ intellectual context in Shanghai during the 1940s? How should the cultural significance of the journal be understood in connection to the political complexities surrounding it? What is the significance of a journal primarily devoted to women’s leisure activities during a period of war and occupation, when the need to survive and find sustenance characterized the daily existence of most ordinary families? These questions will be addressed in the following sections. THE PLAYERS

The publication of Women’s Voices was co-sponsored by Japan’s embassy and its Naval News and Information Agency in Shanghai. Political manipulation was evident throughout the journal, particularly in the section entitled “World News” ( Guoji xinwen ੢ᄑ๘ႝ), which supplied the most current news about the war in Asia and in Europe, as well as about the diplomatic exchanges between the Japanese government and the Wang Jingwei collaborationist regime in the Japanese-occupied region of China. Symbolically framing the journal was the “World News” section, which usually appeared at the beginning of each issue, and a concluding postscript ( Yusheng ኜᑵ) by the Japanese Editor-inChief that always appeared on the last page. The journal’s structure was a microcosm of the system of political control in occupied Shanghai. While Japanese occupation, as an outside political force, limited the cultural production of the period, it also allowed freedom within certain parameters. Within these parameters, there existed a relatively autonomous agenda independent of overt ideological control. “World News” took up no more than two pages of each issue of the journal, while the rest of it dealt exclusively with various domestic and social women’s issues, both in a traditional textual fashion and in what appears to be a sociological representation of women’s lives in occupied Shanghai. The journal’s structure was symbolic in a spatial sense; a seemingly omnipresent system of political control was juxtaposed with the prospering women’s literature, arts, and consumer culture. Tamura Toshiko Ήӫ‫۝‬ʪ (1884-1945), the Japanese woman writer who was known by many Chinese readers as Satô Toshiko ыᗢ‫۝‬ʪ or

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Zuo Junzhi ͣ‫ڥ۝‬, was the Editor-in-Chief of Women’s Voices. Tamura was a significant figure in the first wave of women’s movements in Japan. After the publication of her short story “Akirame” (Resignation) in Asahi shimbun (Daily News) in 1910, Tamura was considered to be one of the most prominent women writers in Taishô Japan, as well as one of the pioneering figures in modern Japanese literature. Her work also appeared in the first and many of the subsequent issues of Seitô (Bluestocking), a controversial feminist magazine started by Hiratsuka Raichô, in Tokyo, in 1911. Recent studies have described how Seitô became a symbol of the Taishô ‘New Woman’ image with its overt revolt against the traditional familial confinement that had long kept Japanese women out of the public arena. 20 Tamura’s writing is characteristic of this first wave of reassessing the historical position of women, in that she depicted male control of women and the painful process of self-realization experienced by modern women. Most of her stories were semi-autobiographical. They often depicted a deeply frustrated female protagonist torn between two separate worlds. One world was the ever-deepening crisis of the protagonist’s relationship with her husband, while the other was her longing for a public life and an independent identity defined by her writing career. The conflict between the two separate realms remained unresolved throughout Tamura’s writing. Though she was not directly involved with the Taishô ‘New Woman’ debate, Tamura Toshiko’s literary writing demonstrated the emotional as well as the psychological dilemma facing many Japanese women who attempted to maintain both a private life

20 According to Laurel Rasplica Rodd, the Taishô debate over the ‘New Woman’ started in 1916 with Yosano Akiko’s criticism of Tolstoy and Key’s ideas that the division of labor between men and women is decided by nature and that the position of women is inferior. Yosano emphasized a woman’s own responsibilities for herself and her independence. On the other hand, Hiratsuka Raichô, the fou nder of Seitô , argued against Yosano and emphasized the government’s responsibili ties in protecting motherhood. The debate beca me more heated when, in 1918, Yamakawa Kikue, a socialist, joined the debate arguing that “socialist eco nomic reform” was a “prerequisite” for any social reform. Rodd explains that the goal of the Taishô debate on the ‘New Woman’ was “mutual encouragement to think deeply about society and women’s roles.” See Laurel Rasplica Rodd, “Yosano Akiko and the Taishô Debate over the ‘New Woman,’” in Recreating Japanese Women, 1600-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 175-98.

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and a public presence.21 Both the controversy surrounding the Taishô image of the ‘New Woman,’ and Tamura’s association with the feminist magazine Bluestocking, were relevant to the publication of Women’s Voices between 1942 and 1945, a period of changing gender roles and family structures in both Japanese and Chinese cultures. Through Tamura Toshiko, it is possible to see the legacy of decades of Japanese leftism and feminism as a key player in wartime China.22 Wartime political strictures may have provided a ‘cocoon’ for the advancement of transnational leftist and feminist discourses. This further complicates the picture of Japanese occupation and Chinese collaboration. The publication of Women’s Voices presents a set of perhaps troubling questions, which have not yet been addressed in scholarly discourses: What was the role of Japanese leftism and feminism in its government’s cultural and political assimilation of the Chinese population? To what extent were Japanese leftists and feminists complicit in Japan’s war efforts and in the violent instillation of an essentially racist and fascist ideology of ethnic national identities? Recent scholarship has examined the role of conservative Japanese intellectuals in promoting a seemingly anti-racist ideology of a multiethnic nation-state during the prewar period, which later resulted in a concerted effort toward mass-mobilization and in an imperial system that actually represented a form of differential racism. Japan justified its 21 See Yukiko Tanaka, ed., To Live and to Write: Selections by Japanese Women Writers 1913-1938 (Seattle: The Seal Press, 1987), 3-38.

For a study of Tamura Toshiko’s role in the first wave of the women’s movement in Japan, see Phyllis Larson, “Re-reading Tamura Toshiko: A Fail ed New Woman?” in Sekine Eiji, ed., Revisionism in Japanese Literary Studies (West Lafayette, Indiana: Midwest Association for Japanese Literary Studies, 1996), 253-67. For a complete biographical account of Tamura Toshiko’s life and career, see Tamura T oshiko: Honhôna ren no shujin no shôgai (Tamura Toshiko: A Life of Passionate Pursuit of Love) by Setouchi Harumi. The biography is one of the Ko dansha series of Women’s Literature/Modern History of Women edited by Setouchi Harumi. Published in 1993. 22 For a study of Japanese leftism during the Taishô era, see Miriam Silverberg,

Changing Song: The Marxist Manifestos of Nakano Shigeharu (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). Arguing for the necessity to “reclaim” Nakano Shig eharu as a Marxist re volutionary, Silverberg asserts that in his manifestos composed between 1920s and 1930s, Nakano places great emphasis on cultural production, suggesting a link with Western Marxism. Silverberg’s close reading of Nakano’s writ ing leads to a reinterpretation of Japanese leftism in the context of Taishô cu lture.

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aggression by defining itself as a unified nation, not only in its polity but also in its ethnic composition. 23 Thus, it is pertinent to ask the following questions: In advancing the cause of leftism and feminism across national and ethnic divides, were the Japanese progressive activists complicit with their conservative counterparts? Did Japanese leftism, at the expense of China’s national salvation, seek to advance its cause, even when the war was entering its deepest and most devastating phase? As complex as it might be, Tamura Toshiko’s leadership role in the journal was overshadowed by the degree of political ambiguity and cultural fluidity involving the journal’s other key player, the Chinese leftist woman author Guan Lu ᘕᛎ. A careful reading of the journal suggests that Tamura’s influence on it was limited in comparison to Guan Lu’s editorial clout. Despite the fact that every issue of the first three volumes of Women’s Voices listed “Zuo Junzhi” as the Editor-in-Chief, the three Chinese editors, Zhao Yunhua ღᙩൡ, Ling Darong ࢃʨ⽿,24 and particularly Guan Lu, played a more crucial role in producing every page of the journal. After Tamura’s death on April 16, 1945, Guan Lu assumed most of the editorial duties and published two final issues, both containing articles commemorating Tamura’s life and career. These articles, particularly the one written by Zhou Zuoren, defined Tamura’s involvement with the journal as merely an attempt to shift away from the loneliness and psychological pain of growing old and frail.25 These final two issues of Women’s Voices lamented the sharp contrast between the exuberant vitality shown in Tamura’s early literary works and her declining situation during the last years of her life, which were characterized by poor health and depression. An editorial postscript written by Guan Lu defined Tamura Toshiko as a “famous Japanese woman writer” whose early years had been glorious, yet her role in shaping Women’s Voices was hardly mentioned. 26

23 See, for example, Naoki Sakai, “Subject and Substratum: On Japanese Imp erial Nationalism,” Cultural Studies: Theorizing Politics, Politicizing Theory 14. 3-4 (July 2000): 464-526. 24 Biographical information on these two other Chinese editors was not avail able. 25 See Women’s Voices 4. 1 (June 1945) and 4. 2 (July 1945). 26 Ibid.

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The way in which Tamura’s Chinese colleagues assessed her contribution to the journal indicates that, to a certain extent, she was viewed as an ‘outsider’ in the production of a ‘Chinese’ women’s journal. Tamura’s cultural presence on the editorial board of Women’s Voices was symbolic of the system of political control in occupied Shanghai—it was omnipresent, but its impact was external because it was unable to saturate Shanghai’s complex cultural structure. In assessing the cultural significance of Women’s Voices, the importance of Guan Lu must be emphasized since her activities surrounding the journal’s publication best illustrate both its historical lineage and its cultural specificity. Among all of the editorial board members, Guan Lu was the one with the capacity for bringing together a variety of textual traditions that included: May Fourth and post-May Fourth literature, Chinese and Japanese leftist literature, popular modern print culture, and evolving discourses on women and modernity in China and Japan. Her career during the 1940s was also representative of the multiple cultural identities many women writers in occupied Shanghai assumed. While working at the journal, Guan was an editor, a journalist, a writer, a social critic, and first and foremost, a ‘new modern urban woman’ —an image she passionately promoted throughout the pages of the journal. Recent biographical literature has depicted Guan Lu as a complex and lonely figure. Known in childhood as Hu Shoumei ࠍ࿕๳, Guan Lu was born into a gentry family in the town of Youyu, in what is now Shanxi Province, in 1907. Her father, who worked as a county commissioner, died when she was only ten. Six years later, her mother also passed away. Guan Lu thus began her nomadic journey in pursuit of a proper education. She and her sister drifted from Changsha to Nanjing, from one relative’s house to another, eventually arriving in Shanghai, where generous friends took Guan into their home. In Shanghai, Guan Lu was finally able to pursue her studies. In 1928, without a proper high school education, she passed the college entrance exam and was admitted into the Philosophy Department of Zhongyang University, in Nanjing. While in college, she befriended many leftist writers and began writing poetry and fiction. Three years later the university expelled her, citing that her high school diploma was forged. Some suspected that the true reason for this expulsion was the university authorities’ disapproval of Guan Lu’s association with the leftists.

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Guan Lu returned to Shanghai and joined the Left Wing Writers’ Association and became an active participant in the national salvation and women’s liberation movements, eventually becoming a Communist Party member in 1932. This was also the period when she established her reputation as a Left Wing poet with the 1936 publication of her poetry collection entitled Taipingyang shang de gesheng ˯ͦ‫ޜ‬ʕ‫ိڄ‬ ᑵ (Songs over the Pacific). 27 When the war began, in 1937, she took part in the Orphan Island literary resistance, continuing to write poetry and fiction. In 1938, she began writing what would become her bestknown work, a novel called Xin jiu shidai ๘ᕄइ̩ (New and Old Eras), which she completed in 1940. 28 Literary histories produced in mainland China occasionally mention Guan Lu, primarily because of her association with Left Wing writers in her earlier years. She has been viewed, however, as nothing more than a minor writer compared to other more prominent leftist writers. Guan Lu’s career up to the end of the 1930s was not unlike those of other young women writers of her time who were inspired by the leftist cause. What distinguished Guan Lu were the political complexities surrounding her writing and editing career in the occupation era. Starting from late 1939, Guan’s leftist friends began to notice puzzling changes in her personality and appearance. Her activities became more and more discreet. Many commented on a series of plastic surgery operations she apparently underwent, including a major nose operation that dramatically changed the contour of her face. Some recalled that during that time she also began to wear more makeup, sport fancy hairstyles, and dress in fashionable clothes. Gradually, her friends began excluding her from their activities. Only a few insiders knew that Guan Lu had been appointed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to work as an undercover agent in the collaborationist regime. From 1942 to 1945, Guan Lu spent her most productive years as a writer and editor working for Women’s Voices. This was initially an ‘assignment.’ Some accounts claim that Guan Lu was instructed by the CCP to get close to Tamura Toshiko in order to obtain Japanese military secrets, since the CCP believed that Tamura

27 Songs over the Pacific was published by Shanghai shenghuo shudian in 1936. 28 New and Old Eras was published by Shanghai guangming shuju in 1940.

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Toshiko might be sympathetic with the cause of the Chinese revolution.29 However, most people did not know this, and they were disappointed by Guan Lu’s sudden involvement with the regime. After the war ended, many of her friends refused to accept Guan back into their circles, apparently troubled by her problematic role during the occupation. Party insiders came forward to clear her name, and Guan Lu enjoyed a brief period of peace and freedom. Those closest to her would later remember that her single most important wish in life was to become a successful writer. For a few years in the early 1950s, Guan Lu thought that she finally had a chance to sit down and write. Sadly, peace was fleeting, since her history as an undercover agent repeatedly came back to haunt her, especially during the Anti-Rightist campaign (1957) and the beginning years of the Cultural Revolution (1966-9) when thousands of individuals with ‘questionable’ pasts were tortured and put to death. Those individuals who held inside knowledge about Guan Lu’s underground wartime activities, such as the two veteran leftist writers, Xia Yan and Ke Ling, were themselves persecuted during the Cultural Revolution.30 During this period, Guan Lu was repeatedly shunned, humiliated, and tortured. She was imprisoned for a total of ten years, first from 29 In his essay entitled “The Cultural Resistance in Wartime Shanghai,” Ke Ling,

a distinguished left-wing writer/editor and himself a survivor of the Japanese occupation, provides many details concerning the various co-existing political forces and the complexities of intellectual choices within that rather unusual historical period and locale. According to Ke Ling, for a period of time, he had pondered the abrupt political shift of Guan Lu, a fellow left-wing writer who once actively took part in the antiJapanese propaganda movement, and who, after 1941, openly co llaborated with Japanese occupational government and was engaged in many social and cultural activities sponsored by the Japanese, including the co-editing of the journal Women’s Voices. Ke Ling, in his memoir, recorded a brief conversation he had with Xia Yan ࢬ ࠯ (1900-1995), a leftist playwright who had for a long time served as a liaison between individual writers/artists and the CCP. Ke Ling wrote: “After the victory of the AntiJapanese War, I once asked Xia Yan: ‘What actually happened to Guan Lu?’ Xia answered dryly: ‘The CCP is such a powerful party; it should not surprise anyone that some party members were planted inside the enemy’s camp.’” See My Life-long Journey Toiling with Words, 54. Also see Ying Guojing, Essays on Modern Literary Periodicals , 418-22. 30 See Ke Ling, “Yaoji Zhang Ailing” ჲ ੿ ઠ ื ߆ (To Eileen Chang from a

Fara way Place), Dushu 73 (1985); reprinted in Ke Ling sanwen xuanji ‫ ޅ‬᝞ ಞ ́ ᎚ ූ (Selected Essays by Ke Ling) (Tianjin: Baihua wenyi chubanshe, 1993), 191-201.

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1955 to 1957, then again from 1967 to 1975. After her second release in 1975, she patiently waited for seven years for the Party to officially clear her name. In April 1982, frail, lonely, sick, and depressed, she finally received her paper of rectification. Her name was cleared, but her life was near its end. Eight months later, she killed herself with an overdose of sleeping pills. A plastic doll was her sole companion during the last days of her life. 31 Just as her pre-1940s literary achievements have been defined in terms of her political allegiances, Guan Lu’s cultural activities during the 1940s have been either explained in purely political terms, or simply not accounted for. Abundant textual evidence exists to determine the scope and depth of Guan’s involvement with the journal Women’s Voices , and her position on the editorial board cannot simply be explained as a cover for underground political activity. The intellectual concerns and literary experiments demonstrated by Guan Lu’s involvement with Women’s Voices transcend the boundaries of political history. Guan Lu’s ‘voices,’ as heard throughout the journal, make her a substantial figure both in the history of modern Chinese literature and in the social/cultural/political history of twentieth-century China. Guan Lu not only served as a co-editor of Women’s Voices, but also published many of her own essays in the journal—over seventy in the thirty-eight issues. She wrote so extensively that in some of the issues, nearly half of the written space was filled by her work. Since she employed many different pseudonyms in these articles, the scope, quantity, and impact of her writing may still be underestimated. 32 The volume of her contributions aside, Guan Lu’s participation with Women’s Voices generated her most influential intellectual arguments as well as literary experiments not present in her earlier works. Most of Guan Lu’s writings can be categorized as social criticism pertaining to women’s issues in contemporary Shanghai, such as family,

31 See memoir essays collected in Ding Yanzhao ʀ Ե ‫ ݲ‬, ed., Guan Lu Ah Gua n Lu ᘕ ᛎ ੒ ᘕ ᛎ (Guan Lu, Alas) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2001). Also see Wu Jimin ѹ ੪ ͺ , “Changqi bei kanzuo hanjian de nü geming jia” ‫ ۂ‬ಭ ூ ߡ ѕ ် Ϥ ‫ ڄ‬ʩ ࡓ ֡ ࣁ (A Veteran Revolutionary Woman Who Had Long been Mistaken as a Traitor), Shanghai tan 30 (June 1989): 10-4 and 31 (July 1989): 40-4. 32 Among Guan Lu’s many pseudonyms, I can identify Fang Jun ‫ ڤ‬Ѽ , Fang ‫ ڤ‬,

Lan ᚱ , Mengyin ࿗ ৏ , and Lin Yin ‫ ظ‬ሟ . but there might be more. Fang Jun was used by Guan Lu in her social and literary criticisms, while Lan was the name she used for her film and drama reviews throughout all of the issues.

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marriage, morality, education, and careers. Through this work, Guan demonstrated an effort to reclaim the various iconoclastic early twentieth-century philosophies concerning the social status of women. She also wrote many lyrical essays, the style of which was also reminiscent of the May Fourth romanticist literature. Guan Lu’s literary activities of the 1940s were, nevertheless, distinctly different from those of the earlier periods. In her experiments with literary criticism, historical critique, and film/drama criticism, her divergence from May Fourth traditions was obvious. Her literary criticisms primarily focused on women writers in ancient China, particularly female poets, such as Jiang Caiping Е‫ۀ‬ᙧ, whom she described as “a talented woman of the Tang imperial chamber.” 33 Confucian discourses on proper women’s conduct, such as Ban Zhao’s Nüjie ʩვ (Commandments for Women), were the focus of Guan Lu’s historical critiques,34 while her numerous film and drama reviews provide an overview of screen and stage productions in Shanghai during the years of occupation. Both Guan Lu’s literary criticisms and her historical critiques demonstrate an attempt to promote women’s arts and literature and to infuse the canon of modern literature with elements of ‘tradition’. Her film and drama reviews, on the other hand, exemplify the fascination women writers had with cultural forms other than literature. These redefined genres were by-products of the larger social and cultural atmosphere of Shanghai in the 1940s. Guan Lu therefore functioned as a bridge between previous textual traditions and the newly discovered possibilities of broader literary creativity. Guan Lu’s position on the editorial board of a journal that has been conventionally defined as a ‘collaborationist’ production indicates that a relatively autonomous editing agenda was permitted, albeit under the shadow of the control of wartime occupation. A historical lineage is also suggested by the editing and writing practices of Guan Lu, one that can be traced from the late nineteenth-early twentieth century by following the impact of traditions represented by the prominent women who helped form them. The complexities of Women’s Voices were not merely the product of the complicated political backgrounds of the sponsors and the editorial board; they also resulted from the intricate 33 Women’s Voices 1. 1 (May 1942): 28. 34 Women’s Voices 1. 2 (June 1942): 21.

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knot of textual traditions formed by publishing a women’s journal. Guan Lu’s presence in Shanghai during the 1940s served to orchestrate all of those textual traditions into one ‘chorus’ of Women’s Voices, at the same historical moment, on the stage of a single printed space. THE NEW KNOWLEDGE

Women’s Voices’ primary function appears to have been to create, restructure, and propagate a discourse on domesticity that transcended national and ethnic boundaries. It certainly was not the first popular journal published in Shanghai that attempted to categorize ‘new knowledge’ for female readers. In fact, it is essential to examine the modern print culture’s late nineteenth-early twentieth-century origins in order to determine the role of the modern publishing industry in transforming issues such as nationalism, anti-colonialism, legal reform, human rights issues, and women’s liberation into everyday discourses. Despite the claim that the Women’s Voices editorial staff made about initiating something completely ‘new’ or ‘original,’ the journal’s structure, eclectic styles, and mixed voices, as well as much of its ‘new knowledge,’ served to situate Women’s Voices in the same lineage as comprehensive popular journals published since the late nineteenth century. 35 The structure of Women’s Voices carried on the tradition of modern print culture started by earlier popular journals in Shanghai. In other

35 Three examples are: Dongfang zazhi ‫ ̄ ز‬ᕺ ბ (The Orient Magazine), Funü

zazhi ੴ ʩ ᕺ ბ (Women’s Magazine), and Shenghuo zhoukan Ά ‫( ̵ ֟ ޥ‬Life Weekly). These predecessors in modern print culture were known for their comprehensiveness, their highly pronounced educational purposes, and the wide variety of subjects they had incorporated. A vast amount of information from the newly shaped corpus known as ‘modern knowledge,’ or ‘new knowledge,’ was popularized, and these journals were turned into everyday manuals full of survival strate gies for a predominantly urban readership. For a discussion of discourses concerning women in Women’s Magazine, The Orient Magazine, and other early comprehensive magazines, see Sylvia Li-chun Lin, “The Discursive Formation of the ‘New’ Chinese Woman, 1860-1930,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 1998. For a hi st orical account of the production and r eception of the journal Life Weekly , see Wen-hsin Yeh, “Progressive Journalism and Shanghai’s Petty Urbanites: Zou Taofen and the Shenghuo Weekly , 1926-1945” in Frederic Wakeman Jr. and Wen-hsin Yeh, eds., Shanghai Sojourners (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, Uni versity of California at Berkeley, 1992), 186-238.

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words, the journal emphasized comprehensive knowledge with a distinct ‘female’ appeal; it was marketed to reach the widest possible readership, with women as its core target group. The categories of knowledge presented in Women’s Voices demonstrated the editorial board’s efforts to further enhance the comprehensiveness and depth of both old and new topics, as well as to increase the amount of detailed information provided about each of them. Magazines like Women’s Voices reached their female readerships precisely by claiming to represent all women and all of the topics that shaped their lives. The ‘new knowledge’ categorized in Women’s Voices can roughly be divided into two parts: self-consciousness and techniques for everyday living. While a few of the feature articles set out to educate women on gaining self-consciousness—that is, an awareness of their own positions and their ability to launch social change—this serious purpose was often surpassed by the scope and the depth of discussions on everyday issues. This process of categorization was a means of popularizing certain knowledge that the editorial board considered to be fundamental for female readers residing in urban Shanghai. The structure of the journal indicates that there was a pre-designated system of information that the editorial board had in mind and intended to convey throughout the journal. The editorial ‘we’ of Women’s Voices assumed an important role in directing the reader’s reception of the journal, going so far as to provide suggestions in its foreword ( xiansheng ζᑵ) on how to approach the journal. Conveniently, this editorial foreword always appeared on the same page as the table of contents. The word xiansheng connotes a sense of being a herald or a precursor, which suggests the editors’ self-proclaimed ‘avant-garde’ positions. The language employed in every editorial foreword unambiguously emphasized the journal’s contents. Readers were expected to follow a certain order, suggested by the editorial foreword when reading the journal, therefore its strong messages were delivered precisely in that order. If the table of contents not only shaped, but also served as a window to the ideas/ knowledge that would be disclosed throughout the reading process, the foreword or xiansheng helped to gradually raise the curtain, illuminating a carefully designed path and gradually guiding the reader toward a predetermined educational goal. ‘Motherhood,’ among many other subjects, was often singled out and reclaimed by the editors and writers of Women’s Voices as a fundamental role for modern women. Instructions for becoming a good mother during a period in history typified by hunger, scarcity, death, blockades,

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and other social and economic turmoil became an important part of the corpus of ‘new knowledge.’ Many featured articles argued that motherhood was an important dimension of womanhood and should be regarded as essential to both female identity and social solidarity. While motherhood was frequently linked to nation building, the model of the “virtuous wife and good mother” ( xianqi liangmu ቖֳԯ͹) was advocated to enhance social consolidation. The collective message was that domestic life was not to be dismantled; instead it must be reconstructed with a reinforced, more prominent position for women. In an article entitled “Funü ruhe tajin shehui” ੴʩϨщቢන‫ڊ‬๡ (How Do Women Enter into Society?), the author Wen Ying’s ́ࠡ arguments represented the editorial board’s standpoint on this issue. 36 Three different views on the progress of women’s liberation since the beginning of the twentieth century were summarized. The first view, one that Wen Ying calls “unrealistic,” is the one embraced by “the most radical group” of women’s advocates. These ‘radical’ advocates wanted women to be exactly the same as men. Wen Ying argued that these views could not be put into practice on the basis that if all women worked outside of the home like men did, there would be no one to take care of the house and children. In her view, gender differences should not be eliminated under any circumstances. Wen Ying also criticized the second position, which, she asserted, was held by a group of educated women from affluent families. Wen Ying argued that these women only cared about their own financial and intellectual well-being. She believed that ‘women’s liberation’ served as nothing more than a slogan with which to adorn their lives, and that it gave upper-class women an excuse to hire lower-class women to do their housework. Ironically in such circumstances, ‘women’s liberation’ only meant liberation from housework, especially from taking care of children—that is, ‘freedom’ from motherhood. Wen Ying argued that the above two positions did not reflect the ‘reality’ of Chinese women’s lives. She suggested a third position, one that recognized the differences between men and women and acknowledged the ‘fact’ that women had “defects” in their “intelligence, endurance, and physical strength.” Wen Ying believed that only a few social positions were suitable and could be assumed by a select number of women, and that most women should remain in their own position in order to fulfill their tianzhi ˭ᕀ or ‘natural duties.’ 36 See Women’s Voices 1. 3 (July 1942).

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Still, women could influence society indirectly through their fathers, brothers, and husbands, and, furthermore, they could educate their children, suggested Wen Ying. The indirect influence of women was allegedly proven by history. In present-day China, Wen Ying argued, only by maintaining women’s natural duties could the stability of society be guaranteed. The gist of Wen Ying’s argument is a tired assertion that has been argued in many cultures and historical periods: community solidarity, as well as that of the nation, relies on women fulfilling their domestic duties. Here, a form of gender conservatism appears to be outlined in this article, in which the author’s arguments seem to suggest a backlash against Chinese women’s liberation. Wen Ying apparently recommended that Chinese women return to the kitchen. Wen Ying was not alone in her criticisms of the ‘modern’ women who chose to abandon their assigned domestic duties in favor of a ‘modernized’ lifestyle. A cartoon by Ding Song ʀࣨ (1891-1972) in the May 1943 issue of Women’s Voices also criticized such women, who were perceived as having lost all of their domestic desires. Entitled as “Zen kan rong xi” ‫ݎ‬ృࣅሖ (How Can I Bear to Be Inside), the cartoon pictures a ‘modern woman’ in high heels and a form-fitting cheongsam, who hesitates at the door of her depressingly cramped kitchen [Plate 10].37 Throughout the journal, words were often interlaced with images to demonstrate the strong position taken by many contributors and the editorial board. However, the message here was much more complicated than what words and images tended to suggest on the surface. The journal’s interest in a strengthened concept of motherhood marked a change in Chinese leftism and Communism. Leaders of these movements, who communicated through the leftist editors, may have expressed their renewed interest, under the pressure of war, in underscoring motherhood and womanhood. The concept of women as good mothers and wise wives was once again targeted as fundamental to winning the war and expanding the basis of leftist ideology. Furthermore, the journal’s efforts to reclaim motherhood were closely intertwined with the enforcement of

37 See Women’s Voices 2. 1 (May 1943): 19. Ding Song was a key member of the latter-day Shanghai School of Fi ne Arts and a prominent cartoonist. He frequently contributed cartoons to popular journals in the 1930s and 1940s. His works were often featured in Women’s Voices. Ding Song has an equally famous son, Ding Cong ʀ ᑶ (b. 1916), who was recognized for his poi gnant social criticisms and his illustrations to Lu Xun’s short stories.

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the new social and political order—an order resulting from the wartime Japanese occupation and based on the building of a ‘nation’ of prolific men and women who would work hard, both inside and outside of the home, toward the future of ‘China/Asia.’ Similarly, they were expected to conduct themselves in a culturally and ideologically ‘Chinese/Asian’ way. Under this system of political control, many articles published in the journal only sketchily described this ‘nation,’ or omitted it altogether, despite the fact that the journal’s discussions about motherhood in relation to ‘nation-building’ were reminiscent of similar discourses produced in earlier twentieth-century China. Dry, abstract language was used to describe this ‘nation,’ leaving no room for individual imagination. ‘Nation’ became a signifier when removed from the meanings previously ascribed to it, and was therefore devoid of further implications. In other words, the concept of ‘nationhood’ was constantly addressed, but invariably left out of the narrative. In contrast, lively, vivid language was employed to define and outline modern motherhood. Modern motherhood’s rich connotations shifted discussions about women’s social and political responsibilities in 1940s Shanghai in a different direction, toward a fascination with everyday life and an attempt to classify the details of everyday life as an important form of ‘new knowledge.’ These extensive descriptions of motherhood often took up the entire journal, forcing previously insignificant, everyday topics into the limelight of the fast-growing, women-centered urban culture of 1940s Shanghai. Women’s Voices carried on the tradition of transforming popular journals into how-to guides for specific urban readerships; yet the journal’s structure significantly altered this tradition in that the scope of ‘new knowledge’ shifted, while notions of the everyday and the art of homemaking were centralized. This new body of knowledge was twofold: on the one hand, it taught Shanghai housewives how to add ‘meaningfulness’ to their everyday routines by venturing outside the boundaries of the domestic world; on the other hand, it also instructed career women on how to add color to their personal lives by making full use of the material possibilities provided by Shanghai’s urban modernity. Many articles in the journal placed great emphasis on improving the quality of everyday life for Shanghai women. For example, in an article entitled “Jiating funü de richang shenghuo” ࣁࣘੴʩ‫̅ڄ‬ગΆ‫( ޥ‬The Everyday Life of Housewives), the author Li Yunbing Өᙩκ argued

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that gaining political rights was not the only goal of the women’s movement. 38 It was also important for women to increase their general knowledge of the world, improve their life skills, cultivate virtue, and strengthen their physical endurance. Most important of all, she argues, was improving the everyday lives of housewives. Li described the everyday life of four different kinds of housewives and suggests improvements for each: the first type, “leisure-class women” ( youxian jieji funü Љ෈෋ঠੴʩ), led a life of luxury, often ignored their children’s educations, and were blind to the outside world; the second type, “aristocratic women” ( guizu funü ඙૯ੴʩ), were indirectly involved with politics through their marriages to significant political figures, and usually led busy social lives, tending to ignore both housework and their children’s educations. Li Yunbing was highly critical of the above two types of women, arguing that they should realize their social responsibilities, especially within women’s circles ( funü jie ੴʩߍ). Additionally, she argued that they should be more frugal and contribute to public welfare, rearrange their daily schedules, devote more time to housework, and create a “model family” ( mofan jiating ᆦᇷࣁࣘ). “Women with professions” ( zhiye funü ᕀ๣ੴʩ) comprised the third group, though Li did not clearly describe their social backgrounds. Nonetheless, it is probable that this category refers to educated women from middle- or upper-middle-class backgrounds. According to Li, these women held responsibilities both inside and outside their homes and were fully aware of their social responsibilities and family commitments. Such women tended to live in a nuclear “new-style family” ( xinshi jiating ๘Ϸࣁࣘ) that was financially supported by both the husband and wife, but still more or less relied on the wife for domestic work. According to Li, this type of women were more likely than the others to be aware of their responsibilities to work toward improving the status of all women—Li felt that these women were ‘perfect’ in every respect. Following this ideal category of women was the most marginalized group of all, “rural women” ( xiangcun funü ඵӫੴʩ) who were barely educated. Even though they worked hard, they still were not able to educate their children. Li believed that enlightening ( huanqi) these women would be the solution to their plight. Li Yunbing’s article indicates that the notion of the everyday had become a criterion for social categorization, and her effort to classify

38 See Women’s Voices 1. 1 (May 1942).

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women into different sub-groups went hand-in-hand with the journal’s attempt to categorize knowledge. A regular column entitled Jiazheng ࣁ‫ ݬ‬best exemplified the journal’s attempt to categorize everyday life. Jiazheng is generally rendered as “home management” or “home economy”; but in this context, it is better rendered as “the art of homemaking.” Articles published under this heading were clearly designed exclusively for young women, especially young mothers. Writers for this column provided numerous tips for healthy womanhood/motherhood. They consistently dealt with general topics such as interior design, household relationships, nutrition, recipes, and children’s health and education. More specific subjects in this section included: how to arrange furniture; brewing coffee; cooking lotus roots and soy-bean noodles; using music when entertaining at home; personal hygiene; the difficulties of being a housewife; the practical and economical benefits of buying cotton shoes; saving money and conserving energy; the healthful benefits of sunlight; family wellness; mother-inlaw/daughter-in-law relationships; how to take care of new-born babies and young children; educating children in terms of nurturing their speech, appearance, and gestures; as well numerous housekeeping tips. If the entirety of the journal can be viewed as a complete narrative, these lengthy discourses on homemaking can be regarded as narrative devices employing fragmentation and materialization. Everyday life was dissected into the minutest of details and dispersed throughout the pages of the journal; but the long list of homemaking tips also depicted everyday life on a grand scale, as ordinary activities were blown up largerthan-life and glorified. A list of all the products and activities mentioned in Jiazheng reads like a colorful, highly-detailed blueprint of the material world. Here, the most visible cultural aspects were presented. When everyday life was categorized and analyzed in such great detail, the practice of homemaking truly became an art. By expressing themselves through gourmet cuisine and fine clothes, women could construct an intelligible universe that was at once sensible, meaningful, and profoundly cultural. Jiazheng and many other articles in the journal set out to teach urban women concrete practical skills and details about life. Such a massively detailed representation of daily life is significant because it indicates that the everyday practices of Chinese women formed a selfcontained, autonomous world. This sphere of existence might have been connected in certain ways to the larger ideological framework forced upon it, but it refused to surrender to ‘outside’ pressures. Similarly,

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urban women’s lives, as described in Women’s Voices, burst forth in such rich, vigorous detail that there was no room for overt ideological control. In the layout of Jiazheng , there appeared to be a concerted effort to redefine ‘domesticity,’ and to merge both old and new practices to generate a concept of ‘modern motherhood.’ At the same time, this force was subversive, for it inevitably transformed the meaning of ‘new knowledge’ and consequently contributed to the creation of a new vision of urban modernity, one that flowed gradually, yet persistently, through the endless narrative of everyday life. THE OLD KNOWLEDGE

The most extraordinary characteristic of Women’s Voices was its promotion of the image of a ‘new modern urban woman.’ Throughout the journal’s entire thirty-eight issues, the editorial board consistently attempted to reshape the societal definitions of modeng ᆃങ (modern or trendy), modeng funü ᆃങੴʩ (modern or trendy women), xiandai funü ୏̩ੴʩ (modern women), and xin funü ๘ੴʩ (new women). Consistent also were extensive critiques of the major arguments that had prevailed in the previous women’s movements, which were the May Fourth and post-May Fourth discourses on women and modernity. Shanghai’s ‘new modern woman’ was a complicated construction because she was actually defined to a large extent by what she was not, rather than by what she was. Guan Lu and the journal’s other editors and writers revealed a body of distinct urban sensibilities characteristic of 1940s Shanghai by describing and critiquing in great detail the older concept of a ‘modern woman,’ one that they claimed was modernized only on the superficial level. From the very first issue, feature articles began questioning the authenticity of some self-proclaimed ‘modern women.’ According to the editorial board, the identities of such women were an end product of the May Fourth discourses on women’s liberation. For these female journalists writing in the 1940s, the anti-feudalism movement that started earlier in the twentieth century was indeed a step forward, but it was by no means a complete solution for Chinese women. Arguments from this earlier movement were considered too naïve from a 1940s point of view. Women’s Voices declared that present-day women needed a so-called “new enlightenment” ( xin qimeng ๘૧Ⴑ) and a “new body of knowledge” ( xin zhishi ๘‫ڈ‬ᗰ). The journal’s painstaking categorization of

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knowledge was thus linked to an apparent second wave of enlightenment for Chinese women and a redefinition of the term ‘modern.’ The editorial board, particularly Guan Lu, set out to promote a “truly dynamic modern woman,” that is, a modern woman who embraced “new substance,” as opposed to one who was merely trendy and superficially modern. Modeng, a word that was once the transliteration of ‘modern,’ they argued, had long been distorted to mean ‘trendy,’ ‘stylish,’ and pleasure–seeking; thus it was necessary to restore a set of positive connotations to it. The editorial staff openly declared their plans to reevaluate the May Fourth discourses on individuality, freedom of choice, and women’s liberation. The 1940s version of urban modernity as exemplified in Women’s Voices also had another kind of implication: it reached into the past, reorganizing texts and images in order to generate inspiration for reconstructing the present. The journal made consistent, collective editorial efforts to reconstruct China’s long history of literature and arts, and to promote female writers and artists to canonical status. These efforts might seem staunchly academic, especially when viewed against the process of canonization that took place from the late 1920s through the 1930s. However, the journal chose to reconstruct China’s literary past within the realm of middlebrow culture, an effort that fueled the everyday imaginations of Shanghai women and added a unique aesthetic dimension to the new vision of urban modernity. ‘Tradition’ meant different things at different times in Women’s Voices, but the most transgressive moments of all were when the discursive boundaries between tradition and modernity were blurred and sometimes even merged. These moments occurred when the word ‘tradition’ carried no ideological weight with it, but instead referred to a newly constructed textual entity that retained its structure only through an endless interplay of sensual details and aesthetic principles. The structuring of Women’s Voices demonstrates how various aspects of previous textual traditions could be brought into the making of a popular journal in 1940s Shanghai. For the editors of Women’s Voices, textual traditions were not exclusive of one another; instead, they could be taken apart and organized in a different order, eventually becoming part of a system of meanings that contributed to the shaping of a new vision of urban modernity. It can be inferred from the journal that a collective effort existed to establish a new textual tradition from a woman’s point of view. This was an effort to reconstruct a literary history that provided a textual

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basis both for envisioning women’s lives in the past and for enriching women’s lives in the present. By doing so, the scope of ‘new knowledge’ was further broadened to incorporate a restored history of women’s arts and literature. In addition to Jiazheng, two other important groups of articles must be introduced. The first of these, entitled Funü yu zhiye ੴʩႩᕀ๣, or “Women and Professions,” was written primarily by Fang Mei ̄౏, another of the journal’s Chinese editors.39 For each issue, Fang Mei usually interviewed women of various professions. These articles belong to the genre of social reportage that was prominent during the 1930s and 1940s.40 A wide variety of Shanghai women were interviewed for this column, including: saleswomen, factory workers, primary school teachers, seamstresses, waitresses, nurses, doctors, and even policewomen. However, the most prominent of the women interviewed were those who had established themselves in the arts—mainly painters, musicians, and actresses. After the first volume, “Women and Professions” was replaced by Funü de shenghuo ੴʩ‫ڄ‬Ά‫ޥ‬, or “Women’s Lives.” An emphasis was placed on how Chinese women had been represented in different types of texts throughout history. For example, articles discussed women’s lives as they were depicted in folk songs; historical records of wives who had been cast off by their husbands’ families; texts accusing women of being the root of disaster ( huoshui ၱ̐); the fate of aristocratic women as represented both in literature and historical sources; Confucian attitudes toward women; footbinding in various historical periods; and even the custom of zhuihun ᕚ੹—a man living with his in-laws after marriage. Following the tradition of “Women and Professions,” famous women in the arts were again endorsed. Fang Mei continued to interview female artists, including painters (such as Zhang Liying ઠ৊ࠡ), musicians (such as pianist Wu Yueyi ѹᆪᛯ), and movie stars (such as Li Xianglan). Women’s literature in pre-modern China was also examined in “Women’s Lives.” Li Qingzhao, Gu Taiqing, and Zhu Shuzhen were praised highly, both for their writing and for their unique decision to enter a male-dominated profession. The editorial board demonstrated clearly that in addition to learning about the lives of women in rural or 39 Biographical information on Fang Mei was unavailable. 40 See Footnote 3 in Chapter Two.

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remote areas of China, it was also essential for the intellectual wellbeing of its Shanghai women readers to learn about female historical figures. “Women and Professions” and “Women’s Lives” both served to deliver a strong message: through literature and the arts, women in occupied Shanghai could effectively express themselves. Similarly, much could be learned from the literary and artistic women of pre-modern China who had dared to try to succeed in these areas. Many articles in Women’s Voices could be considered as scholarly attempts at rewriting literary history following a female-centered lineage. For example, Guan Lu’s (under the pseudonym of Fang Jun) article in the inaugural issue, entitled “Tangdai gonggui cairen—Jiang Caiping” ࢑̩ࣃᄊʼʆíЕ‫ۀ‬ᙧ (A Talented Woman of the Tang Imperial Chamber: Jiang Caiping), depicted an imperial concubine from the Tang dynasty as an unusual female artist. Various authors discussed other important topics, which included “Ciji yu cini” අҥႩඅ͠ (Courtesan Poets and Buddhist Women Poets), “Shijing minge zhong fanying de funü shenghuo, lian’ai, jiehun” ༶໩ͺိˀ˫‫ڄݳ‬ੴʩΆ‫ޥ‬ᜣื഻੹ (Women’s Lives, Love, and Marriages Represented in the Folk Songs of The Book of Odes ), “Ta de yisheng: Cong minge zhong kandao Zhongguo funü de shenghuo” ϧ‫ڄ‬ɾΆíનͺိˀߡռˀ੢ੴʩ‫ڄ‬Ά‫( ޥ‬Her Life: Chinese Women’s Lives Represented in Folk Songs), and “Zhu Shuzhen he Yuanxici” Ќଥ࠶Ⴉ˔ʧඅ (Zhu Shuzhen and Her Poem on the New Year’s Eve). Textual analysis was not the purpose of such articles; it was merely a mediation through which the reader could enter a physical realm rich in the details of life. Based upon the fictiveness of these histories of women’s lives, the newly constructed notion of ‘tradition’ allowed for the conceptualization and creation of various aspects of modern urban material life. In these articles, ‘tradition’ no longer opposed ‘modernity,’ but instead became the source of numerous material details that eventually helped to construct a body of distinct modern sensibilities. The construction of Women’s Voices suggested a means of solving a dilemma that had haunted previous generations of cultural practitioners—namely, what role ‘tradition’ could play in the creation of Chinese modernity. It is culturally significant that the journal did not view modernity as a complete obliteration of the past; instead, textual traditions from China’s past could be reorganized and reprioritized to deliver a different message. The newly constructed history of women’s arts and literature thus served both the educational purposes and the entertainment needs of a popular journal. Sensationalism played a role in popularizing liter-

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ary history, and the journal appeared to have created a body of new historical legends. Speaking through both words and images, the journal’s collective voices eloquently addressed the immediate need to construct a womencentered history and culture. The journal’s importance lies in its potential to reveal a discursive formation that was taking shape in the fields of literature, cultural criticism, and social theory. Notions of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity,’ as discussed within the pages of Women’s Voices, are explicitly expressed in the journal’s portrayal of Shanghai women. This newly created image demonstrated how ‘traditional’ elements could be dissected and rearranged to convey a body of sensibilities labeled as ‘modern.’ THE IMAGES

For the first issue of Women’s Voices, Guan Lu, under the pseudonym of Fang Jun, wrote an article entitled “Qingnian funü de quedian” ‫϶ی‬ ੴʩ‫ڄ‬থᓭ (The Defects of Young Women) in which she argued that the May Fourth discourses on equality and individual rights were misleading. She stated that Chinese women had not yet achieved complete liberation, due to an over-simplistic interpretation of the notions of equality and freedom. According to Guan Lu, many women enjoyed equality as a right without being socially responsible; the same women also viewed freedom as pure indulgence. This tendency, she asserted, was most common among “self-proclaimed progressive and liberated women.” Guan Lu believed that young women should be the “pioneers of their era” and that they should attempt to become “truly healthy and thoroughly modern women” ( zhenzhengde, jianquan de modeng funü ॲ͸‫ڄ‬çਯη‫ڄ‬ᆃങੴʩ). A recurrent theme throughout the journal was Guan Lu’s promotion of ‘authentic’ modern women as opposed to the ‘superficial’ women of the May Fourth model. In the editorial foreword of the third issue, which may have been written by Guan Lu herself, the concept of modeng (modern) was questioned: The word modeng by now has entered into our everyday expression, and it is so broadly used that it describes everything and everybody. Women

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are referred to as modeng funü. But women who call themselves modeng funü have never questioned what the word modeng really means.41

In order to learn how to become a ‘genuine’ modern woman, and not just one at the superficial level, the foreword suggested that every woman read Guan Lu’s article, “Zenyang zuo yi ge xin funü” ‫ݎ‬ᆟਭ ɾࡴ๘ੴʩ (How to Become a New Woman), which was published in the same issue. This was the feature article of that particular issue, and probably the centerpiece of the entire journal collection. In this article, Guan Lu argued that the modernization of young women depended on correctly interpreting the true definition of ‘modern’ and throughly embracing “new substance” ( xin neirong ๘˖ࣅ). She strongly emphasized that to devote oneself to the latest fashions and expensive cosmetics, to frequent dance halls and nightclubs, and to indulge in an endless pursuit of pleasure was not a truly modernized way to live. According to Guan Lu, a truly modernized woman should equip herself with “vigorous thinking” ( jianquan de sixiang ਯη‫)ึ݋ڄ‬, “sufficient life skills” ( chongfen de shenghuo jineng ̭˜‫ڄ‬Ά‫ޥ‬ӑ঻), and positive habits, such as “hard work and frugality” ( keku qinli de hao xiguan ոࠚ෺Ꮳ‫ڄ‬Ϧ஑က). These qualities combined to form the ‘new substance’ that helped to restore the original meaning of modeng. 42 Aside from providing a few abstract concepts like “vigorous thinking” and “sufficient skills,” the journal failed to concretely define what it meant to be a truly ‘modernized’ urban woman. Conversely, it provided lengthy and highly elaborate descriptions of women’s lifestyles that it deemed not to be ‘authentically’ modern. These detailed, negative sketches reveal a body of urban sensibilities reflecting the underlying aesthetic preferences of Guan Lu and her colleagues. This group seemed particularly critical of urban women whose lives were characterized by hedonism. Through their denunciation of such women, Guan and her associates were, in fact, evoking a pivotal female image artistically sculpted and enthusiastically promoted by modernist writers in 1930s Shanghai, discussed at the beginning of this chapter. Rather than refuting the femme fatale myth, Women’s Voice’s female editors and authors chose to target a type of woman, the modeng nülanM or ‘modern girl,’ who seemed to fit the 1930s prototype. Compared to modeng funü (modern women), modeng nülang carried a 41 Women’s Voices 1. 3 (July 1942): 1. 42 Women’s Voices 1. 3 (July 1942): 12-3.

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much more negative connotation in that it referred to highly Westernized young women who blindly followed fashion trends. Modeng nülang were repeatedly criticized in Women’s Voices as being a group of pleasure-seeking, self-promoting ‘modern women.’ In the aforementioned article “How to Become a New Woman,” Guan Lu argued that the daily existence of such pleasure-seeking women centered on fashion and imported cosmetics, as well as piecing together fragmented foreign language vocabularies. Guan Lu indicated that these women existed in a “sickly state” ( bingtai ॣ࿽) and belonged to a culture of ‘decay’ that included nightclubs, dance halls, casinos, and Hollywood movies. Extraordinarily, Guan Lu made no effort to conceal that she was intentionally criticizing the modeng nülang way of life in order to promote her own views. Nonetheless, she devoted much space in her article to detailing what she intended to dismiss. Glossed over were the lives of working-class women, whose diligence and frugality Guan Lu praised. Instead, she painted an exquisitely detailed portrait of a pleasure-seeking woman. She seems to have been caught between wanting to deliver a serious critique and enjoying writing an elaborate, rambling narrative. While the May Fourth discourses on women oversimplified the issues of freedom and individual choice, the modernist writers of 1930s Shanghai mythologized modern urban femme fatales. Dissatisfied with earlier constructions, the editors and contributors of Women’s Voices countered them with the image of a ‘new’ modern urban woman. However, this did not signal a complete break with previous discourse. This counter-creation still retained many elements of the distorted 1930s image, such as the highly aesthetic qualities, the fascination with colors and shapes, and the glamour. No longer, however, did the 1940s modern urban woman dwell in the city’s pleasure quarters (i.e. cafés, night clubs, casinos, dance halls, and hotels); instead she was situated within the walls of her own home. The message conveyed here was that even the most glamorous women needed to take a step back and confront the many concrete, real life issues emerging in everyday Shanghai. While reintroducing the modern urban woman to everyday material life, a distinctive body of urban sensibilities and aesthetic principles was created. Certain visual images promoted by the editorial board best represented these concepts. Women’s Voices fully demonstrates the powerful role images played in the creation of popular journals in 1940s Shanghai. From cover to cover, the journal was filled with women’s art, photographs, and car-

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toons. Great pains were taken to define not only the correct behavior of a ‘new’ modern urban woman, but also her proper appearance. Some of the most subversive moments in the journal resulted from the composite nature of these images. At first glance, it may have been difficult to detect images depicting the ‘new’ modern urban women since a variety of images were represented. On the surface, Women’s Voices looked quite different from other women-oriented popular journals of the period, in that the covers of most of its thirty-eight issues featured traditional style Chinese paintings produced by modern female painters. Images of graceful maidens appeared on nearly two-thirds of the covers, thus the editorial board seems to have promoted the ‘Chinese-ness’ of such beautiful traditional women [Plate 9]. How did these traditional images fit in with the journal’s ‘genuine’ focus of addressing women’s issues in 1940s Shanghai? Were they promoted as ideal models for women to emulate? Was featuring such motifs simply a matter of stylistic choice, or was it a discursive strategy? Beneath the surface of these cover images, an entire system was at work. A careful reading of the journal reveals a separate set of female images behind the cover beauties. It becomes apparent that the images and the lifestyles of modern female painters were what were actually being promoted. The women painters themselves were the focus, rather than their cover art. They seemed to have personified in ‘real life’ the concept of ‘new’ modern urban women promoted by the editorial board. On the table-of-contents page in Volume 1, Number 3, there appeared photographs of three female painters: Wu Qingxia, Zhou Lianxia, and Chen Xiaocui [Plate 11]. As mentioned earlier, most of the paintings featured on the covers of Women’s Voices were created by these three women. On the same page featuring their photographs, the definition of a “truly dynamic modern woman” was highlighted in the editorial foreword. The images and the text were so closely juxtaposed that the connection between the two was immediately implied. The editorial foreword promoted the female painters in the same way that Eileen Chang promoted Su Qing. These women painters thus joined the same rank as Chang and Su, becoming Scarlett O’Hara-like figures who were betrayed by their time but managed to strive for success against all odds. Like women writers, female painters formed a new generation of public intellectuals who managed to lead productive lives while still retaining the beauty of femininity. They were therefore promoted as models for Chinese women.

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The truly original, modern visual images were the photographs of the painters. The images of the painters were comprised of three basic elements: clothing and accessories, gestures, and positioning (space). Each woman wore a qipao န௅, or cheongsam, a one-piece Manchurian dress that was adapted for casual wear at the beginning of the century. In the 1930s, these dresses became close-fitting in order to emphasize and enhance the female body’s natural curves. The cut of the qipao went through so many transformations that by the 1940s, it had evolved into a sleeveless dress with very high side-slits. Eileen Chang discussed the evolution of the qipao in one of her essays entitled “Geng yi ji” Ӧн৩ (A Chronicle of Changing Clothes), which will be discussed in a later chapter devoted to Chang’s essay writing. According to Chang, women of the early 1920s were inspired by Western culture to pursue the cause of women’s equality. One symbolic gesture of this movement was to eliminate “everything that was feminine,” with the intention of “uprooting the origins of femaleness.” Therefore, Chang believed that the qipao originally imitated men’s clothing. Straight and boxy, it was a long gown reminiscent of “the Puritan style.” Chang described the transformation of the qipao over the first half of twentieth century as simply a history of “subtraction,” meaning that there was a gradual shortening of collars and sleeves, until they were altogether eliminated. The modified qipao resembled a “close-fitting long vest,” revealing much of the female body. Dressing in a more conservatively cut qipao gave the wearer a subtle beauty that was absent from Western-style dresses. At the same time, wearing a qipao cut in the latest style could also be erotic and alluring without sacrificing gracefulness. By this time, the rebellious May Fourth image had disappeared completely and the modern urban women of the 1940s were making a different fashion statement. 43 After fashion, the second element to examine in the photographs of the female painters is what gestures the camera captured as they carried out their usual work. Not only did the photographs feature the artists and their paintings, but they also froze a particular moment of the artistic process in time. With these photographs, painting was no longer a private practice carried out solely in women’s inner quarters, as it was in traditional China. Instead, it became a public gesture, one appearing in

43 See Wri tten on Water , 67-80.

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the print-media, where it was repeatedly viewed and interpreted by the journal’s readers. After the publication of the photographs, subsequent issues of the journal were a testament to the new image of the public intellectual. The textual portrayal of the modern urban woman was constructed with the support of the visual images, and it is in this portrayal that the third crucial element of the images can be found. A Fang Mei interview with the female painter Wu Qingxia was published in Volume 1, Number 4. It is clear that Wu’s attire and gestures were not the only elements constituting the verbal/visual portrait. It also features the final element needed to complete the portrayal of the new public intellectuals: a spatial construction. In this case, the construction is Wu’s private home, which served as both her working studio and her bedroom. This living and working space functioned as the center of activity, where Wu not only produced artistic images inspired by her surroundings, but also engaged in a continuous process of self-fashioning. Included with the interview was a photograph showing the painter seated at her desk in the middle of the room. A textual description of the room described what was already revealed in the photograph: Besides a bed, some square tables for the purpose of guest gatherings, and some other basic furniture, the showiest object in the room is the female painter’s huge painting desk. Rolls of xuan paper and stacks of fan coverings, as well as several painting manuals and paint brushes are scattered on the desk. Doesn’t this provide us with a representation of the painter’s life already?44

Fang Mei, like the other editors of Women’s Voices, attempted to convince readers of the realistic qualities of such a female image. Yet one cannot also help noticing the highly aesthetic, or sensuous and refined, qualities of these images that featured Wu Qingxia and her fellow artists. These female artists embodied a certain glamour, which the texts accompanying their images suggested resulted from ‘self-cultivation.’ Xiuyang ࡸኙ, or “Self-Cultivation,” was the title of a recurring column and a very important concept emphasized throughout Women’s Voices. In several issues, the group of articles under “Self-Cultivation” dealt with topics such as how young women could find boyfriends/the ideal fiancé; general social etiquette, and proper behavior before mar-

44 Women’s Voice 1. 4 (August 1942): 14.

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riage; how newlywed women should deal with their husbands and inlaws; what types of men made the best life partners for educated women; and the importance for women to acquire basic knowledge in both the social and natural sciences. For women who were housewives, the notion of ‘self-cultivation’ suggested a form of reaching out, of social engagement. Conversely, for women who were already working outside the home, ‘self-cultivation’ meant looking inward to rediscover the small details of life and to balance their personal lives. ‘Balance’ was a relative harmony between one’s career and domestic responsibilities, between love and social obligations, and between spending money on beauty products and clothing and being frugal. For female readers, ‘self-cultivation’ was the only way to become a truly ‘modern woman.’ As suggested by the journal, ‘self-cultivation’ was a process of selfrefinement best carried out by practicing art. Art provided modern women with an opportunity to be public and private at the same time. As they sought public recognition, they were also expressing themselves personally. In the featured images, the artists appeared to successfully combine exquisite personal taste with artistic productivity, thus creating an appealing public image and a refined domestic life. Here we perceive a notion of femininity as both domestic/emotional and as publicly/ physically active. Gender polarities do not apply to these images, which were a combination of all the basic elements needed for constructing the image of a modern urban woman. These female images were truly the crystallization of all the ideas that the Women’s Voices editorial board sought to convey. An element of fantasy is also embedded in these highly aestheticized images. The journal’s demonstrated interest in the private lives of famous women was, in fact, an interest in their personal tastes and preferences: the arrangement of their homes; their outfits, hairstyles, cosmetics; as well as their inscribed gestures. The family lives of the painters were not mentioned anywhere in the journal. Motherhood, home habits, and female domestic duties were completely omitted from the representation of their lives. There was a sense of fictiveness in the journal’s description of the women, though correspondences to real life were frequently suggested. Readers cannot help but notice the imaginary/celestial qualities of these female images. In fact, the transgressive implications of the images lie precisely in their fictiveness, in their capacity to open up an imaginary landscape. Imaginary literary landscapes demand a highly interactive reading process, and herein lies the possibility for turning reading strategies into

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subversive tactics in the battlefield of wartime politics. With Women’s Voices, readers had to contextualize the components of images into coherent entities and subsequently had to inscribe themselves into the settings. The images allowed readers to imagine themselves beyond the boundaries of their everyday routines. Women’s Voices presented images designed for and about women. By presenting flawless images of successful women, the journal intended to resolve the contradictions that real women encountered in their own lives. Such images opened up a fantasy landscape where each reader could envision her own personal accomplishments. In this sense, it can be argued that the images of modern female painters were as displaced as the cover art depicting traditional Chinese beauties. As a result of the reading process, everyday Shanghai women projected their own lives onto the images of the artists. Fantasy and reality merged within this imaginary landscape created by the journal’s attempt to visualize new public intellectuals. In its entirety, Women’s Voices provided the reader with the material conditions and textual testimony, as well as the visual manifestation of the women’s print culture that took shape in 1940s occupied Shanghai.

CHAPTER FOUR

WRITTEN ON WATER: EILEEN CHANG AND THE MODERN ESSAY Few literary figures of this century have attracted as much attention or created as much of an aura in the Chinese-speaking world as Eileen Chang. During the spring of 1943, Chang emerged as a new literary talent, with the publication of her first short story “Aloewood Ashes: The First Incense Burning” in the popular Butterflies journal The Violet Monthly . Chang was among the first of a stream of young women authors who were discovered by Zhou Shoujuan, the Editor-in-Chief of The Violet Monthly .1 But unlike other young women authors who continued their writing careers under the umbrella of Butterflies journals, Chang soon went beyond the market of popular fiction and became a principal architect of the cultural life in occupied Shanghai. In the war-torn city of Shanghai, Chang, who was in her early twenties, was to complete the most substantial portion of her journey as a professional writer in a mere two years. This period saw the publication and enthusiastic reception of a collection of short stories entitled Romances and a collection of essays entitled Written on Water . These two works alone secured Chang’s reputation as the most prominent cultural personality of the era. In 1977, more than three decades after her initial rise to fame, Chang published a collection of essays on the most renowned vernacular narrative of pre-modern China— Honglou meng ߹ᆧ࿗ or Dream of the Red Chamber, otherwise known as Shitou ji ΔᏃ৩ or Story of the Stone , by Cao Xueqin ૹఆ‫( ڪ‬1715-1763). 2 By then, Chang’s works had been banned on the mainland for nearly two decades, but she was

1 See the second and third issues of The Violet Monthly published in 1943. Refer to Chapter Two for a discussion of how Mandarin Ducks and Butter flies journals played an important role in promoting young women authors in the early 1940s. 2 For an authoritative English translation of this fictional masterpiece, see The

Story of the Stone, translated by David Hawkes and John Minford (New York: Penguin Books, 1974).

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revered as a canonical figure in modern Chinese literature elsewhere and was a semi-cult personality in the popular culture of Taiwan and Hong Kong. Taiwan’s prominent Crown Publishers readily printed her new book, as they similarly published her sparse writings in later decades. Chang’s choice of her book title—Honglou mengyan ߹ᆧ࿗ᝤ or Nightmare in the Red Chamber—calls for much critical scrutiny. In the preface, the author explains that it is meant to suggest “a kind of crazed obsession” with the novel. 3 These critical essays were written mostly in the 1960s and 1970s during Chang’s solitary American years, far removed in time and space from her heyday in occupied Shanghai. The focus of Chang’s essays on authorship and thematic meditations of Dream of the Red Chamber might not, at first glance, suggest any connection to her earlier literary pursuits; but it is in Chang’s choice of title that one can better contextualize the significance of this later work. The word ‘nightmare’ suggests a kind of intimacy formed between the writer/critic and the literary work in question. The title then depicts a particular state of creativity: during the writing/critiquing process wherein the writer/critic is involved in a constant dialogue with previous textual traditions while at the same time anticipating and suggesting how her writing should and would be received by future readers. In choosing this title, Eileen Chang employed a language of self-reflexivity that is characteristic of personal literary innovations throughout her entire writing career. In the same preface, Eileen Chang recalls that the meaning of liuyan ‫ޟ‬Ե, the Chinese title of her essay collection published in 1945, derives from the English saying ‘written on water.’ For many of her readers who were already familiar with her essays in Written on Water , this revelation came more than three decades later. “I often wonder whether it had made any sense at all to my readers,” Chang states, “but I never asked anyone.” She then explains the implications of the metaphor: she does not expect her writing to endure—instead, her work should be like words written on water, or ‘flowing words,’ as liuyan indicates more literally in Chinese, lingering momentarily and eventually elapsing. She also hopes that her writing will be endowed with the spirit of ‘rumors’ or ‘gossip’—a second denotation of the word liuyan —flowing freely and swiftly in order to reach the widest possible audience.4 3 See Chang, Nightmare in the Red Chamber (Taipei: Huangguan, 1977), 1. 4 Ibid., 1- 2.

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Readers versed in classical Chinese literature might speculate that the word liuyan originates from the Song Dynasty poet, essayist, and critic Su Shi’s ᙨཝ (1037-1101) frequently quoted definition of prose writing: “[Prose] mostly resembles traveling clouds and flowing water ( xingyun liushui мෙ‫…)̐ޟ‬.”5 Other readers might make an immediate connection between Chang’s title and the broken lyre engraved on the headstone of the English Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821): “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”6 One can only speculate as to the specific source of Chang’s title phrase, but the words do suggest that the brevity and immediacy characteristic of the structure of the modern essay may be read as metaphors for the fragility and futility of human life. This connection is further strengthened if we take into account the extraordinary background against which Chang defined the significance of her essay writing. As the first edition of Written on Water went to press in 1945, China was entering into its final year of a long and devastating war with Japan. Those residing in the occupied city of Shanghai were besieged from all sides and saw no end in sight. Death, hunger, and massive destruction had become everyday occurrences. In this context, Chang’s naming of her essays suggests a state of ambivalence. It is as though she was caught between a sense of despair over future destruction and a desire to emerge from the currents of history and leave a semi-permanent imprint before the culture that she was helping to shape was washed away. Chang’s use of self-reflexive language in naming her book provides a window through which the curious reader can peer into the intimate process of her creative work, so much so that the creative mentality of the author herself becomes perhaps the primary text to be deciphered in 5 See Su Shi, “Da Xie Minshi shu” ള ᒧ ͺ ࣖ ए (Letter in Reply to Xie Minshi ) in Guo Shaoyu, ed., Zhongguo lidai wenlun xuan ˀ ੢ ገ ̩ ́ ቈ ᎚ (Selected Literary Criticisms of China of Past Dynasties, vol. 2) (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1979), 307. 6 My thanks to Wolfgang Kubin who first brought my attention to this refer ence. For an image of the famous headstone in the Protestant Cemetery of Rome, see Plate 2 in Andrew Motion, Keats (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997). The design was said to have been dictated by Keats’s own instruction s prior to his premature death at age twenty-five. Motion writes: “Being written ‘in’ rather than ‘on’ water, his ‘name’ seemed doomed to vanish immediately, leaving nothing which might be praised. On the other hand, it made itself permanent. His poetry had come to him ‘as naturally as leaves to a tree’; now it was part of nature—part of the current hi story” (565).

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these essays. The invention of the title Written on Water is characteristic of Chang’s long-term effort to negotiate the boundaries between different genres of writing. In this case, it is the distinction between literary criticism and the personal essay that is being questioned. Here, the mechanism behind naming her writing is more than just a clever pun. The watery title not only suggests a new style of essay writing, but it also indicates a corresponding way to highlight the generic identity of this reinvented literary form. During the writing process, the author of the essay creates a structure of both containment and openness. There is containment in the sense that the prose language captures the instantaneous thoughts and feelings of a particular moment and there is openness in that it lacks definite meaning or substance. During the reading process, the immediacy and the transience of the messages conveyed in Chang’s essays are the first elements to be comprehended. While the style of writing is described as flowing like water and the essay genre is compared to a fluid form of ‘gossip,’ or a series of leisurely chats, Chang’s naming of her own writing offers more than just a commentary on the practice of literary writing. More importantly, the renaming of the essay genre should be understood as one woman writer’s commentary on the state of cultural production during a time in modern Chinese history characterized by enormous turmoil and disruption. In other words, the naming itself suggests an acute sense of temporal specificity in Chang’s vision and helps explain why Chang was compelled to begin writing essays at this particular moment in history. The essay genre was the most powerful literary form adopted by Eileen Chang in her efforts to constantly redefine the boundaries between life and work, the domestic and the historic, and to meticulously weave these spaces of private life together within the fabric of literary writing. WRITING WOMEN , WRITING ESSAYS

Over the past five decades, Chang’s fiction writing has been subjected to abundant critical scrutiny. Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, scholars such as C. T. Hsia ࢬӆଡ and Shui Jing ̐ಥ set out to reestablish the significance of Eileen Chang’s writing and to promote her as one of the finest and most original stylists of twentieth-century Chinese literature. Published as early as 1961, C. T. Hsia’s chapter on Chang in his History of Modern Chinese Fiction already claimed that she was more important than several ‘giants’ of mainstream literary tradition such as

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Lu Xun and Mao Dun. Hsia was attempting to rewrite the history of modern Chinese literature, in a way that would run contrary to literary historiography produced on the mainland. This scholarly interest in Chang went hand-in-hand with her resurging popularity in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Chinese diasporic communities around the globe. Shui Jing’s 1969 book entitled Pao zhuan ji ،ጷ৩ (Cast a Brick to Attract the Jade), his subsequent 1973 study called Zhang Ailing de xiaoshuo yishu ઠื߆‫ڄ‬ʮიᗟி (The Fictional Art of Eileen Chang), and C. T. Hsia’s 1970 collection of essays in Chinese titled Aiqing, Shehui, Xiaoshuo ืશç‫ڊ‬๡çʮი (Love, Society, and Fiction) were all published amidst a renewed infatuation with Eileen Chang in readers in the Chinese-speaking world outside of mainland China after 1949. The most illuminating studies of Chang’s fiction are the results of an attempt to reveal the complex intertextuality underlying her creative constructions and to focus on the interaction of various textual traditions within the space of modern fiction. A classic example of this is Edward Gunn’s study of Eileen Chang in his pioneering work on wartime literature entitled Unwelcome Muse: Chinese Literature in Shanghai and Peking (1937-45). Gunn defines the significance of Eileen Chang in the context of what he calls “a Chinese antiromanticism,” a literary trend that valued irony and restraint and undermines the slogans and idealisms prevalent in mainstream literary traditions shaped since the May Fourth era. He argues that Chang’s literary world “recalls traditional Chinese fiction and its love of the supernatural” while “resort[ing] to Freudian psychology and elements of traditional fiction to underscore her departure from the more well-traveled paths of modern literature.” 7 Many later scholars have taken up Gunn’s initial suggestion of psychological depth and an intertextual labyrinth within her fictional world and produced a number of interesting studies. One fine example is David Wang’s analysis of what he calls “modern ghost narratives” by Chang and a group of women writers from Taiwan in the 1970s and 1980s.8 7 See Edward Gunn, “Antiromanticism” in Unwelcome Muse: Chinese Literature in Shanghai and Peking (1937-45) (New York: Columbia University Pr ess, 1980), 193264. 8 See Wang Dewei ̙ ᅭ ‫( ܩ‬David Wang), “Nü zuojia de xiandai guihua: cong

Zhang Ailing dao Su Weizhen” ʩ ѕ ࣁ ‫ ̩ ୏ ڄ‬ਥ ༼ í ન ઠ ื ߆ ռ ᙨ ਮ ࠶ (Modern Ghost Narratives by Women Writers: from Eileen Chang to Su Weizhen) in

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Chang’s essays, however, remain uncharted terrain in scholarly discourse. Since the most popular of these were written during the same period as Chang’s fiction writing, and due to the fact that some of her essays seemed to provide the concrete historical and biographical background for her fiction writing, these essay have so far only been read as commentaries to the fiction, particularly to the short stories collected in the acclaimed Romances . Wu Fuhui, a leading literary historian in mainland China, argues, along with many others, that Eileen Chang’s essays are only interesting when read together with her short stories. Wu uses the essay entitled “Jinyu lu” ᔙኜᎨ (From the Ashes) as an example, arguing that the text should be read to provide the necessary historical context for Chang’s highly acclaimed novella Romance from the Ruins .9 Wu’s position is representative of the traditional approach to Chang’s essays. While such an approach may lead to a coherent discussion of Chang’s literary writing as a whole, it overlooks the specificities of the essay genre within the Chinese context and downplays the close connection between Chang’s essays and the wartime popular culture that she and other women writers helped build. For example, “From the Ashes” and Romance from the Ruins make two strikingly different attempts in piecing together a wartime narrative. The former, an essay, presents a social gallery of figures—a group of female college students, from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, whose complexity of personality is brought out by the war. The latter, a novella, as discussed in the introduction, focuses more on the collapse and the reconstruction of the Chinese beauty legend. Here the generic distinctions between fiction and the essay are essential to an understanding of the meanings of these two literary texts. “From the Ashes” and other essays by Chang from the same period effectively highlight the stormy backdrop against which she and others used writing and publishing as a means of survival, in the pursuit of a better life, and as a crucial tool of self-representation. In other words, Chang’s essays, perhaps more than her works of fiction, effectively illuminate her unique historical imagination.

Zhongsheng xuan-hua: sanshi yu bashi niandai de Zhongguo xiao shuo ୥ ᑵ న ᅃ í ʒ ʏ Ⴉ ʉ ʏ ϶ ̩ ‫ ڄ‬ˀ ੢ ʮ ი (Heteroglossia: Chinese Fic tion of the 1930s and 1980s) (Taipei: Yuan liu chuban gongsi, 1988), 223-38. 9 See Wu’s preface in A Complete Collection of Essays by Eileen Chang , 1.

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To read Chang’s essays mainly as commentaries to her fiction would also obscure the fact that readers in 1940s Shanghai related to her essays in a rather personal manner, and were captivated by them as they were by her fiction. Yet, unlike her fiction, Chang’s essays provided her audience with an insight into her private life. Her ever-insatiable readers devoured her words when many of these essays were first published in various popular journals. Some essays revealed a tormented childhood and a multifaceted adult life in a way that Chang’s fiction could not possibly convey. Weaving a complex inner life together with a mounting public persona, her essays stood as the building blocks of Eileen Chang the legend. Chang’s experiments with the modern essay also serve to position her at a critical point of literary transformation in modern China. While women writers had actively participated in the writing of both fiction and poetry since the early decades of the century, the essay genre, particularly the genre of xiaopin wen or the informal essay—a remaining landmark of the time-honored literati culture of China of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—had been championed by male authors. In the context of twentieth-century China, the term ‘essay’ has been defined differently in various sub-contexts. This is indicative of the fluidity of its discourse, and thereby demonstrates how easily this form of literature can be politicized. The aforementioned modern informal essay exemplified by Zhou Zuoren ֟ѕʆ (1885-1967) and Lin Yutang ‫ظ‬გ ੫ (1895-1976), is characterized by a light and relaxing tone, simple and elegant diction, political disengagement, wit, a leisurely mood, and a highly aestheticized and personal vision of dream and reality—the crystallization of the so-called late Ming sensibilities.10 The ‘miscellaneous essay’ ( zawen ᕺ́) is personified by Lu Xun and his entourage of young followers, including a group of leftist writers residing in Shanghai during the Orphan Island Era. The style emphasizes intellectual sharpness and rhetorical eloquence, advocates active engagement with reality, and maintains the belief that literary writing should be employed as a powerful tool for social criticism and political intervention. The ‘refined essay’ ( meiwen ࠀ́), a term that is sometimes interchangeable with the modern ‘minor writings,’ was practiced by Zhou 10 Wai-yee Li, “The Late Ming Moment” in Enchantment and Disenc hant ment:

Love and Illusion in Chinese Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 47-88.

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Zuoren, Zhu Ziqing Ќбଡ (1898-1948) and many writers from both the Literary Studies Circle ( Wenxue yanjiu hui ́ዕߧԥ๡) and the Creation Society ( Chuangzao she ట௪‫)ڊ‬, two major literary societies in the early 1920s. It promoted linguistic experimentation, with the goal of creating a language of refinement and elegance, and images that embody highly aesthetic and sensual qualities. In conventional literary histories, particularly the ones produced in mainland China, the zawen (miscellaneous essay) tradition is often highlighted as a mainstream style because it defines literature as a vehicle for social and political intervention. These standard literary histories do acknowledge the lyrical qualities of xiaopin wen and meiwen, but fail to situate the practice of these alternative essay-writing styles in their cultural and intellectual contexts. Chang’s experiments with the modern essay also serve to position her at a critical point of transformation in the popular culture of urban Shanghai. To be sure, Eileen Chang was not the first among the Shanghai school of writers to engage in the innovations of modern literary forms. Shanghai writers in general are characterized by their bold innovations in various genres. Wu Fuhui, in his rich study of the “Shanghai School Fiction” ( Haipai xiaoshuo ऺާʮი), presents a list of fictional sub-genres that were invented by Shanghai writers of the 1920s and 1930s. These sub-genres had one thing in common: they were all characterized by their hybridity and close connection to the popular culture of urban Shanghai. Wu Fuhui’s literary analysis demonstrates that haipai writers often repeatedly told a single story in different forms of fiction. The emphasis seemed to be placed on endless formalistic innovations, and not on the story itself. For instance, news reports from newspapers and journals were adapted into “fiction of current events” ( shishi xiaoshuo इՖʮი) or “fiction for evening newspapers” ( wanbao xiaoshuo ૴ేʮი). The film industry played an increasingly important role in shaping the everyday imagination of men and women in Shanghai—as exemplified by the metamorphosis of Scarlett O’Hara depicted in this book’s prologue—and popular films of the time were often adapted into “film stories” ( dianying xiaoshuo ྐᅬʮი). Similarly, plays were often transformed into “drama stories” ( xiju xiaoshuo ᐀ᄶʮი). Sometimes, historical documents and legendary tales were transformed into “fiction of ancient events” ( gushi xiaoshuo ͅՖʮი) or “folklore fiction” ( minjian xiaoshuo ͺ෇ʮი). With regards to Western literature, the degree of adaptability arrived at the point where it was often appropriated in a kind of narrative that

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was somewhere between a translation and an original creation—the socalled “transmitted fiction” ( yida xiaoshuo ᙲཥʮი). Wu continues to argue that the emergence of these new literary subgenres was related to the growing interaction between literature and the new technologies of urban culture. Fiction narratives during the 1930s and 1940s incorporated more and more cinematic techniques and modern photographic devices. Additionally, in popular journals of the 1940s, radio dramas were often published together with other works of fiction, combining the pleasures of reading and listening into a single cultural space. 11 Chinese writers’ liberal treatment of various translated genres and their readiness to transmit an imported text can be traced back to Lin Shu’s ‫ظ‬᷏ massive translation project in the late nineteenth-early twentieth century. Though he did not know any foreign languages, Lin was well versed in classical Chinese. He relied on a translator/mediator to recount the stories in works of fiction from the West and then went on to improvise the stories in a way that he found appropriate for his Chinese readership.12 By the 1940s in Japanese occupied Shanghai, there were at least half a dozen literary journals available that proclaimed to specialize in essays. Foremost among them was Gujin banyuekan ͅˑ̵̽̇ (Past and Present Biweekly). Edited by Zhou Li’an ֟ኲઞ (1916-2003), it was backed by Zhu Pu Ќዹ (1902-?) and Zhou Fohai ֟шऺ (1897-1948), both key players in the collaborationist regime. 13 It remained in publication from March 1942 to October 1944 and published a total of fifty11 See Wu Fuhui, The Shanghai School Fiction in the Currents of Urban Culture , 138-9. 12 For a study of Lin Shu’s translation project and its cultural significance, see Pat-

rick Hanan, “A Study in Acculturation: The First Novels Translated into Ch inese,” Chinese Literature, Essays, Articles, and Reviews 23 (2002): 55-80. 13 Zhou Fohai was a key member in the collaborationist regime and became the

mayor of Shanghai in 1944. Zhou Li’an was a prominent essayist in the Orphan Island Era when he was considered to be a steadfast follower of Lu Xun’s style of essay writing, along with Ke Ling, Tang Tao ࢑ ᦟ (1913-1992), and Kong Lingjing ˱ ͏ ࿏ (1904-1972). Many people were puzzled by the fact that a writer so closely associated with the leftist camp would readily take up the ed itorship of a journal sponsored by the collaborationist regime. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Zhou did not show much remorse about his capitulation despite the fact that he paid a dear price for it in postwar China, including a twenty-year incarcer ation at a labor camp in the 1960s and 1970s. It was said that Zhou had once ex plained to a friend of his: “Simply put, I wanted to live and was afraid of death.”

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seven issues. Leading essayists of the time, including Zhou Li’an, Jin Xingyao ‫׷ہ‬ూ (writing under the pseudonym of Wen Zaidao ́ཛྷལ) (b. 1916) and Su Qing, were key contributors to the journal. Fengyu tan yuekan ࡘ‫ۋ‬ሾ̵̇, or Chatter on Wind and Rain Monthly , edited by Su Qing’s friend Liu Yusheng ‫ۋގ‬Ά (b. 1917), another leading essayist of the time, was also successful in championing prose writing. In publication from April 1943 to August 1945, this journal published a total of twenty-one issues. The same group of authors who wrote for Past and Present Biweekly also supported Chatter on Wind and Rain Monthly . In 1943, Su Qing published her own prose journal called Heaven and Earth Monthly . Edited by Feng Heyi ෤֜ᄭ (Su Qing’s original name), the journal was inaugurated in October and managed to publish a total of twenty-one issues until it folded in June 1945. In the editorial foreword of the inaugural issue, Su Qing encourages all women to participate in essay writing. 14 The same issue featured an essay by Yang Shuhui ๫ଥᅰ, the wife of Zhou Fohai. Entitled “Wo yu Fohai” ӍႩшऺ (Me and Fohai), the essay sings the praises of domestic harmony. Even Shanghai’s first lady wrote, and did so for a journal edited by a woman; other Shanghai women were then encouraged to follow suit. But Su Qing’s most important supporter was Eileen Chang, whose essays were featured in almost every single issue of the journal. The pages of Heaven and Earth provided a stage for a further enactment of the Chang-Su double act described in Chapter Two. Most of the women writers in Shanghai during this period experimented with essay writing. In fact, women produced a larger quantity of essays than any other literary genre. In addition to Eileen Chang, many women writers of the period, including Su Qing, Guan Lu, Pan Liudai, and Shi Jimei, also discovered the generic fluidity embedded in the essay form. Compared to their experiments with other literary genres—such as fiction, drama, and poetry—it was in women’s essay writing of this period that discourses on female gender and sexuality, issues of the domestic sphere, and the structures of social institutions such as marriage were most vigorously challenged and thoroughly reformulated. The essay genre was the most powerful literary form adopted by women writers such as Eileen Chang in their efforts to redefine the boundaries

14 See “Fakan ci” ച ̵ අ (Preface to the Inaugural Issue), Heaven and Earth Monthly 1 (October 1943): 2.

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between life and work, and to meticulously interweave the realms of private life and literary writing. While innovations in fiction had been hotly contested terrain among the haipai writers since the 1920s, the radical transformation of the essay genre did not take place until women writers of the 1940s entered the field. Compared to other women writers of her time, Eileen Chang produced the most extraordinary works of experimental essay writing. It is in Chang’s creations that a close link can be detected between essay writing and other literary and cultural genres, such as autobiographical fiction and the roundtable talk. Through Chang’s artistry, the modern essay became a structure of fluidity. The following sections will examine how Chang’s choice of the essay form was central to her aesthetic vision. Chang’s self-positioning in the realm of urban culture in 1940s Shanghai was expressed through her appropriation of this genre. The discussion will feature an analysis of Chang’s essay writing of the period to demonstrate how the genre was made into an important discursive site where Chang overtly challenged literary conventions of the day, searched for alternatives in both literary writing and practices of everyday life, promoted herself as an important cultural figure, and, most importantly, materialized the experience of war and turbulence into words and images. “BALCONY AT DUSK” OR THE AESTHETICS OF LIMINALITY

How, then, did Eileen Chang write the experience of war and turbulence into the new form of the modern essay? While the sense of massive impending destruction is omnipresent in her essay writing of the 1940s, the representation of the specific historical situation is not delivered through any direct social and political reference to the immediate present. Instead, the presence of history is often concealed in the guise of an aesthetic vision in the form of meditative inward contemplation, an orchestra of city sounds, and an imagined border of the urban civilization endangered: Alone I sit next to a candle, thinking about the past and the present. What I have been busy doing for the last two years will probably be shattered soon … I should have a sense of it. I was alone on the dusky balcony after Su Qing left. Suddenly I noticed a tall building in the distance, on whose edge hung a great swatch of

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rouge-like redness. At first I thought it was the reflection of the setting sun on the windows, but on a second glance, I saw a full moon, rising crimson above the city. I murmured to myself, “So this is what they mean by turbulent times.” In the evening mist, the borders of Shanghai were gently rising and falling in the distance, resembling layered mountain peaks, although there are no mountains surrounding our city. I pondered the fate of many people, including myself. I began to have a melancholy sense of what we call destiny. Such intimations normally connote self-involvement and self-pity, but I now think that they might suggest something altogether more broad. When the peace and security of the future finally do arrive, they will no longer belong to us; at the present moment each of us can only strive to comfort ourselves ….15

This impressionistic silhouette of the city is none other than the image of modern history itself. Here, history is visualized, flattened, and inevitably spatialized. The image of the city and the force of history intermingle into one performative moment, captured by the first-person narrator as though she has taken a snapshot. Here, the narrator is a woman writer, sitting on the balcony of her home, looking out into the distance, watching the border of the city rise and fall, observing the currents of history come and go, as if the entire setting were merely an act in a long and winding chuanqi (romance) play. Chang’s “balcony at dusk” ෦‫ڄة‬෍Ⴈ ( huanghun de yangtai) appears again two years later in postwar Shanghai. In a preface to her 1947 screenplay Taitai wansui ˯˯໗๶ (Long Live the Missus), Chang writes: As for the figures that appear in “Long Live the Missus,” what they have experienced are no more than some tears and laughter that will surely be forgotten by themselves and others. This unnamable burden of life, shared by many, should have brought a sense of intimacy among them, shouldn’t it? Some say that “death makes it all equal,” but why do we have to wait till death? Shouldn’t life itself make everyone equal? Throughout one’s life, the events that can shake one to the core are few. Why do we have to overemphasize the significance of death? Is it because death has always been taken as a dramatic event whereas life is normally seen as filled with trivial matters and common places? Thinking along these lines, all of sudden I seem to have attained a major understanding. My joy of discovery is mixed with sadness and disillu15 See “The Way I Look at Su Qing” in A Complete Collection of Essays by Eileen Chang , 256-73.

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sionment. I know that once I have left my balcony at dusk I will never be able to explain these feelings. The green bamboo blinds that spread out from the balcony, after one summer of sunning, have already turned yellow like autumn grass. I am combing my hair on the balcony. My hair falls down like autumn leaves, one lot after another, softly brushing my arm on its way down, like evening rain. From places near and far, automobiles rush by, making fearful sounds. The gradually darkened sky resembles a massive lake of boundless smoke and clouds. The opposite building produces some faintly white cooking smoke from one of its windows on the lower level. The smoke hesitantly rises, as if it cannot be sure of where the sky is. Dew has already appeared on the balcony, which dampens my hair. No matter how I comb it, it will no longer be smooth. With bare feet, and feeling the chill of the evening breeze, I have finally decided to go inside.16

Eileen Chang of 1947 still persisted in writing about trivial figures and their daily routines. The film Long Live the Missus, as she herself puts it, is “about a wife of an ordinary person” and “there are several of them in each house of any Shanghai alleyway.” 17 It seems that a greater vision of everyday life and historical transformations can only be shaped at a particular time and in a particular location. Here the setting of the “balcony at dusk” involves both a transitional moment between day and night (dusk) and a transitional space between one’s own home and the outside world (balcony). Life cannot be made sense of without this specific vantage point. Thus, “Balcony at dusk” can be read as Chang’s metaphor for writing and publishing during wartime occupation. Here Chang seems to be implying that insights into war and peace can only be achieved during this fleeting moment of ambivalence. Without it, the experience of writing will only be like combing through dampened hair, no longer smooth. The evening chill forces the “I,” the narrator, to retreat inside. Dusk is brief and the balcony is not a place to linger for long. In 1947, though continuing her efforts to document the petty bourgeois life in Shanghai alleyways, Chang also suggests that her unique vision of the city and history in general can no longer be duplicated.

16 See Chang, “Taitai wansui tiji” ˯ ˯ ໗ ๶ ᖅ ৩ (Preface to Long Live the

Missus ), Dagon gbao, December 3, 1947. 17 Ibid.

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From her “balcony at dusk,” Chang constructs a notion of history as a narrative that rejects any deep structure or profound meaning. Characterized by chaos and reversal, history is no more than a shadowy presence in one’s consciousness: In this era, the old things are falling apart, while the new ones are still in formation. Before the high tide of our time arrives, all certainty is but an illusion. We feel that everything in our everyday life is out of order to a terrifying degree. An individual belongs to a certain historical era, but our present era is sinking like a shadow; therefore we feel we have been deserted. In order to prove our own existence, we want to grasp onto something that is real, something fundamental. We then seek help from our ancient memory, the memory of human beings who have lived through various times in history. Looking back helps us regain more clarity and closeness than we might gazing far into the future. We then have a strange feeling about the reality that surrounds us. We begin to suspect that this is an absurd and antiquated world, gloomy and bright at the same time. Between memory and reality, there often arise unbearable discrepancies, resulting in a perplexing but subtle agitation, an intensified but indefinable struggle.18

Here, history is no longer presented as a linear progressive course; instead, it is broken into numerous fragments that can be reorganized and filled with fresh meanings. The passage quoted above demonstrates Eileen Chang’s fascination with various liminal sites in time and space. Throughout her writing, Chang demonstrates her fascination with numerous liminal sites, such as the dusk, the balcony, the illusory realm between memory and reality, the brief moment between past and present, and the intersection between life and work, fiction and poetry, stage movements and everyday events. The best of Chang’s writing often captures these transitional moments, or sites, and the subjectivity in question is often overwhelmed by a deep sense of uncertainty: An individual can afford to wait, but an era is transient. Things are being torn apart, and an even larger destruction is on its way. Some day our civilization, no matter how glorious, will become the past. I often use the word ‘desolation’ (huangliang ৉ ଘ ) because there is a premonition of impending danger underlying my thought.19

18 See “Ziji de wenzhang” б ʴ ‫ ́ ڄ‬ఈ (Writing of One’s Own) in Written on

Water , 19. 19 See “Preface to Romances, Second Edition,” in Written on Water , 203.

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I do not like heroics (zhuanglie Қ ् ). I like tragedy (beizhuang ౲ Қ ), and even better, desolation (huangliang). Heroism has strength, but no beauty, and thus seems to lack humanity. Tragedy, however, resembles the matching of bright red with deep green—an intense and unequivocal contrast. And yet, it is more exciting than truly revelatory. The reason desolation resonates far more profoundly is that it resembles the conjunction of scallion green with peach red, creating an equivocal contrast.20

Chang’s acute sense of her time is summed up in one word, huangliang, a term that does not have a precise equivalent in English. When life and death were at the center of human experience, and mainstream writers of the time saw only sharp contrasts in a world turned upside down, Chang insisted on writing about the gray area, a zone of equivocal contrast. The word huangliang implies both a sense of sadness and distance from sadness. Chang’s choice of the essay genre is consistent with her unique vision of history and her fascination with the aesthetics of liminality. One would be hard-pressed to find a more appropriate literary genre than the modern essay to capture the liminal qualities of that specific historical milieu. The essay is a genre positioned between the careful structuring of fiction and the free flow of poetry. The essence of essay writing lies exactly in its lack of essence, that is, in its eccentricity. The liminal qualities of the modern essay are further enhanced by other textual strategies Chang uses to challenge literary genres and conventions. For instance, her essay entitled “Shuangsheng” ᕻᑵ (Duet) takes the form of a mini roundtable talk, a prominent genre in popular culture of that period.21 At the beginning of the essay, like most of the roundtable talks recorded in popular journals of the time, the surroundings and the atmosphere are provided in painstaking detail. While 20 See “Writing of One’s Own,” in Written on Water , 18. The translation of these two passages is by Andrew F. Jones. It is forthcoming in Wri tten on Water: A Collection of Essays by Eileen Chang. 21 First published in Heaven and Earth Monthly 18 (March 1945); reprinted in A Complete Collect ion of Essays by Eileen Chang , 241-52. The title implies another clever pun. The phrase shuangsheng , meaning two or more characters with the same initial consonant, is often used together with dieyun , meaning two or more characters with the same vowel form ation. It is a linguistic terminology suggesting the basic rhyming principles in Chinese language, but can also im ply a sense of harmony.

See Chapter Two for a discussion of the roundtable talk as an important cul tural genre in 1940s Shanghai.

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indulging in coffee and pastries in a coffee shop, Eileen Chang, the narrator, and Mo Meng 】࿗ (named Yan Ying elsewhere), the narrator’s female companion, begin their rambling chat on disparate topics: “Having seated ourselves, we started chatting about a variety of things in great detail. When our topics became more weighty, she [Mo Meng] said: ‘You know what, this seems a lot like a roundtable discussion.’” Within the space of the essay, the two women talk about a wide variety of themes: the discourse on love in both China and the West, the construction of romance in different cultural contexts, gender relationships inside and outside marriage, fashions for women of different age groups, and the distinctiveness of the Japanese mentality. The fragmentary and all-inclusive qualities ( san ಞ) of modern prose style ( sanwen ಞ́) are fully elaborated by Eileen Chang. The format of a roundtable talk coincides with the need to push the limits of modern prose to the most eccentric, unrestrained, and far-ranging extremes. The structure of this essay also bears a resemblance to a one-act play. The beginning passages can be viewed as stage descriptions. The action takes place on a quiet afternoon when the two protagonists are engaged in a highly performative dialogue. Occasional dramatic moments arising throughout the conversation enhance its theatrical effect. The essay “The Way I Look at Su Qing,” referenced at the beginning of this book’s prologue, represents Chang’s further effort to test the generic boundaries of the modern essay. The author effortlessly switches back and forth between her characterization of Su Qing and a close-up of the narrative introspection. At one point in the essay, the face of the author peeks through the thin veil of the narrator and confesses that, in this essay devoted to Su Qing, she has actually dedicated much more space to self-portrayal. The essay is a fine example of how Chang often playfully shifts between the dual persona of an author and a narrator. Most of the time, the essay reads like an internal monologue: the narrative self is immersed in a continuous display of numerous intimate moments. The free-flowing sequence of random thoughts and the switching back and forth between different personae are fictional and theatrical devices used to further widen the representative capacities of the modern essay. While “The Way I See Su Qing” imports fictional devices into the ‘minor pieces’ form, an earlier essay entitled “Siyu” Ԣგ (Whispers)22 22 First p ublished in Heaven and Earth Monthly 10 (July 1944): 6-12; col lected in Written on Water , 150-65.

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demonstrates an even more radical experiment, that is, to turn the genre into a new form of autobiographical writing. The title of the essay hinges on a double meaning. While siyu can mean private discussions, it also mimics the lowered voice and fragmented syntax used when speaking of the most intimate moments of one’s private life. The narrative voice in the essay whispers, murmurs, and gossips. Nothing substantial is presented; instead, segments of life, tinted with the haziness of childhood memory, are organized by way of a reinvented prose form, like a stream of thought or a random layout of scenes. The technique used here closely resembles montage: fragments of the past are presented as flashbacks, and moments of free association further remind the reader of the blurred boundaries between memory and reality, past and present. The essay entitled “Tongyan wuji” ബԵ೷Ӆ (Children Will Say Anything) 23 presents another example of writing autobiographies within the space of the modern essay. Sometimes the way that moments of childhood memory are narrated resembles the use of close-ups in filmmaking. The following episode even makes a direct reference to cinema: I stood in front of the mirror and watched my trembling face, with tears falling down in streams. My face looked like a close-up in a movie. I told myself, grinding my teeth: “I want revenge. One day I will take my revenge.”

Each sub-section in this essay—“Money,” “Fashion,” “Food,” “Men Above,” and “Brother”—can be viewed as one cinematic long take. There is no direct connection between any of them. The entire essay is compiled from a series of long takes. Within the space of the modern essay, there appear to be many of these extended fictional or cinematic moments. Sometimes, descriptive details of clothing, or simply the pattern on a piece of fabric, can contribute to the shaping of a performative moment, the formation of a narrative structure. The following passage from the same essay is a good example: Japanese printed fabrics. Each bolt is a work of art. Each time I bring one home, before handing it over to a tailor, I repeatedly unroll it and bask in the image. A small Burmese temple is half shielded by the leaves of a palm tree; rain is falling incessantly through the reddish brown haze of the tropics. A pond in early summer, the water coated with a layer of green scum, above which float duckweed and fallen lilac petals, purple

23 First published in Heaven and Earth Monthly 7-8 (May 1944): 15-9; col lected in Written on Water , 1-16.

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and white. Seemingly a fitting scene for a song lyric set to the tune “Laments of the South of the Yang-tze”.…

Situated within the context of Chang’s other essays of the time, these irrelevant details become meaningful. Here we witness a process of aestheticization taken as far as possible, until the point that there appears to be no connection to the utilitarian discourses of modern prose. The sense of uselessness radically challenges the presumption that prose always serves some political or didactic function. However, Chang’s experiments also suggest other possibilities: reading some of these highly aesthetic moments in Chang’s essay writing, one might argue that it is within the liminal space provided by the modern essay and by means of cinematic devices that the fragmentation of conventional narrative language becomes inevitable. THE MAKING OF A NEW PROSE LANGUAGE

Few writers in twentieth-century China are as persistent as Eileen Chang was in constantly experimenting with new literary language. In her essay entitled “Ziji de wenzhang” бʴ‫́ڄ‬ఈ (Writing of One’s Own), Chang retrospectively remarks on her use of a new fictional language in her serialized novella Lianhuantao ௤ᐼࢭ (Chain of Rings): I adopted the language from traditional fiction on many occasions when writing the novella Linked Rings. In the story, Cantonese people and foreigners who lived fifty years ago speak like figures just out of the seventeenth-century fictional masterpiece Plum in a Golden Vase [Jing Ping Mei], … My original intention was: I already created a considerable distance in space by writing about a romanticized Hong Kong from the point of view of a Shanghainese; I also created a distance in time by writing about the Hong Kong of fifty years ago. Therefore I intentionally adopted an antiquated diction to represent such a double displacement ….24

To situate the story in both a remote time and a distancing space endows the writer with abundant freedom in her choice of language. By returning to traditional literature to search for imaginative inspiration and expressive resources, Eileen Chang defines, on the discursive level, the cultural as well as political connotations of the modern vernacular language. For a modern reader who has considerable knowledge of the 24 See Written on Water , 23-4.

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May Fourth literature, Chang’s fictional language points to a remote system of referentiality through her use of a diction and narrative tone characteristic of those used in classical Chinese novels such as Plum in a Golden Vase and Dream of the Red Chamber. This kind of fictional and temporal distance is also characteristic of Chang’s short stories written during the period. David Wang argues that the fictional world presented in the short stories in Romances points to a remote system of references for modern readers by interweaving many unreal elements such as the fantastic, the grotesque, the decadent, and the dark romanticist.25 What, then, are the characteristics of Chang’s linguistic experiments in her essay writing of the period? The titles of the essay collection Written on Water and the essay “Whispers” can be viewed as the author’s own commentaries on the language she has chosen for the transformed essay genre. While literary language is compared to voices whispering, murmuring, or gossiping, and words may eventually flow away like water downstream, the practice of writing is a process of both embracing and breaking away from words. The meanings of words presented no longer contribute to a system of enclosure. Chang’s naming of essays highlights the indeterminacy of literary language and directs the reader’s attention to the uncertainty embodied in both the structure of the essay and the language that it employs. In the opening passage of the essay “Tan nüren” ሾʩʆ (Talking about Women),26 Eileen Chang, in a relaxed, whimsical tone, cites a characterization of ‘women’ presented in a small pamphlet written by an English author whom she chose not to identify: Westerners refer to sinister and cruel women as ‘cats.’ I ran across a pamphlet recently, written in English, entitled Cats, which does nothing else except condemn women. It is not that what is said in it has never been expressed by other people. Lines of wisdom concerning women are scattered everywhere and it is just not easy to collect them all together.

25 See Wang, “Modern Ghost Narratives by Women Writers: from Eileen Chang

to Su Weizhen,” in Heteroglossia: Chinese Fic tion of 1930s and 1980s, 226. 26 First published in Heaven and Earth Monthly 6 (March 1944); collected in Written on Water , 82-95.

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But this pamphlet is really a compilation [of what has been said about women].27

Chang then invites her readers to accompany her as she skims through a group of translated quotes selected from that pamphlet, most of which are a condemnation of the erotic potential of women. Chang offers no explicit judgment throughout her essay, nor does she expressly challenge the assumptions contained in this pamphlet about the gendered character of each individual. After reading Chang’s essay, a reader might wonder to what extent the author behind the masquerade of the narrative has internalized such a male view. Additionally, to what extent is Chang’s translation faithful to the original text? The original author’s name remains absent in Chang’s essay, making it difficult to assess the extent to which the original male narrative voice has been twisted or distorted by Chang’s rendition. This male voice appears to be a composite in the selected quotes, while the narrative voice in the rest of the essay appears more mixed. Thus, one approach to reading Chang’s essay is to regard the quotation as an integral part of the whole essay, and to view it as Eileen Chang’s own linguistic construction, which already contains her subtle critique. Within these quotes, the message is complicated, and presented on several levels. Some of the quotes are reminiscent of an archetypal male voice: “The physical construction of women is so exquisite; therefore, their spiritual construction is incomplete. This is predictable. We just cannot be over-critical of them [women].” “If you do not seduce a woman, she would say that you are not a man; if you do, she would say that you are not a man of the upper-class.” “The only difference between a woman and a dog is: a dog is not as spoiled as a woman is; a dog does not wear jewelry; and—thank God!—a dog does not speak!”28

Chang mentions that the intended readers of the pamphlet, Cats, are married middle-class men and the original author admits that, “a man, after having just fought with his wife, would feel comforted if he reads this pamphlet before he goes to bed.” Functioning as a form of psychotherapy, the reading process is intended to pleasurably soothe away the 27 See Written on Water , 82. 28 Ibid., 82-3.

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grievances and unhappiness from one’s real life. Through the mediation of a narrative language, the imagined male reader takes up the implicit point of view built into the assumed male author’s account, manipulates and appropriates the construction of the female image, and displaces his sense of anger, repression, and alienation, or his frustrated desire for control and domination, onto such a constructed image. For a married man, unsuccessful threats toward his wife in real life can then be successfully prosecuted on a textual level. Such an erotic female image depicted in a seemingly unambiguous male text could generate a variety of culturally coded specific meanings and gendered differences. However, the tone of Chang’s language seems to invalidate the possibilities of applying an ideologically-charged critique of these messages. Her narrative tone is relaxed, whimsical, playful, humorous, and somewhat ironic. The message transmitted in these quotes is impure; it has been reworked, and already contains a look. This look is interwoven with a sense of irony. This is even more explicit in some of the other quotes from the pamphlet: “A man can flirt with a bar waitress in a squalid bar without losing his reputation; yet an upper-class woman is not even allowed to blow a kiss at a postman from afar. We can then draw an inference that men are different from women—no matter how low they [men] bend their backs, it is never difficult for them to stand up straight again.” “Generally speaking, women do not need the variety of stimulants in their lives as men do. Therefore, we should tolerate a man if he transgresses boundaries during his leisure time in order to enliven his weary body, [to expel] his worries, [and to accomplish] his unrealized aspirations.”29

These quotes should be understood primarily as Eileen Chang’s own rendition of the original pamphlet. Through their ironic tone, their message becomes twisted, distorted, highly dramatized, and thereby transformed into parody and ridicule. If Eileen Chang does seek to tease out this constructed male voice, such an attempt proceeds through the creation of a narrative distance, a sense of innuendo, a skillful rewording of the male voice, and not through any explicit charges or critiques. The reader is left to read between the lines herself, to speculate about the hints, and to sort out the mixed messages.

29 Ibid., 83.

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Despite the absence of an explicit criticism toward this unambiguous male voice, Eileen Chang’s presentation has revealed the fact that the male denunciation of the public effects of a female eroticism is itself manifested in an eroticized form. Such an eroticized form has been dramatized to an extreme by Chang in her skillful rewording. In turn, Eileen Chang’s appropriation of the male denunciation of female eroticism then becomes a fine example of ‘mimicry,’ a double affirmation of her alternative cultural critique whose voice and undertone cannot be simply defined by their femaleness. Consequently, it would be inappropriate to single out the femininity of Chang’s language, or to attempt to situate her within the women’s literary tradition of modern China, a tradition usually associated with the stridency and revolutionary spirit of the May Fourth era. Chang’s cultural marginality, her interest in irrelevant details and domesticity, and her sometimes mocking portrayals of patriarchs and patriarchal family life all tempt critics to label her work as ‘feminine’ in one way or another. However, her writing celebrates a mixed voice, a voice to which polarizing labels cannot be affixed. In Eileen Chang’s essay writing, it is finally the narration itself that becomes a site where conflicting cultural discourses meet and interact. The narrative voice does not embody or point to any authoritative discourses. It is neither the passive receiver of a system of accomplished social customs and values containing stereotypes of passive femininity, nor a spokeswoman for a progressive nationalist ideological agenda. While history is viewed as transitory and fragmented, the language used to account for this history no longer speaks of any given system of truth and beliefs; it is a language of paradox and enigma. Chang’s use of language serves to revive a remote tradition that is incompatible with the present historical situation and to restore a different set of voices that are inconsonant with the chorus of her time. Chang’s reinvention of a modern prose language challenges the coherence of a women’s literary writing tradition in modern China. The linguistic constructions in Chang’s essay writing playfully appropriate male fantasies, turning them into props in the creation of a new literary space. By turning structures contained in male fantasies into narrative devices and by using male voices to enhance the theatrical effect of essay writing, Eileen Chang has confidently offered a critique of gendered constructions in both the larger social context and the sphere of literary writing.

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Chang’s language of enigma and paradox is further enriched by her frequent use of popular idioms. While many educated Chinese use idioms in daily conversation, and idioms are indeed part of colloquial Chinese, Chang’s treatment of idioms could not be more different from the typical usage of such language in everyday life. Chang consistently plays with the twists and the accustomed meanings of familiar expressions. The title of the first essay in the collection, translated as “Children Will Say Anything,” is a case in point. It demonstrates how Chang is a masterful stylist who never hesitates to challenge the expectations and reading habits of her audience. Once again, the title generates a double meaning. A literal rendition of the title would yield “children’s speech has no prohibitions,” an idiom that often appears on red paper strips used as decorations during the Chinese New Year festivities. Here, Chang transforms the familiar idiom into another cunning comment on her autobiographical writing, one specifically tailored for the accounts of her often tormented childhood. the richly textured language employed in Written on Water unfailingly conveys a sense of uneasiness and defamiliarization in her accounts of ordinary life. THE MODERN ESSAY AND WARTIME POPULAR CULTURE

Eileen Chang’s essays are, of course, more than an experiment with a richly textured literary language. Her flowing words also made concrete a life that was devoid of structure. In the pages of Written on Water , Chang uses the form of the modern essay to construct an intelligible universe where imagination and fantasy could anchor. This book of essays tackles a wide ranges of issues and concerns, from Peking (Beijing) Opera to women’s fashion, from street-level urban culture to relatively more aloof matters in literary history and aesthetics, from histories of dance to a gallery tour of European modernist paintings, and from nostalgic rambling through classical Chinese literature to a fond journey through Shanghai’s vibrant cinematic cultures. Chang’s breadth of knowledge and her eagerness to popularize this knowledge are evident throughout Written on Water . Foremost in the body of knowledge highlighted in Written on Water is Chang’s demonstrated fascination with and close study of the everyday. It is in her detailed descriptions of everyday experience—devoted as they are to exploring the cultural meanings of the material world—that her reader observes not only a dynamic inner life but also a new social

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identity in formation. Chang’s conceptualization of the quotidian focuses around two primary themes. One is the space of a modern apartment as a liminal site in the city, and the other is the discourse of fashion as a vital form of material consciousness. Two questions remain: How did Eileen Chang use her writing to intervene in the daily life of wartime Shanghai? Further, what was the relation between literary writing and the popular culture of its time? In the preface to her 1988 collection of essays entitled Xuji ᚮූ (Sequel), Eileen Chang confesses that she has been a “loyal believer” in Greta Garbo’s life philosophy: For several decades, relying on make-up and acting skills, she [Garbo] lived the life of a recluse, seldom seen through by other people. Her lifetime belief was that “I want to live by myself.” … Why is it that writers also have a hard time preserving the privacy of their lives?30

These sentiments could not have been expressed in the 1940s. The solitude of the four decades after Chang arrived in the United States in the fall of 1955 forms a sharp contrast to the glorious moments during the first half of the 1940s, particularly the years of 1944-5, when she and Su Qing simultaneously emerged in the cultural scene of Shanghai and became brighter stars than the most acclaimed movie actresses and popular singers. As demonstrated in Chapter Two, the most important players in this society-wide promotion of women intellectuals were none other than women writers themselves. Among all of the literary genres, it was the modern essay that became the most powerful form of expression in women writers’ self-promotion and myth-making. Essays served to lend form to a life that was void of any structure; in other words, women writers such as Eileen Chang and Su Qing used the form of the modern essay to construct an intelligible universe where imagination and fantasy could anchor. Detailed descriptions of everyday experiences—that is, representations of cultural meanings of the material world—manifest not only a dynamic inner life, but also a new social identity in formation. The following section highlights two aspects of life conceptualized in Chang’s essay writing: the space of a modern apartment as a liminal

30 “Xuji zixu” ᚮ ූ б Һ (Preface to The Sequel) in Xuji ᚮ ූ (The Sequel) (Taipei: Huang guan chubanshe, 1988), 6-7.

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site in the urban landscape and the discourse of fashion as a vital form of material consciousness.

Passage from Apartment to Street In her essay entitled “Gongyu shenghuo jiqu” ˙ౘΆ‫ޥ‬৩ቝ (Interesting Moments in Apartment Life),31 Chang describes a spatial construction that serves as the backdrop of the formation of a new urban persona: “I would ride the wind, returning up there, but fear those marble domes and jade galleries the place so high, the cold is unbearable….” On reading these lines, residents who live on top floors of apartment buildings will more or less shiver with fear. The higher the apartment, the colder. Ever since the price of coal soared, radiators in apartments have become purely decorative. The letter H on the hot water faucet is indispensable in order to perfect the bathroom design; but if you turn on the hot water tap by mistake, a hollow but grievous rumble will burst out from the ‘Nine Springs’ down below. It sounds like the very complicated and very capricious hot water pipe system in the apartment building has lost its temper. Even if we do not provoke it, the God of thunder still makes its power felt at any moment. Out of nowhere, it can set off a long and evil buzz followed by two blasting sounds, as if an airplane was circling above for a while and then dropping two bombs. Having been terror-stricken in wartime Hong Kong, this kind of noise would always make me panic when I first returned to Shanghai. At first the pipe was still working conscientiously; with much difficulty, it would carry some hot water all the way up to the sixth floor, accompanied by a gurgling sound. That was still acceptable, but now it is like deafening thunder followed only by drizzle, and worse yet, all we get are just two droplets of yellow rusty mud. But I dare not complain any more; the unemployed can easily fly into a rage.32

In this opening episode, the experience of everyday living is shaped to parallel life during the war. War makes its metaphorical presence felt in the daily life of an apartment dweller, serving as a trope for the erratic rhythms of an urban lifestyle. Indeed, Chang’s colorful tapestry of the 31 Originally published in Heaven and Earth Monthly 3 (December 1943): 20-22;

collected in Written on Water , 25-31. 32 See Written on Water , 25.

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various textures, or nuances, of apartment-dwelling life can be read as a parable of war. This opening episode alone makes references to several archetypal war themes, including death (as in the reference to the ‘Nine Springs’ or jiuquan ʃ‫)ޛ‬, the scarcity of everyday necessities (the high price of coal and lack of hot water), and the threat of air-raids (tinged perhaps by the Chang’s own memories of the Hong Kong Battle in December 1941, which she experienced as a college student and describes in her essay “From the Ashes”). Themes of unemployment, social unrest, and economic instability are also represented in Chang’s depiction of an unpleasantly animated world of objects, a world in which one’s private space is constantly intruded upon by external forces. The author has invented a new sense of interiority in her attempt to come to terms with the topography of urban life during wartime. The modern apartment becomes more than a private space. The building’s internal structure, layers of wires, cables, and pipes between the walls are revealed to the reader. Domesticity in wartime is about more than what is simply going on in the household: food, clothes, and necessities. It is also about the infrastructure within the city that sustains daily life in each household. Chang’s essay gives textual testimony to the two most important categories of life in occupied Shanghai: urbanity and combat. These two categories converge precisely within the space of a modern apartment. This was the first time in the history of modern Chinese literature that the literary world of a woman author was so tenaciously associated with an urban lifestyle characterized by routines in and around a modern apartment. In other words, the spatial specificities of a modern apartment are essential to the construction of a vision of life in wartime in Eileen Chang’s writing. A city offers many transitional territories—hotels, stations, theaters, and cafés—that are spaces beyond the rigid categorization of inside or outside, private or public. In Chang’s writing, the space of an apartment is presented as one such transitional site. It is a self-contained, private space, which enables a city dweller to escape the intensity of life outside the apartment when necessary. But more importantly, an apartment is also a locus point from which one can enter into various aspects of urban culture. However, during wartime, the structure of a modern apartment is threatened and on the brink of falling apart. From 1942 to 1945, Eileen Chang spent most of her time in an apartment on the top floor of a six-story art-deco building in the French Concession. The apartment building still exists today. Chang’s loyal

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fans who travel from overseas to Shanghai to pay homage to her will find the building at a busy intersection not far from the Jing’an Temple. Repainted in a beige color, it must seem sad and shabby to these visitors. After decades of wear and tear, the interior has also deteriorated to the extent that one can barely detect any of yesterday’s charm and status.33 However, the true face of Chang’s apartment is forever preserved in words. In her essays, the modern interior space of an apartment is like a picture frame, encircling the nights and days of an urban dweller who constantly watches the world from her windows. In other words, it is a new vantage point from which to view the kaleidoscopic world of metropolitan Shanghai. Living in an apartment seems to have heightened the urban dweller’s sensory perceptions: not only is the cityscape presented differently from a new height (the windows of an apartment on the sixth floor), even sounds in the city become more vivid with the elevation of height: I am often amazed at how street noises can be heard so clearly from the sixth floor, as if it were all happening right beneath one’s ears. The older we get, the farther we are separated from our childhood, and yet the memories of it and its many trivial details have gradually become more sweet and vivid.34

Just as our present bears imprints of the past, an interior space is constantly permeated and reshaped by the ever-changing outside world. This is a world (un)marked by blurred boundaries; liminality characterizes one’s own positioning within such an obscure realm. Senses become more acute, and thoughts take on a fresh direction. Here, we are witnessing the formation a new metaphysics of the everyday: 33 See Chen Danyan ௾ ˂ ጝ , “Zhang Ailing de gongyu” ઠ ื ߆ ‫ ˙ ڄ‬ౘ (Eileen

Chang’s Apartment) in Shanghai de fenghua xueyue ʕ ऺ ‫ ګ ࡘ ڄ‬ఆ ̇ (The Sentimental Shanghai) (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1998), 46-51. The author includes a few photos in the essay. One shows many bicycles parked in front of the mailbox to which Hu Lancheng, Chang’s lover at the time, supposedly delivered his first love letter. Another photo pictures the door of Chang’s apartment. It was out side of this door, we are told, that Hu once stood for a long time, patiently waiting for the woman he admired to admit him. A third photo captures the balconies. Their curved art-deco shape is a faint reminder of the charm of a by-gone era. The one that formerly belonged to Chang, the author tells us, is now adorned with a hanging air-conditioning unit, a Japa nese import. 34 See Written on Water , 26.

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I like to listen to street sounds. Those who have more refined taste would rest on their pillows and listen to wind whistling in a pine grove or the roar of ocean waves. But it is the sound of a streetcar that I must hear in order to fall asleep. On the hills in Hong Kong, only in winter when the north wind blew on the evergreens all night would it remind me of the charming sound of a streetcar. People who have lived in an exciting city for many years do not realize what they must have in life until they have left the place. The thoughts of a city dweller are set against a curtain of striped pattern; the light-colored stripes are running streetcars. Like neatly paralleled currents of sound, they continuously flow into our subconscious.35

For Eileen Chang, an apartment is truly the center of urban life. Like a train station, it serves as an initial starting point, always ready to transport one’s senses in many different directions. Chang’s aesthetics of life are endowed with a concrete spatial form deeply rooted in the soil of the everyday wartime experience. If the production of popular journals in occupied Shanghai symbolizes the shaping of an imagined space, as argued in Chapter Two, the modern apartment is another important site on the mental map of an occupied city. The aggression of wartime occupation disrupted cycles of life—that is, routines inside and outside of one’s own home—but new urban spaces and experiences were also created. Here, the presence of war intensified one’s urban experience, crystallizing it in the spatial form of the modern apartment. In Chang’s vision, this spatial experience is also gendered: the image of an apartment dweller is gendered, and often female. “It seems like only women can fully understand the advantages of life in an apartment,” Chang writes, since the household duties in an apartment are much simpler than those in a house. Through living in an apartment, a woman can better appreciate the numerous trivial details in everyday life; she can even start to appreciate the vivid colors of fresh vegetables on display at the morning market and enjoy the pleasures of cooking and cleaning. Chang’s reinvention of these daily trips is most memorably presented in her essay entitled “Zhongguo de riye” ˀ੢‫( ֬̅ڄ‬China: Days and Nights). 36 In Chang’s own account of her morning outings, errands to the vegetable market seem to be a pleasurable jaunt through the part of

35 Ibid. 36 See Romances, Enlarged Edition, 388-94.

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the city to which she is most attached. Every morning she would take the elevator down from her sixth floor apartment, emerge onto the awakening streets, mingle with the morning crowd, and progress toward the magnificently-colored world of the early morning market. In this essay, daily routines are not just bound duties confining the everyday experiences of women; instead, they become forms of life choreographed to the distinctive rhythms of the city. Women can finally look at these daily routines as opportunities to explore a life that is wider, brighter, and more open to a variety of new possibilities. Apartment life is presented through many layers in Chang’s essay writing. In “Daolu yi mu” ལཔ̣Α (Scenes from the Streets), Eileen Chang also reminds the reader of the many levels of urban culture taking shape outside of the apartment, on the street. On one level, the street scene of Shanghai is most distinctively characterized by the window displays and neon lights on Avenue Joffre: Designing shop windows is a fascinating job, since there is motionless drama in each display … [I remember] a mid-winter night four or five years ago when my cousin and I were strolling down Avenue Joffre, looking at shop window displays. Under neon lights, the slanted faces of those wooden beauties were adorned with slanted hats and dangling feathers. I did not wear western suits, had no need of a hat, and did not want to buy one. And yet I still looked at them with admiring eyes ….37

This fascination with window displays and neon lights is staged at a moment that belongs to the past—“four or five years ago.” At the present time within the essay, a different layer of images is highlighted, such as various street corners scattered in less prestigious neighborhoods of the metropolis. Chang’s impressionistic depiction of the city of Shanghai contains the crisscrossing of numerous small lanes and the faces of ordinary people: There are many scenes on the streets that are worth a second glance. At dusk, a rickshaw is parked by the roadside, a woman is leaning against the seat, a sack in her hand, some persimmons in the sack. The rickshaw man is squatting down on the ground, trying to light up an oil lamp. It is getting dark, and the lamp by the woman’s feet slowly brightens.38

37 See “Scenes from the Streets” in Written on Water , 62. 38 Ibid., 61.

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Here, within the space of one essay, the images of a rickshaw man and a housewife on a small street are juxtaposed with the memory of two young women window-shopping on the extravagant Avenue Joffre. The faint light of an oil lamp is placed against the bright and alluring rays of neon signs. The warmth and intimacy of the present offsets the cold—remoteness of a moment in the past. Even though there is no direct reference to the turbulent events taking place in the background of occupied Shanghai, we can nonetheless sense the presence of war in this contrast between the two time frames and the switching back and forth between different layers of urban space. Rapid movements, swift changes, dramatic transformations, and the transience of a given moment—these themes of war are represented in a most subtle and yet vivid fashion. To carry the argument further, Chang’s sense of modernity has extended from a modernist high culture to a culture of wartime quotidian life. The author is more interested in representing the tension between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ surfacing in everyday routines of ordinary men and women in her city. The intrusion of war seems to have pushed the brilliance of Avenue Joffre back into the dusty recesses of one’s memory. Here we can perceive how the experience of war and occupation has systematically changed the spatialization of modernity. As a body of new urban sensibilities, modernity is now located somewhere between the grand avenue and the back alley.

Fashion Talk To illustrate how material imagination is essential to Chang’s aesthetics of the everyday, this section will focus on her conceptualization of fashion as an invented form of life. Chang’s discussions of fashion demonstrate her fascination with an inner vision. By depicting a world of shifting light, brilliant colors, unique lines and shapes, Chang also suggests that essay writing can be the beginning of a cultural history of things. In Chang’s fiction writing, colors, lines, surfaces, and words are often combined to form an intricate network of meanings. Her writing is known for its meticulous attention to detail, particularly to clothing. For instance, in her novella Jinsuo ji ‫ہ‬ᕬ৩ (Chronicle of Gilded Fetters),39

39 See Romances, Enlarged Edition, 110-51.

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a portrait of the story’s traditional-style family is introduced through a description of the clothing of female servants. Clothes with bright colors contrast the neutral tones of modern fashion. Traditional styles become a symbol of the past, gradually receding into the background —gorgeous, amorous, and dazzling, but helplessly decaying. The temporality of fashion serves to punctuate the narrative rhythm in Chang’s fiction writing. It is in Chang’s essay writing that a discourse of fashion is passionately elaborated. Chang’s most important essay on fashion is entitled “Gengyi ji” Ӧн৩ (A Chronicle of Changing Clothes), in which one hundred years of Chinese history is acted out in a dramatic display of clothes in movements: If all the clothing handed down for generations had never been sold to dealers in secondhand goods, their annual sunning in June would be a brilliant and lively affair. You would move down the path between bamboo poles, flanked by walls of silk and satin—an excavated corridor within an ancient underground palace buried deep under the ground. You could press your forehead against brocades shot through with gold thread. When the sun was still here, this thread was warmed by the light, but now it is cold.40

The essay was originally written in English under the title of “Chinese Life and Fashions,” published in the English-language journal The XXth Century . The English version of the above passage is slightly different: Come and see the Chinese family on the day when the clothes handed down for generations are given their annual sunning! The dust that has settled over the strife and strain of lives lived long ago is shaken out and set dancing in the yellow sun. If ever memory has a smell, it is the scent of camphor, sweet and cozy like remembered happiness, sweet and forlorn like forgotten sorrow. You walk down the path between the bamboo poles, flanked on each side by the walls of gorgeous silks and satins, an excavated corridor in a long-buried house of fashion. You press your forehead against the gold embroideries, sun-warmed a moment ago but

40 First published in Past and Present Biweekly 34 (December 1943). See Wri tten

on Water , 67. This translation by Andrew F. Jones was published as Eileen Chang, “A Chronicle of Changing Clothes,” positions: east asia cultures critique 11. 2 (Fall 2003): 428.

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now cold. The sun has gone down on that slow, smooth, gold-embroidered world.41

In Chang’s world, the transformation of modern clothing can be read as a history of the mentality that centers on a continuous redefinition of notions such as femaleness, female beauty, and proper feminine conduct: Today, Western-style men’s suits are cautious and colorless, adhering as closely and as conservatively as possible to the established image of a foreign gentleman. This is notwithstanding the fact that even Chinese-style garments have been trapped for many years within a limited palette of gray, coffee brown, and dark blue and restricted as well by extremely monotonous fabrics and patterns. Men enjoy far more freedom than women, but purely on account of this single and all too conspicuous sort of unfreedom, I would not want to be a man.42

In the 1920s, a Beijing University professor named Zhang Jingsheng ઠᙔΆ (1888-1970), nicknamed “Dr. Sex,” had already examined the

significance of changes in clothing/fashion, which, he theorized, reflect and shape the present state of mentalities.43 For Zhang Jingsheng, clothes are the extension of the female body and therefore are crucial elements in exploring female sexuality and the inner psyche. This serves as a historical context to a demonstrated fascination with the clothed female bodies expressed in Chang’s writing of the 1940s. However, Chang has taken a bold step forward in teasing out the absurdity of gendered assumptions in cultural discourses on clothes and fashion: Clothes seem to be quite inconsequential. The ancient hero Liu Bei had this to say on the matter of clothes: “Brothers are like one’s hands and feet; wives and children are like clothes that can be put on and taken off.” It will be very difficult indeed for women to reach the point when 41 See The XXth Centu ry 1 (1943): 54. The Journal The XXth Century, pub-

lished in 1941-5, was ed ited by Klaus Mehnert. For a background study of Mehnert and the journal, see Michael Kohlstruck, “Klaus Mehnert und die Zeitschrift The XXth Century” in Georg Armbrüster, Michael Kohlstruck, and Sonja Mühlberger, eds., Exile Shanghai: Jewish Life in Emigration (1938-1947) (Berlin: Verlag Hentrich & Hentrich, 2000). 42 See Eileen Chang, “A Chronicle of Chang ing Clothes,” positions: east asia cultures critique 11. 2 (Fall 2003): 439. 43 See Zhang’s 1925 book entitled Mei de renshengguan ࠀ ‫ ڄ‬ʆ Ά ᝳ (An Out -

look on a Life of Beauty). Reprinted in Zhang Jingsheng wenji ઠ ྵ Ά ́ ූ (Collected Works of Zhang Jingsheng) (Guangzhou: Guangzhou chubanshe, 1998), 24-138.

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husbands are like clothes. One Western author (was it Bernard Shaw?) once complained, “Most women put more careful thought and consideration into the choice of their hats than their choice of husbands.” Even the most heartless of women will wax passionate when she starts to speak of “last year’s quilted silk gown.”44

Whether it was Bernard Shaw or another Western writer who made these peculiar comments about a woman’s apparent lack of judgment in choosing her own destiny and her partiality for clothes and other seemingly trivial accessories in life, for Eileen Chang, these male voices all spelled out the similarly absurd, but ancient logic by Liu Bei, one of the warlords of the Three Kingdoms era (third century A.D.). The essay “A Chronicle of Changing Clothes” does much more than merely tease out the gendered categories embedded in fashion discourses. “We cannot really imagine the world of the past generations, so idle, so quiet, and so organized,” writes Eileen Chang, “during the three hundred years of Manchu rule in the Qing Dynasty, there was not even ( jing ఉ) such a thing called women’s fashion!” The use of the adverb jing implies astonishment: how could women have endured three hundred years of unaltered fashion? What misfortune! The emphasis placed on women’s clothes seems to be a landmark separating the modern era from the antiquated world. From Eileen Chang’s perspective, the lack of change in three hundred years of China’s fashion history forms a sharp contrast to the past thirty or forty years, which, for Chang, could be read as a fascinating narrative comprised of rapidly shifting patterns of women’s fashion. Chang’s account of modern fashion turns history into a stage presentation. Her impressionistic view of modern history highlights colors, lines, shapes, textures, and moods, which are all crystallized in the changing faces of women’s clothes. Chang’s representation of modern history through the transformation of women’s clothes has the effect of a museum of human fantasies, or a gallery of artifacts constantly in motion. History is turned into a fiction narrative. More interestingly, 44 See Eileen Chang, “A Chronicle of Chang ing Clothes,” positions: east asia cultures critique 11. 2 (Fall 2003): 439-40.

For an excellent discussion of the correlation between clothes, gender discourses, and performance culture during the first two decades of the century, see Katharine Hui-ling Chou, “Staging Revolution: Actresses, Realism, and the New Woman Movement in Chinese Spoken Drama and Film, 1919-1949,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1997.

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there is no human being moving through this narrative; shapes, colors, lines, and circles occupy the space. The cover of Written on Water , designed by Chang’s best fried Yan Ying ٬ᚡ (Fatima), exhibits a female figure that is devoid of any facial features [Plate 12]. This female figure has a late-Qing-style jacket on, the design of which is reminiscent of a jacket that Chang designed and made for herself [Plate 13]. Another faceless figure, also by Yan Ying, appears on the cover of Chang’s short story collection titled Romances [Plate 18]. Through a personification of clothes, both in words and an accompanying series of comic sketches, Chang has created an animated effect in her world of changing fashion. Replacing human voices, clothes become a form of language, taking on a life of their own [Plates 14 and 15]. In “Scenes from the Streets,” Eileen Chang also describes fashion displays as “motionless theater,” a notion highlighting the correlation between literature, performance art, and material culture. By using the notion of theater as a trope, Eileen Chang has indicated that fashion, like works of fiction, is a dramatization of life, a life presented on stage. A fashion image is a frozen historical moment—that is, a close-up of a historical moment intersecting with moments in one’s personal history. The clothed body of a modern urban woman thereby carries the burden of history, as well as the marks of our present time. In his 1904 essay on fashion and modernity, Georg Simmel theorizes the cultural and social significance of fashion in modern life. He views fashion as a signifier of modernity and a theatricalization of social transformations. For Simmel, fashion consciousness is vital to a conceptualization of the modern and the urban.45 This essay on fashion should be read side by side with another crucial essay by Simmel, written a year earlier, in 1903. This earlier essay, entitled “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” describes the heightened level of sensory stimulation associated with the construction of a modern metropolis. More than any other cultural element, fashion responds most directly to change and instantaneously adapts to it. Following is a frequently quoted passage from “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” which describes the essence of modern life from a physiological as well as psychological perspective: 45 Georg Simmel, “Fashion” (1904), in On Individuality and Social Forms:

Selected Writings , edited and with an introduction by Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 294-323.

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The psychological foundation, upon which the metropolitan individuality is erected, is the intensification of emotional life due to the swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli. Man is a creature whose existence is dependent on differences, i.e., his mind is stimulated by the difference between present impressions and those which have preceded. Lasting impressions, the slightness in their differences, the habituated regularity of their course and contrasts between them, consume, so to speak, less mental energy than the rapid telescoping of changing images, pronounced differences within what is grasped at a single glance, and the unexpectedness of violent stimuli. To the extent that the metropolis creates these psychological conditions—with every crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life—it creates in the sensory foundations of mental life, and in the degree of awareness necessitated by our organization as creatures dependent on differences, a deep contrast with the slower, more habitual, more smoothly flowing rhythm of the sensory-mental phase of small town and rural existence.46

Simmel’s remarks help illustrate how the discourse of fashion is situated at the center of Eileen Chang’s aesthetic vision. However, Chang has gone far beyond Simmel’s theories. She incorporates urbanism, modernity, and femininity in her creation of fashion as a new cultural paradigm. The fact that the power to design such a fresh paradigm was in the hands of a woman made it even more unique in the 1940s. More importantly, Chang’s fashion stories can also be read as parables of war. Designing and writing about fashion were her means of coming to terms with a world at war and life in a besieged city. In a world where nothing was fixed, and scenes of the present disappeared with each passing moment, the ever-changing realm of women’s fashion ironically became the most stable and lucid thing to hold onto. In Chang’s essay “From the Ashes,”47 an account of wartime Hong Kong, she describes individualized styles of clothing at a critical moment in time when one’s life could be obliterated in a second: In Hong Kong, when we first heard the news that the war had broken out, a girl classmate in my dormitory started panicking. “What am I going to do? I have nothing appropriate to wear!” she cried. Her fam46 See Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), in On Individuality and

Social Forms: Selected Writings , 325. 47 “From the Ashes,” in Heaven and Earth Monthly 5 (February 1944): 20-5; collected in Written on Water , 43-56.

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ily were wealthy overseas Chinese. She had a different wardrobe for every social occasion. From a dance party on a yacht to a formal dinner, she was always sufficiently equipped. But she never imagined that there would be a war. She finally managed to get hold of a big black quilted jacket which probably would not attract any attention from the air force circling above. When it was time to flee we all went our separate ways. I saw her again when the war was over. She had cut her hair short in the masculine Filipino style—the trend in Hong Kong at the time because a woman with that hair style could pass for a man. Indeed our different responses to the war are reflected in our choice of clothes. Take Suleika for example. A beauty from a remote town on the Malay peninsula, she was petite and dark, with dreamy eyes and slightly protruding teeth. Like most girls who had a convent education, she was naive to an embarrassing degree. She chose to major in medicine, which means that she had to learn to dissect human bodies. But did the corpses have clothes on or not? The question bothered her, so she was asking people about it. This had become quite a joke around our school. A bomb landed next to our dorm, so the warden had to convince us to flee down the hill. Even in such an emergency, Suleika did not forget to pack up her most lavish clothes. Against the well-meaning advice of many wise people, she somehow managed to transport, in the midst of the gunfire, a big heavy leather trunk of clothes down the hill. Suleika then joined the defense force, working as a substitute nurse for the Red Cross. She was often seen squatting on the ground, hacking firewood to light up a fire, wearing her copper red and dark green silk gown embroidered with the character for longevity. What a waste, but for her it was all worth it. This smart outfit endowed her with an unprecedented confidence; without that she would not have blended so well with her male colleagues ….48

Here, Chang’s war stories are interwoven with references to fashion. Fashion is no longer a form of creative life found only in the realm of leisure. Instead, it becomes an essential medium through which an individual can finally comprehend an otherwise incomprehensible world, name surroundings that are otherwise unnamable, and determine one’s own otherwise indeterminate gender and ethnic identities. In the conclusion of the essay “A Chronicle of Changing Clothes” a parable is also found:

48 See Written on Water , 43-5.

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An autumnal chill as dusk approaches and vendors at a vegetable market prepare to pack up and go home. Fish scraps and pale green husks of sweet-kernel corn litter the ground. A child on a bicycle dashes down the street just to show off. He lets out a shout, lets go of the handlebars, and effortlessly shoots past, swaying atop the seat. And in that split second, everyone in the street watches him pass, transfixed by an indefinable sort of admiration. Might it be that in this life that moment of letting go is the very loveliest?49

This scene seems detached from Chang’s detailed descriptions of the transformation of fashion trends, but it can be read as a parable of how fashion actually functions in everyday life. It is exactly that moment of ‘letting go,’ that is, the moment that one gains the power and freedom to go beyond immediate material and political conditions that captures the essence of fashion in Chang’s world. Here the essay genre not only becomes an open-ended and ongoing process for women writers in their entry into the existing order of the literary world, it also becomes the testing ground where the boundaries between the literary world and the larger social realm become unstable and ever-shifting. Not only the life styles of women writers can be read as texts, but the women themselves can also become concrete historical subjects within the space allowed by the modern essay. Life is woven together with work, the boundaries between the private and the public are further blurred, and biographical contingencies become important textual devices in constructing a legend of a new era.

49 See Eileen Chang, “A Chronicle of Chang ing Clothes,” positions: east asia cultures critique 11. 2 (Fall 2003): 441.

CHAPTER FIVE

ETHNOGRAPHIES OF WARTIME: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FICTION BY SU QING AND PAN LIUDAI Autobiographical voices speak from the pages of many works of women’s literature from occupied Shanghai. The preceding chapter demonstrates how Eileen Chang employed biographical contingencies throughout her essays as a crucial tool for rebuilding an intelligible world atop the ruins of a war-torn city. This chapter turns to two other equally popular writers from the same period, Su Qing and Pan Liudai, and considers how they manipulated the hazy boundaries between the authorial voice and the narrative self to produce ethnographical accounts of wartime survival and personal growth in the form of novels. To be sure, women in occupied Shanghai were not the first to have discovered the elasticity of the autobiographical voice. Since the early twentieth-century conceptualization of modern Chinese literature, one of the trademarks that rendered this literature ‘new’ and set it apart from its predecessors was the use of the first-person, and at times, the autobiographical voice. 1 Women’s autobiographical writing of occupied Shanghai was a continuation of these earlier traditions. When addressing this introspective trend that took place in the early years of modern Chinese literature, scholars often highlight one of the very first modern vernacular short stories, “Kuangren riji” ԙʆ̅৩ (Diary of a Madman, 1918). They argue that this story by the ‘literary giant’ Lu Xun, which defined the beginning of China’s ‘New Literature,’ constitutes a skillful application of the first-person voice and a daring experiment in the diary form as a new fictional subgenre. Scholars have

1 For a discussion of the use of first-person and/or the autobiographical voices in the literary and cultural discourses of the May Fourth (1910s) and post May Fourth era (1920s), see Lydia H. Liu, “The Deixis of Writing in the First Person” in her Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity, China, 1900-1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 150-82.

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defined the story as a landmark that underscores psycho-narration as a crucial feature of modern Chinese fiction.2 Lu Xun presented an even more important type of first-person narrative with his story, “Shang shi” ෱௦ (Mourning the Dead), which was published seven years later in 1925. Though it has generally been interpreted as a work patterned on “Diary of a Madman” in its attempt to psychoanalyze the male protagonist, a different way of reading “Mourning the Dead” is to emphasize its ironic undertone and to understand the story as a critical commentary on the state of literary production in the 1920s. It is due to this story that Lu Xun’s fiction writings from the 1920s, long regarded as the classics in the canon of modern Chinese literature, can be discussed in the same context as the popular literature of Shanghai’s women writers from the 1940s. Consequently, through a rereading of this story, one might even argue that the decades-long ideological divide between the tradition of ‘New Literature’ that Lu Xun championed and the middlebrow culture he and his followers loathed was indeed arbitrary. “Mourning the Dead,” the subtitle of which is “Juansheng shouji” ़Ά˾৩ (Juansheng’s Journal), is also written in diary form and employs an autobiographical voice. The entire text reads as a piecedtogether string of fragmented notes speaking of the pain experienced by the male protagonist upon learning of the death of his former lover, Zijun ʪѼ. The story’s sophistication lies in its self-referentiality; that is, it ridicules the autobiographical impulse so prevalent in literary representations of the period. Lu Xun’s use of a first-person narrative endows the story with a sense of parody. Not only is the narrator Juansheng distanced from the reader, but his depiction of the female protagonist Zijun causes her to seem even further removed from the reader. An ironic undertone prevents the story from being read conventionally and thus keeps it, if not on the outside, at least on the periphery of mainstream 1920s literature for which Lu Xun himself had been recognized as a champion. Perhaps it should be read as an antithesis of early twentieth-century discourses on love, freedom, individual rights, and equality. Role-playing figures heavily into the story. From the very beginning of their romance, both Juansheng and Zijun are confined to strict roles. Zijun wears the most popular costume of the May Fourth era, a striped 2 See, for instance, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Voices from the Iron House: A Study of Lu

Xun (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 49-69; and Lydia H. Liu, “The Discourse of Individua lism” in Translingual Practice , 77-102.

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blouse and a black skirt, and reads some of the most popular translated literary texts of the period: Ibsen, Tagore, and Shelley. Her favorite topics are the hegemony of the traditional family, abandoning old customs, and equality between men and women. Frequently, she declares her intention to leave her father’s family, saying, “I belong to myself; none of them has the right to interfere with my business.” Zijun’s character appears to be more of a projection of progressive discourses of the 1920s than a representation of an individual. Her death does not seem particularly tragic since it is only the role she plays that has been shattered. Even more important than Zijun’s death is the male protagonist Juansheng’s self-conscious role-playing. Throughout the story, Juansheng doubts the sincerity of his love for Zijun. He constantly reflects on the drama surrounding each of their romantic encounters and acknowledges that courtship involves elements of fantasy and role-playing: I cannot remember clearly how I expressed my sincere and intense love to her at that time... Flustered, I could not help myself from using the methods I had learned from movies. Whenever I think about it, I feel embarrassed. But that embarrassing moment always remains in my memory, like a lonely lamp in a dark room, which lights up the image of myself, holding her hand, tears in my eyes, on bent knee...3

Lighting up a moment in the narrator’s past, this metaphorical lamp resembles a mirror or a camera. In this story, straightforward autobiographical writing is twisted into narrative irony, an effect derived from the narrator’s simultaneous self-confirmation and self-subversion. Lu Xun uses the first-person voice to anatomize the visible elements of Juansheng’s narrative, while at the same time uncovering the invisible ones. The result is a parody highlighting the performative qualities of the first-person voice. There is a very similar scene in Eileen Chang’s 1944 essay entitled “Children Will Say Anything.” Due to the similarity of these two scenes, the use of autobiographical voices in women’s literature from occupied Shanghai could be called a staging of the autobiographical: I stood in front of the mirror and watched my trembling face, with tears falling down in streams. My face looked like a close-up in a movie.

3 Collected in Panghuang ӂ ౯ (Wandering), 1925. See Lu Xun quanji ኬ Ճ η

ූ (A Complete Collection of Lu Xun’s Works, Vol. 2) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chuba nshe, 1987), 112-3.

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I told myself, grinding my teeth: “I want revenge. One day I will take my revenge.”4

This scene is a flashback to the I-narrator’s childhood. Within this introspective moment, the mirror takes the place of a metaphorical lamp or a camera. The cinematic perspective here suggests a connection between this episode and the one in “Mourning the Dead.” How much of the inner psyche is revealed is not essential to the meaning of either scene; rather, new meanings are derived through the framing of the scenes and the first-person narrative voices that test the boundaries of these literary constructions. Through the use of an autobiographical voice, the layout of both scenes resembles a stage. Fragments of the narrator’s memory and his/ her subconscious thoughts become dramatic moments that are framed by a distant narrative and played out shot by shot. For both scenes, created two decades apart from one another, it is evident that an autobiographical voice does not provide a short-cut to the final revelation of personal truth. Instead, it sets up an even more slippery barrier, one that further complicates a reader’s ability to comprehend the world represented in the text. To be sure, Eileen Chang carried the performative qualities of the autobiographical voice a step further than Lu Xun did. We have only to look at the irony of the title, “Children Will Say Anything,” which, when translated literally, means “children’s speech has no prohibitions.” By comparing her own writing to the guileless words of children, Chang was alluding to the purported directness of autobiographical writing. Yet the narrative and cinematic devices employed in her writing immediately undermine such directness. Here, the forwardness of the firstperson narrative becomes another form of masquerade, like an adult playing an innocent game of children’s ‘dress-up.’ Therefore, embedded in the title of Chang’s essay is her criticism of what she dubbed “personal literature” ( shenbian wenxue Խᘃ́ዕ). 5 At the heart of Chang’s childhood reminiscence is not how the autobiographical voice unravels long-forgotten, hidden secrets, but rather, how such a literary method can so vividly recall one’s past memories. Therein rests the subversive power of such a voice. Chang’s use of the 4 See Written on Water , 12. 5 For a further discussion of the first-person/autobiographical voice by Chang, see her “Writing of One’s Own” in Written on Water , 17-24.

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autobiographical voice questions the boundaries between life and work, fiction and reality, memories of the past and a sense of the immediate present, and between knowledge and the production of knowledge. Eileen Chang was not alone in her use of this technique; the performative qualities of the autobiographical voice were equally manipulated by other women writers of the period. Engaging both a middlebrow readership and the tradition of ‘New Literature’ shaped since the earlier decades, women’s autobiographical writing mounted the best challenge to the age-old belief in the truth value of the discursive divide between the so-called ‘serious’ literature and ‘popular’ literature. The following sections of this chapter will demonstrate how Su Qing and Pan Liudai manipulated the autobiographical voice in their fiction writing, how it was used as a crucial textual strategy in fictionalized personal journeys, and how these accounts can be read as ethnographies of an entire era. SU QING

The year 1944 saw the simultaneous publication of two major works by Su Qing that established her reputation as one of the most important—and controversial—cultural figures in occupied Shanghai. One was an essay collection entitled Huanjin ji ᴢᎫූ, or Washing Brocade , which contained most of the essays she wrote between 1935 and 1944. The other was an autobiographical novel entitled Jiehun shinian ഻੹ ʏ϶, or Ten Years of Married Life . The latter recounts the female protagonist Su Huaiqing’s ᙨᖩ‫ ی‬decade-long journey from a provincial city to Shanghai the great metropolis and her metamorphosis from being a wife and mother consumed by everyday domestic routines, to becoming a young and talented author who aspires to launch a successful career amidst war, marital crises, and motherhood. Ten Years of Married Life became the most debated literary work of the era because of its direct references to events in the author’s own life, its focus on how war threatened the stability of the female protagonist’s family/marriage, its vivid depiction of the ever-increasing difficulties of maintaining basic daily needs, and, most importantly, its intrepid revelation of the female inner psyche, desire, and sexuality. Su Qing herself acknowledged that the notoriety of her book contributed to its success: “Ten Years of Married Life seems more popular [than Washing Bro-

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cade], possibly because more people have condemned it, and it therefore attracts even more public attention.” 6 Known as a child as Feng Heyi ෤֜ᄭ, Su Qing was born into an intellectual family in the city of Ningbo of Zhejiang Province in 1914. She was raised by her grandparents because, during her early childhood, her father went to the United States to pursue a degree in banking at Columbia University and her mother had yet to complete her studies at a local college. Various accounts discuss how, as a child, Su Qing was ‘wild’ and ‘rebellious,’ and how her grandparents failed, repeatedly, in their efforts to mold her into a proper lady. In 1927, when she was only fourteen, Su Qing was betrothed to a fellow townsman named Li Qinhou Өೈϒ, possibly her family’s way of making sure that she would have more respect for social conventions. The young couple formally married in 1934 when Su Qing was a freshman at the National Zhongyang University in Nanjing. In the same year, she became pregnant, quit school, and gave birth to her first child, a daughter. The birth of her daughter inspired Su Qing to write and publish. Her first essay, entitled “Sheng nan yu nü” ΆԝԮʩ (Child-bearing: Boy or Girl) was published in 1935. It was warmly received, and Su Qing’s name was known throughout Shanghai’s publishing world from that time onward. Her readers marveled at the daring young woman, still in her early twenties, who was not afraid of sharing her innermost feelings with the public. From the very beginning of her writing career, Su Qing the writer had been described as ‘bold’ and ‘straightforward.’ This autobiographical essay recounts her experience as a first-time mother raising a baby girl. In giving birth to a daughter, she endured much pain and shame. She thus hoped that her second child would be a boy since bearing a male heir was instrumental to her future well-being in her husband’s family.7 Su Qing’s first published work demonstrates her early interest in social commentary and her close attention to issues important to women. The oldest among this generation of Shanghai’s women writers and in many ways a self-proclaimed champion, Su Qing went on to gradually build her writing career throughout the Orphan Island Era 6 See Su Qing, “Huanjin ji yu Jiehun shinian” ᴢ Ꭻ ූ Ⴉ ഻ ੹ ʏ ϶ (Washing Brocade and Ten Years of Married Life ), Heaven and Earth Monthly 15-16 (Janu ary 1945): 29-31. 7 Originally published in Lunyu (Discourses) 67 (June 1935); collected in Washing

Brocade, 12-4.

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and the first years of the occupation, publishing essays and short stories in several major literary journals, including Lunyu ቈგ (Discourses), Yuzhou feng Ϭ‫( ࡘ׉‬Cosmic Winds), Past and Present Biweekly, and The Miscellany Monthly .8 The year 1943 was a critical one for Su Qing in both her life and career. Her marriage with Li Qinhou fell apart after nine years and five children. Financial difficulties strained the relationship, and Li’s extramarital affair accelerated its end. At the same time, Su Qing’s career reached its zenith with the production of her own literary journal entitled Heaven and Earth Monthly , and the founding of her own similarlynamed publishing house, Heaven and Earth Press, which printed both Washing Brocade and Ten Years of Married Life in the following year. Su Qing’s association with members of the collaborationist government was instrumental in the success of her journal and publishing house, though it became a permanent source of trouble during her turbulent mid-life years. It was widely believed that her publishing career was personally financed by Chen Gongbo ௾˙త (1892-1946), who was the mayor of Shanghai from 1940 to 1944. There were rumors that Su Qing was once Chen’s mistress, although Su and those close to her denied it. Upon its return to Shanghai, the Nationalist government executed Chen and labeled Su Qing’s literary endeavors as ‘collaborationist.’ In 1944, much of the furor caused over Su’s two books had to do with the public’s curiosity about the destiny of Heaven and Earth Press. Run solely by a young woman author, it was an unprecedented phenomenon in the history of modern Chinese publishing. The publication of Su Qing’s two books was a much-anticipated media event, especially since some of the novel’s earlier episodes were serialized in the monthly literary journal Chatter on Wind and Rain, which was edited by Su Qing’s friend, the essayist Liu Yusheng. Other major newspapers and journals promoted the forthcoming books for months before they finally appeared on the shelves of local bookstores and on the stalls of street vendors. 9 Not only were the books themselves eagerly awaited, but there was speculation as to their impact on Shanghai’s reading public. Both became instant bestsellers and went through a 8 For a detailed account of Su Qing’s childhood and the early years of her adult life, see Wang Yixin ̙ ɾ ˻ , Su Qing zhuan ᙨ ‫ ی‬෭ (A Biography of Su Qing) (Shanghai: Xuelin chubanshe, 1999). 9 See issues of The Miscellany Monthly and The Past and Present Biweekly pub-

lished in 1944.

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dozen printings in a matter of six months. From their initial conception to their final marketing success, the entire process of producing the two volumes seemed meticulously scripted and carried out by a publishing community comprised of newspaper/journal publishers and editors, literary and cultural critics, and the author herself. While Ten Years of Married Life was marketed as a distinctly autobiographical work, the essays in Washing Brocade were described as having strong autobiographical elements. Su Qing herself suggested the ‘correct’ way of reading these two works, insisting that the novel should be read as ‘autobiographical fiction’ ( zizhuanti de xiaoshuo б෭ᝂ‫ڄ‬ʮ ი), with more of an emphasis placed on its fictional aspects. Su Qing indicated that, in fact, more direct real life references could be found in her essays, which, as a whole, should be interpreted as an extended personal narrative: I treasure Washing Brocade, for every single essay in the collection belongs only to myself. There is no embellishment or exaggeration. My eight years of hard work are all here. Gradually, piece by piece, it has come together like this. These essays are a reminiscence of my past. I feel a little sad, but my sadness will not make me cry out loud. I can’t force everyone else to share my feelings, but if there is anyone out there who can understand me and feel sympathy for me, I will shed tears because it will have brought me joy….10

Such rhetoric should of course be interpreted as a self-reflexive effort on the part of the author to place both her writing and herself within the literary mainstream of the time by invoking autobiographical contingencies and literary individualism as a discourse of legitimation. By highlighting her own presence as an author/narrator in a highly personal text, Su Qing reminded readers of the difficulties in literary communication and of the much-scrutinized practice of merging one’s personal experiences with reading/writing. Together, the two books achieved precisely what both the author and her readership had hoped for: a well-rounded portrait of Su Qing, a glimpse into various areas of her private life, and true celebrity status. Contributing to Su Qing’s transformation into a unique urban figure during the two years before the war ended was her public image, the operation of her publishing house, the success of her journal, the popularity of her writing, and the private elements of her life that she allowed

10 See Su Qing, “Washing Brocade and Ten Years of Married Life ,” 29-31.

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the public to scrutinize. As previously discussed, between the years 1944 and 1945, Su Qing was promoted, often alongside Eileen Chang, as a near cult figure in the occupied regime through a vast amount of media coverage that included roundtable talks, interviews, profiles, photographs, cartoons, and tabloid stories. Everything she wrote or said was labeled as ‘autobiographical,’ a fact that is not at all surprising since, as a writer, Su Qing’s identity was defined by a well-documented ‘autobiographical impulse.’11 The final episode of Su Qing’s career as an ‘autobiographical’ writer was marked by the successful publication in 1947 of the sequel to Ten Years of Married Life , which recounts the female protagonist’s experience surrounding the publication of the first volume of her autobiographical novel. In a sense, Su Qing wrote an ‘autobiography of an autobiography.’ She wrote it partly in response to all of the allegations brought against her amidst postwar politics. 12 Though the book was another success, all of the pre- and postwar details surrounding the female protagonist attest to the many real-life ties the author herself had with the Wang Jingwei collaborationist regime. Even though she never wrote anything to promote the “Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere” ideology, her ties with key figures in the collaborationist government were enough to forever doom her politically. While the sequel secured Su Qing’s position as one of the most prominent writers of Shanghai’s pre-revolutionary era, it also served as a catalyst for the violent finale of her once-prolific writing career. Before long, no publisher dared to print her writing unless she wrote under a pseudonym, despite her assertion that: “Su Qing is the Su Qing who wrote books such as Washing Brocade and Ten Years of Married Life during the occupation era.”13 To no avail, her stubbornness hastened her descent into obscurity. With the Communist take-over in 1949, Su Qing’s literary prospects further declined. During the first two decades of the People’s Republic,

11 See Shi Zhai ࿧ ᓲ , “Ji Su Qing” ৩ ᙨ ‫( ی‬About Su Qing), published in The

Miscellany Monthly 13. 1 (April 1944): 97-100. 12 Xu Jiehun shinian ᚮ ഻ ੹ ʏ ϶ (Sequel to Ten Years of Married Life). Shanghai: Tiandi chubanshe, 1947. 13 See Su Qing, “Guanyu wo: Xu jiehun shinian daixu” ᘕ ‫ ؠ‬Ӎ í ᚮ ഻ ੹ ʏ ϶

ʨ Һ (About Me: Preface to Sequel to Ten Years of Marriage), February 1947. Reprinted in A Complete Collection of Essays by Su Qing, 539-50.

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she could only find employment as a scriptwriter for local theater troupes, such as the Shanghai Fanghua Yue Theater Troupe (Fanghua yueju tuan ‫ڤ‬ൡඞᄶ࿋). As a scriptwriter, Su Qing wrote under the pseudonym of Feng Yunzhuang ෤˕ப. She wrote many plays during this period, among which the more successful ones were Mai you lang ቗ٛࡇ (The Oil Vendor, 1952), Qu Yuan ‫ࢍ׌‬, (1953), and Baoyu yu Daiyu ᘽ΂Ⴉᓰ΂ (Baoyu and Daiyu, 1954). Her scripts were based on either accounts of historical figures or well-known traditional fiction narratives. People who enjoyed the theatrical performances could not possibly have imagined that the quiet, invisible scriptwriter had once commanded a sizeable readership and a near-cult following less than a decade earlier. When the Anti-Rightist movement started in 1957, Su Qing’s work unit and her own children cast her aside for having indirect ties to the writer/critic Hu Feng ࠍࡘ (1902-1985). For the next two-and-a-half decades, she lived in a state of sickness, loneliness, poverty, and depression brought about by the waves of political movements. Having been reduced to cultural obscurity, Su Qing died in 1982 at the age of sixtynine. A relatively short time later, during the late 1980s and early 1990s, publishers rediscovered her works from the 1940s and repackaged them to represent rebellious ‘feminine writing’ as well as Shanghai’s ‘golden era’ of popular culture. Su Qing’s literary works once again entered the bestseller market. 14 PAN LIUDAI

Compared to Su Qing and Eileen Chang, biographical information on Pan Liudai is sparse. Though she occupied a different space in the popular culture scene of Shanghai, Pan shared with Su Qing the distinction of writing what was defined primarily by its ‘autobiographical impulse.’ Toward the end of the 1940s, Pan Liudai introduced her novel Tuizhi furen zizhuan ਂᕀˮʆб෭ (An Autobiography of a Divorcée) into the popular print market. What is known about the author’s life comes mostly from this fictional account. Even though the book was 14 See Xie Weiming ᒧ ሜ ‫“ ا‬Su Qing” in Suiyue de fengling ๶ ̇ ‫( ྀ ࡘ ڄ‬The Tinkling Bells of Times Past) (Tianjin: Tianjin jiaoyu chubanshe, 1993), 118-29. Xie Weiming, a much respected journalist and writer, was once married to Su Qing’s youngest daughter. Xie held much inside knowledge about the last few decades of Su Qing’s life.

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published five years after the occupation era ended, Pan had established her reputation as a tabloid journalist and popular fiction writer during the same years that Su Qing and Eileen Chang became popular culture icons. Though Pan figured somewhat less prominently in the celebrity pantheon than either Su or Chang, the publication of her novel was a much anticipated event for Shanghai readers who had enjoyed following the author’s private life in the tabloid press during the occupation years. Pan Liudai is generally dubbed a ‘tabloid writer’ ( xiaobao zuojia ʮేѕࣁ) made famous by newspapers and magazines from Shanghai’s mosquito press, such as the daily Haibao ऺే (Shanghai Herald). If Su Qing and Eileen Chang’s cultural activities were primarily labeled as ‘middlebrow,’ Pan’s activities were ranked as ‘lowbrow.’ 15 She earned her greatest notoriety through her close associations with several Japanese-sponsored newspapers and journals operated by the collaborationist government, including Huawen meiri ൡ́ӵ̅ (Chinese Daily, the Chinese weekly edition of Mainichi shinbun ) and Literary Companion . Pan herself had no qualms about her ‘contaminated’ past. Most events in the novel were drawn directly from real-life incidents in Pan Liudai’s own decade-long north-south journey from the ancient capital Beijing, to the great metropolis of Shanghai, as well as her many entanglements with various circles of intellectuals and politicians in the occupied regime. Speaking in the first-person narrative, the novel’s female protagonist, Liu Siqiong ‫݋ގ‬ᗂ, relates her adventures in great detail. The novel begins with Liu’s childhood in a disgruntled family in Beijing, with a mother who does not love her and at times physically abuses her, and a father who does seem to love her but eventually abandons his wife and children for another woman. Still a teenager, knowing that her family will not be able to fund her education, Liu Siqiong leaves home and heads south to pursue an independent life and a successful career. Along the way, she loses her virginity to a middle-aged man whom she does not love, is forced to cohabit with him for a time, and eventually leaves him out of disgust. From north to south, Liu Siqiong continues her journey. After having sought patronage from one family after another, she eventually launches a successful journalistic career in Nanjing, the home of the collabora15 Interviews with Ke Ling and Wei Shaochang, Shanghai, May 1994. Neither

Ke nor Wei cared to discuss Pan Liudai in the interviews, since, according to them, Pan was a ‘lowbrow’ writer.

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tionist government. Throughout the novel, the narrator/protagonist seems to indulge in an endless account of how she masters the art of maneuvering across gender, class, national, and political divides. The second half of the novel is an account of how Liu Siqiong meets and marries her future husband, experiencing sexual emancipation in the process, but subsequently endures a relationship that gradually deteriorates. It turns out that the tall, slender man who has so charmed Liu still lives under the shadow of an incestuous relationship with his aunt. Toward the end of the novel, the marriage has become a source of grave psychological torment for the female protagonist, and she opts to leave this suffocating prison. In the end she is left facing an unknown future after filing for divorce. Pan Liudai’s real-life story would add another chapter to this narrative of disillusionment. The story would conclude with Pan’s flight from Shanghai to Hong Kong, shortly after the publication of the novel. She joined a massive southbound migration following the Communist victory of 1949 and went on to become a celebrated author among the Shanghai expatriate community in Hong Kong. As in Eileen Chang’s physical and literary maneuver between Shanghai and Hong Kong, Pan’s life was also a ‘tale of two cities,’ further exemplifying the connection between Shanghai’s culture in the 1930s and 1940s and Hong Kong’s culture in the early 1950s. Hong Kong’s culture was often regarded as a transplanted version of Shanghai’s earlier culture.16 Even though Pan Liudai’s books were all postwar publications, they still addressed the same kind of imaginary readership, one that was shaped by, and in turn sustained, the popular print culture of the occupation era. This kind of readership was willing to accept Pan’s maneuvering across the thin line dividing literary endeavor from popular entertainment. Pan’s case is unique, for it not only illustrates exactly how a women’s popular culture took shape during such a brief moment in Shanghai’s history, but it also demonstrates how short periods in history can generate such an enduring and far-reaching impact on culture. In other words, it shows precisely how everything comprising Shanghai’s culture in the 1930s and 1940s—film, music, literature, and other art forms—became historical memories. Furthermore, it demonstrates the process of producing these memories and describes the power dynamics involved in claiming the legitimate right to recount them. 16 See Leo Ou-fan Lee, “Epilogue: A Tale of Two Cities” in Shanghai Modern, 324-41.

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In Hong Kong, Pan Liudai continued to compose her laid-back, mosquito-press brand of writing for yet another decade, catering to the Shanghai expatriate community, which was comprised mostly of movie stars, singers, writers, filmmakers, and other cultural celebrities, who for a brief period of time, transformed the ‘fragrant harbor’ into a replica of Shanghai during its 1930s and 1940s golden era. The Shanghai-born Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai meticulously captured the Shanghai expatriate society in postwar Hong Kong in his sumptuously filmed In the Mood for Love (2000). During her years in Hong Kong, Pan Liudai published several books, including Mingxing xiaozhuan ‫ݶا‬ʮ෭ (Biographies of Movie Stars, 1953), a collection of interviews with the most popular movie stars of the era, many of whom had achieved their initial fame in occupied Shanghai, but had to reestablish themselves with Shanghai’s expatriate community in Hong Kong. Pan also published Furen zhi yan ੴʆ˃Ե (Women’s Words of Wisdom, 1956), a collection of jokes, gossip, and tabloid stories that appear to have been taken directly out of a society column in an evening paper. During her first decade in Hong Kong, Pan also worked to sustain Shanghai’s fan press and a related tabloid column. Her work coincided with the rise and fall of Hong Kong Mandarin-language film studios during the 1950s and 1960s. Pan’s writing from this period supplies textual evidence attesting to the continuity of cinematic traditions from Shanghai to Hong Kong, though this continuity has yet to be incorporated into a historical narrative of the first golden age of Hong Kong cinema and popular entertainment.17 In the late 1960s, Pan wrote a rather satirical essay about Eileen Chang, apparently displeased by the iconic writer’s everlasting fame. Many of Chang’s fans then declared Pan a ‘public enemy,’ and the essay marked the rather abrupt end of her writing career. Perhaps disheart-

17 For a study of Hon g Kong cinema during its earlier decades, see Stephen Teo,

“Early Hong Kong Cinema: The Shanghai Hangover” and “Shanghai R edone: Les Sing-Song Girls in Hong Kong” in Hong Kong Cinema: The Extra Di mensions (London: British Film Institute, 1997), 3-39. Also see Zhang Zhen, “The Shanghai Factor in Hong Kong Cinema: A Tale of Two Cities in Historical Per spectives,” Asian Cinema 1 (Fall 1998): 146-59. So far no study has been done on the correlation between the film industry and popular print of the period.

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ened by the cultural scene of Hong Kong, Pan later moved to Australia and was rarely seen or mentioned by others.18 A DISCOURSE OF COHABITATION

The rationale for grouping Su Qing and Pan Liudai together in the same chapter goes beyond the fact that they both established their initial reputations during the occupation era. More importantly, both of their careers were overshadowed by political controversies. The novels of both writers were labeled as ‘autobiographical’ and end with the dissolution of the female protagonist’s marriage. Most significant of all though, the popularity of the two authors and their novels demonstrates a society-wide fascination with female public intellectuals, a phenomenon most characteristic of the popular culture of the occupation era. The infatuation of Shanghai readers with new urban mythologies centering on the life and work of women authors helps explain why autobiographical fiction and the modern essay were two of the most prominent literary genres of the time. The essay genre is discussed in the previous chapter. This current chapter addresses the strong presence of an autobiographical voice in women’s fiction writing of the period. It should be emphasized that this autobiographical voice employed a specific style of writing, one recurrent in many discursive constructions of gender and sexuality that began during the early decades of the twentieth century. Going hand-in-hand with the accumulation of four decades of literary and cultural representations of female gender and sexuality was the manipulation of the performative qualities of the autobiographical voice by writers in 1940s Shanghai. Many intertextual relationships can be established between discussions of sexuality from the first half of the century and the representation of gender and sexuality in works of fiction by Su Qing, Pan Liudai, and other 1940s women writers. The popularity of women’s autobiographical writing in 1940s Shanghai should also be situated within this intellectual context. Sexuality became a serious topic in twentieth-century China at least as far back as the early 1920s, when the highly controversial Beijing 18 See Xia Zuli ࢬ অ ᘰ , “Huaren yanglao zai Aozhou” ൡ ʆ ኙ Ч Ϛ ጑ ϳ

(Elderly Chinese in Australia), Minsheng bao, December 11, 1996. A picture of an aged Pan was included with the article, which was also collected in Xia’s Xiyue de zhouwen మ ࣬ ‫ ڄ‬ᇞ ঙ (Wrinkles of Joy) (Taipei: Jingdian chuanxun wenhua, 1999).

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University professor Zhang Jingsheng began introducing Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter’s theories of the psychology of sex and eugenics into China. From the very beginning, Chinese discourses on sexuality appear to have focused on the ever-problematized topic of the female gender. Following the initiation of the subject by Zhang and other leading intellectuals, discourses on modern female sexuality began to take shape. Their transformation over the next two decades provided an important historical context for the construction of a distinctive body of urban sensibilities in women’s literature of occupied Shanghai. Some recent studies have attempted to reestablish Zhang Jingsheng’s significance, both for his innovative creation of popular discourses on female sexuality and for the connection of such discourses to literary representations of body and desire. 19 Many of Zhang’s concepts did indeed become recurrent themes in women’s literary writing of 1940s Shanghai. For instance, Zhang Jingsheng suggested the necessity of creating an entirely new concept of the male-female relationship, one not based on any legal contracts or restrictions, but rather on ‘free love’ or ‘friendship.’ According to Zhang, love is conditional and ever-changing, thus the conventional structure of marriage restricts the ability of individuals to freely develop. These ideas were articulated in his 1923 article “Aiqing dingze” ืશ‫׆‬۱ (The Norms of Love), 20 which triggered a series of discussions surrounding the issues of love and marriage.21 In a 1925 article entitled “Mei de shehui zuzhi fa” ࠀ‫ڊڄ‬๡இᔶٗ (The Rules of Organizing a Society of Beauty), 22 Zhang continued to advocate “qingren zhi” શʆվ (lovers’ unions) as an alternative to marriage. He triggered much controversy in his lifetime over his concepts of “lovers’ unions” and a society based on partnerships of sexually liberated men and women. Apparently following the same line of thought, Eileen Chang, Su Qing, and Pan Liudai advocated and represented cohabitation as an alternative to marriage in their literary works of the 1940s.

19 See Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice , 128-49. 20 Published in Chenbao fukan (Morning Daily Supplement), April 29, 1923. 21 The articles of this debate were collected by Zhang himself, entitled Aiqing

dingze taolun ji ื શ ‫ ׆‬۱ ৫ ቈ ූ (The Debates on the Norms of Love), published by Meide shudian, 1924. 22 Serialized in Jingbao fukan (Beijing Daily Supplement), September 4-30, 1925.

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Their outspoken remarks also caused much controversy and received even greater publicity. Zhang Jingsheng was considered bold in the 1920s, not because of any specific theories he held about female sexuality, but because of the simple fact that he was speaking about sex at a time when it was considered taboo to do so, and even leading scholarly discourses on the subject. When Su Qing, Eileen Chang, Pan Liudai, and other women writers of 1940s Shanghai began focusing on female gender and sexuality, translated versions of foreign books and articles discussing psychoanalysis, eugenics and female sexuality had been available to the reading public for almost two decades. Nonetheless, their open discussions about female sexuality triggered as much public furor as when Zhang Jingsheng began speaking publicly about sex in the 1920s. The 1940s controversy surrounding women writers then had different historical implications. Whatever topics were considered bold in the 1940s were precisely the issues these women supported publicly. They may have done this for a dual purpose: to make an important point, and also for the sake of shock value. It was unprecedented in Chinese history for women to openly discuss some of their most intimate female experiences as Su Qing and Pan Liudai did in their autobiographical works. The autobiographical voice thereby became the most important vehicle for them to intervene in public discussions of women-related issues.. Su Qing, in particular, was renowned for her bold and unconventional opinions regarding family, marriage, modern womanhood, and female sexuality and desire. 23 The controversies over the outspokenness of women writers not only centered on whether female sexuality should be discussed publicly and in such a bold manner, but more importantly, whether it was proper for a group of women writers to openly address these issues. It was this latter issue that triggered much fear and anguish because it was purported to be a threat to the fabric of society. The most fundamental difference separating the 1940s discussions of female gender and sexuality from those of earlier decades is the fact that the former were situated within the context of modern marriage. In the autobiographical novels of Su Qing and Pan Liudai, the most basic question posed is: How can female sexuality be expressed when the structure of marriage is threatened by a world full of uncertainty? 23 For instance, Su Qing’s essay entitled “Tan xing” ሾ ‫( ׷‬Talking about Sex) and her short story entit led “E” ༟ (Moth) triggered many discu ssions.

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In their novels, Su Qing and Pan Liudai directly address the formation of public discourses on cohabitation ( pinju ‫ )׍ܠ‬during the occupation era. Much of the popularity of the two novels has to do with the fact that they became a testing ground for the most controversial social issue of the period—namely, alternatives to the family structure. Recent sociological studies of wartime marriage practices in China have focused on how 1940s media representations of family and marriage were marked by sentimental and melodramatic moments. Based on classified advertising sections of local newspapers from the period, scholars have argued that cohabitation during wartime was typically legitimized, and, in some cases, glorified by the popular media. In a recent study, the author Lü Fangshang discusses the widespread use of the wartime analogy “opening a second front” ( kaipi di er ge zhanchang ළཟ୶ʅࡴዢౄ) in reference to the practice of cohabitation.24 It is important to bear in mind that media representations of cohabitation were perhaps somewhat exaggerated. For a popular print culture, the melodramatization of everyday life is essential for securing a readership, especially during wartime. Compared to the media of previous periods, the wartime print culture of occupied Shanghai dedicated much more space to representing the dissolution of the conventional family structure. The media of the time depicted divorce, cohabitation, and other types of temporary domestic reorganization in great detail. One of the central concerns of women writers like Su Qing and Eileen Chang was the oppressiveness of the marriage and family ideology. Su Qing frequently contended in her essays that the structural unit keeping women both economically and physically dependent on men was the nuclear family. In her essay, “Lun nüzi jiaoyou” ቈʩʪΟ˩ (On Women’s Association with Friends), Su Qing asserts that it is the structure of society that separates women from one another, and reduces men and women’s relations to a commodification of the female body and sexuality.25 Arguing that the present form of family and marriage is 24 See Lü Fangshang, “Ling yi zhong ‘wei zuzhi’: kangzhan shiqi hunyin yu jia-

ting wenti chutan” ͏ ɾ ၲ ਨ இ ᔶ í ӏ ዢ इ ಭ ੹ ‫ ܪ‬Ⴉ ࣁ ࣘ ੕ ᖅ ‫ ڶ‬ૉ (Another Kind of ‘Pseudo-Organization’: A Preliminary Study of Marriage and Family of Wartime China), Jindai funü shi yanjiu (Research on Women in Modern Chinese History) 3 (1995): 97-122. 25 In Washing Brocade (1944).

Other essays by Su Qing centered on female psychology and sexuality include “Tan nüren” ሾ ʩ ʆ (Talking about Women), “Tan xing” ሾ ‫( ׷‬Talking about Sex),

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inadequate, Su Qing proposes eliminating marriage and legitimizing cohabitation as an alternative, to her female readers in Shanghai. In her 1944 essay entitled “Tan nüren” ሾʩʆ (Talking about Women), the author unveiled her iconoclastic ideas: For the sake of women, the most ideal type of life is as follows: marriage eliminated, freedom to cohabit, children nurtured by mothers, and funded by the state.26

Eileen Chang echoed this jarring statement in her essay “Writing of One’s Own,” which contains ideas that might even shock contemporary feminists and might not be considered politically correct in today’s world: For women who live a life of cohabitation, their social position is lower than men’s. But they all embody a vigorous force of life. From a male point of view, they are endowed with glamour, yet only strong and healthy women embody such glamour—if they were weak or sick, they would not satisfy the demands of those men. They also work, they can be jealous, they fight, and they can be very cruel; but they are never hysterical.27

Chang wrote these comments after providing an interpretation of her serialized novel Lianhuantao ௤ᐼࢭ (Chain of Rings), which she wrote and published in 1944. 28 In the same essay, she lists three types of malefemale relationships: prostitution ( piaoji ࿟ҥ), urbane flirtation ( gaodeng tiaoqing ਢമቆશ)—perhaps Scarlett-O’Hara style, and cohabitation. She then argues that prostitution is inhumane for both genders and flirtation is too casual. Conversely, she asserts that cohabitation should be legitimized because she believes it is a very common phenomenon in modern urban societies and it exists for a reason. She argues that the cohabitation of men and women is underrepresented in literature in that it occupies no position in either the Mandarin Ducks

“Tan nanren” ሾ ԝ ʆ (Talking about Men), “Lun hongyan boming” ቈ ߹ ᖄ ᒆ ֡ (On Women of Beauty Fated for an Early Demise), and “Lun lihun” ቈ ᕹ ੹ (On Divorce). These essays are all collected in Washing Brocade, mostly written during the years of 194 3 and 1944. 26 See A Complete Collections of Essays by Su Qing, 137. 27 See Written on Water , 22-3. 28 Serialized in The Phenomena Monthly in 1944.

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and Butterflies fiction or the ‘New Literature.’ She asserts that cohabitation is more ‘humane’ than uncommunicative marital relations. In Chain of Rings , Chang addresses social and marital practices outside the normative boundaries of socially-determined sexuality, thereby implicitly challenging the public taboo of representing unorthodox sexual relations. The story of Nixi Ꮉమ, a woman who cohabits with many men over the course of her life, becomes a moving tale when described by Chang: What moves me in Nixi’s story is her unmitigated love for material life. She has to seize this material life firmly all the time. She demands love from men, she also demands a sense of [economic] security. But she cannot have both. It always happens that she loses both….

In Chang’s interpretation, Nixi’s movement from one man to another parallels the waves of historical unrest taking place in the outside world. She is assigned a role that is neither completely passive, nor powerless. Embodying a vigor in her endless pursuit of material life, her destiny is not one of hopeless oppression. It is her choice to cohabit with men for most of her life. A woman never to be categorized as weak ( ruozhe ࣚ‫ )ږ‬or oppressed, Nixi is depicted as a moth-like figure, someone who chooses to play with and readily throws herself into the flame. In Chang’s story, fire is a symbol of sexual desire, as well as the numerous temptations in life. But unlike a moth that would give itself up to the flame, Chang’s female protagonist does not perish. Though she does not exactly rise phoenix-like out of the ashes, the experience does give her power over her own life. In promoting cohabitation as an alternative lifestyle for Shanghai women, Eileen Chang and Su Qing seem to have played different roles. While Su Qing presented this controversial concept in a raw, straightforward style of rhetoric, Eileen Chang meticulously depicted a fictional woman who cohabited with men, thus visualizing for real-life women what such a lifestyle might be like. The two authors’ different, yet complimentary, methods of approaching what was the most controversial subject of the 1940s created a sense of community and of affirmation for Shanghai women who chose cohabitation over marriage. In both Eileen Chang and Su Qing’s writing, the spokeswomen of Shanghai’s women’s rights movement were directly and harshly criticized. Eileen Chang described her encounter with some women’s rights advocates at a social gathering:

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Articulating like a veteran radical reformer (lao xindang Ч๘ᚎ), a woman talked about how unjust men were, how they humiliated women. Women were such gentle and emotionally oriented creatures, and men took advantage of women’s emotions in order to control them. [She also claimed that] the reason that women always occupied an inferior position in the struggle for existence was due to the unequal opportunities [provided for them], … In all of these debates between men and women, women have always presented themselves in this way. At that time, I could barely keep myself from standing up and challenging her. It is not that I liked to present unusual arguments. I was really fed up with such statements…. We are so familiar with these arguments made by women. We also heard a lot of men’s complaints—simply condemning women as wicked and unpardonable, whose faults were too numerous to mention .…29

For Eileen Chang, by constantly focusing on the oppression of women and persistently advocating autonomy and liberation from men, gendered differences are inevitably naturalized and reinscribed into human behavior and everyday practices. She believed that the counterdiscourses produced by women’s rights advocates concerning the roles of men and women only served to collaborate with patriarchal conventional notions of social stability/solidarity by refusing to consider alternative roles for women. Everything still fit into the conventional social framework. In her essay “Guanyu wo” ᘕ‫ؠ‬Ӎ (About Me), Su Qing joins Eileen Chang in criticizing radical women’s rights advocates. 30 Though the two women might be considered quite ‘radical’ in the early twenty-first century contemporary context, back in the 1940s, they made it very clear that they were different from the ‘radicals’ of their time. In this essay, Su Qing freely admits that she is not a member of the so-called “zhengyi wenhuaren” ͸໳́ˢʆ (righteous literati) circle. Su asserts that a magazine published by radical feminists labeled her writing as ‘pornographic’ and depicted her as a ‘seductive’ woman. Articles in this magazine accused Su Qing of being a “wen ji” ́ҥ (literary prostitute) or “wen yao” ́Ң (literary demon), and of committing crimes that included “occupying the literary circles, promoting an extravagant style 29 In Written on Water , 86-7. 30 “About Me” was published as a preface to Su Qing’s 1947 sequel to Ten Years of Married Life . See A Complete Collections of Essays by Su Qing, 539-50.

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of writing… [and] enslaving the thought[s] of Shanghai women… [thereby] paralyzing rebellious consciousness.” According to these radical women authors, Su’s writing encouraged her readers to forget about the existence of ‘oppression’ and “the bloody reality” of their status as women. Such radicals not only attacked Su Qing’s writing, but they also criticized her personal life, which led to a political defamation of her character. By rejecting both the patriarchal, socially-imposed feminine stereotypes and the so-called progressive ideological framework promoted by radical women’s rights advocates, Eileen Chang and Su Qing’s writing attempted to depart from the naturalization of sexual and gendered differences. Their writing did not explicitly judge the gendered character of every type of individual, male or female. Rather, it celebrated the potential of a variety of alternative identities, something that was absent from the mainstream writing of the 1940s. In this sense, it could perhaps be argued it was not the radical advocacy and literary representation of women’s rights during the 1920s and 1930s that should have been perceived as “potentially disruptive” to the fabric of traditional society, but rather that it was the way in which Chang, Su, and Pan represented men and women. During the 1940s, the desire for pleasure went hand-in-hand with the desire for the knowledge of pleasure. The repression of sex in one place inevitably led to its expression in other forms. Both Chang and Su asserted that although nearly all sexual discourses up until that point had taken place between men, women should not refrain from also speaking about sex. They repeatedly noted that women themselves were joining the sexual marketplace as consumers in increasing numbers. For Eileen Chang and Su Qing, the key to creating a discourse of cohabitation was through women negotiating the boundaries of normative sexual practices and representing such choices in their own writing. ETHNOGRAPHY /FICTION /HISTORY

The 1940s women writers chose writing as a way to become both the consumers and producers of the sexual marketplace. The question that naturally follows is: Exactly what types of language and what modes of representation did Su Qing and Pan Liudai employ in their fictional representations of women’s lives? It is important, in the context of this discussion, to introduce Pan Guangdan ᇃγͲ (1899-1967), a leading eugenist and Freudian literary

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critic of his time and a key figure in early twentieth-century discussions of female gender and sexuality.31 His writing from the early 1920s to the late 1940s demonstrates an enthusiastic effort to channel European discourses on psychoanalysis and sexuality into the context of modern China, an effort that culminated in 1946 when his complete translation of Havelock Ellis’ Psychology of Sex was published. More importantly, however, Pan established a narrative norm/mode of writing for the representation of sexuality in the Chinese context through his translation projects. Pan was an ethnographer of a Chinese history of sexuality based on his several decades of scholarly work on the subject. Pan Guangdan’s interest in Ellis started in the 1920s when he encountered the seven volumes that comprise Studies in the Psychology of Sex. He translated portions of the book, which were published in the form of two pamphlets, entitled Xing de jiaoyu ‫ڄ׷‬૥Ԯ (Sexual Education) and Xing de daode ‫ڄ׷‬ལᅭ (Sexual Moralities) respectively.32 In 1934, Pan discovered Psychology of Sex , which is a condensed version of the seven-volume edition. He worked on the translation over a period of two years, completing it in 1941. The work was published concurrently in Shanghai and Chongqing in 1946. In his preface to Psychology of Sex , Pan states that completing the project was the “fulfillment of a twenty-year ambition.” 33 The publication of this work was significant because it was contemporaneous with the period when 1940s Shanghai women writers started diverging from social standards in their representation of gender and sexuality. Why did this translation project take so long? Even when taking into account the very complicated role a cultural translator assumes, it would still be an understatement to call Pan Guangdan a translator of western psychoanalytic theories. For twenty years, besides working on translation projects, he also devoted much of his time to textual and archival research. By the 1940s, after examining a vast quantity of literature and unofficial histories, he had found enough primary sources to support his argument for the relevance of applying Western theories to the study of sexuality in China. Whether or not he successfully proved 31 Pan Guangdan was of no relation to Pan Liudai. 32 These pamphlets were published by Shanghai qingnian xiehui shuju in 1934.

See Pan’s preface in his translation of Havelock Ellis Psychology of Sex (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1987), 1-5. 33 Ibid., 1-5.

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the relevance of Western theory is not of central importance to the present study; rather, the significance of Pan’s persistent research is that it uncovered a long-suppressed part of China’s textual tradition. A research paper entitled “Feng Xiaoqing kao” ෤ʮ‫ی‬Ш (A Case Study of Feng Xiaoqing) was a very early work by Pan Guangdan, written in 1922 when he was a young student at Qinghua University. He submitted it for a history class entitled “Zhongguo wuqiannian lishi niaokan” ˀ੢ˉʢ϶ገ͑఍ᑅ (A Bird’s Eye View of Five Thousand Years of Chinese History), which was taught by Liang Qichao. Pan later explained that he was reading A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis at the time and was fascinated by a new possibility of interpretation suggested by Freudian theory. Rather than using official histories as his source material and selecting a commonly addressed political or social topic from conventional interpretations of history, Pan chose to write about a woman of the late Ming dynasty, whose stories were recorded only in unofficial or unorthodox histories. The purpose of his paper was to supply a classic Chinese example to support the Freudian theory of narcissism. Pan’s research paper was serialized in Funü zazhi ੴʩᕺბ (Women’s Magazine) in 1923 and later expanded into a book, entitled Xiaoqing de fenxi ʮ‫( ؾ˜ڄی‬An Analysis of Xiaoqing). 34 Commenting twenty years later on the importance of his early work, Pan said: According to my research, Feng Xiaoqing’s narcissism was the earliest and also the most classic example of narcissism recorded in Chinese sources. The importance of this story to psychoanalysis surpasses many examples recorded in Western sources for the last forty years. I always wanted to rewrite my work in English and to discuss it with Ellis and other predecessors of the West. Over ten years have passed and I have

34 Xiaoqing de fenxi (An Analysis of Xiaoqing) was first published in 1927 by

Xinyue shudian (The Crescent Moon Boo kstore) and reprinted several times by Shangwu yinshuguan (The Commercial Pr ess). The book was later published under a slightly different title: Feng Xiaoqing: yijian yinglian zhi yanjiu ෤ ʮ ‫ ی‬í ɾ ά ᅬ ᜣ ˃ ߧ ԥ (Feng Xiaoqing: A Study of a Case of Narcissism). The book has recently been reprinted and given a much more sensational title Feng Xiaoqing xingxinli biantai jiemi ෤ ʮ ‫ ୎ ˻ ׷ ی‬᜵ ࿽ ಒ ঁ (Unravel the Deviant Sexual Psychology of Feng Xiaoqing) (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chu ba nshe, 1990).

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not yet finished this project. Unfortunately Ellis died last summer (1939).35

More striking even than Pan’s theories was the mode of writing and historicizing that he adopted. His translation of Psychology of Sex was accompanied by numerous commentaries containing his own theorization of the Chinese history of sexual behavior drawn from various sources, historical and literary. Though it was still a rather fragmentary history, it demonstrates Pan’s unwavering effort to delineate a Chinese history of sexuality, based on Western theories of psychoanalysis. In his commentaries, Pan argues that not only does China have its own theories pertaining to sexual differences, but it also provides classic examples of such differences. Moreover, it has its own means of regulating sexual behavior and it considers specific forms of sexual behaviors ‘deviant,’ including day-dreams, narcissism, voyeurism, erotic fetishism, and sadomasochism.36 Pan writes like an excited ethnographer, one who has returned from a long journey into a remote realm where he has uncovered a large body of historical material that contributes to the construction of a reality that is both remote and intimate. Pan Guangdan incorporated an immense number of primary sources into his commentaries, most of which were drawn from unofficial histories ( baiguan yeshi ┑‫)͑௴ׇ‬, encyclopedias ( leishu ᘝए), literary notebooks ( biji ര৩), folk songs ( liqu ۣЇ), and fiction ( xiaoshuo ʮი). 37 His efforts to delineate a history of Chinese sexuality went hand-in-hand with his attempts to uncover the part of textual tradition that he believed was disappearing into the past. Pan’s elaborate commentaries are provided in the form of footnotes that punctuate the translated text. The massive quantity of footnotes consists of his findings from archival research and is longer and more extensive than the entirety of the Psychology of Sex itself. Pan’s use of footnoting calls to mind the critical commentaries of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries that accompanied much of China’s vernacular fiction during that time. Such commentaries were often written in red ink and appeared in the upper margins. They were also frequently inter-

35 See Pan Guangdan, translated and annotated. Xing xinlixue ‫ ୎ ˻ ׷‬ዕ

(Havelock Ellis’ Psychology of Sex) (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1988), 1-5. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid.

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spersed throughout the text. For centuries, these critical commentaries were regarded an integral part of the fictional text itself by Chinese readers—their reading experience would not have been complete without these inserted voices. In many cases, the literary commentator’s voice took on an authorial role that overshadowed the author’s own voice. The commentator, who was often anonymous, set the boundaries between fiction and reality, at moments testifying to the truthfulness of a particular detail and at other times calling the readers’ attention to the craftiness of a particular fictive device. In the case of Pan’s translation project, the translated text falls into the background. Foregrounded instead is an alternative textual tradition highlighted by Pan, a tradition of the fantastic, the unusual, the gloomy, and the decadent. Resulting from the project is a further romanticization of seventeenth-century Chinese history, a period often identified as the late Ming. A mystique has always surrounded the culture of seventeenth-century China, characterized by a fascination with how literature and art from the period celebrated the human capacity to produce dreams and illusions as a process of remembering and self-representation.38 Pan’s historical research seems to have been driven by a narrative impulse, one that aimed at constructing a coherent narrative though an alternative mode of historicization. Pan Guangdan’s tireless scholarship indicates that the formation of a modern, female-centered discourse of sexuality was a prolonged process. This discourse, which deviated so sharply from mainstream thought, took shape between the beginning of the twentieth century and the 1940s. Public discussions of female sexuality in 1940s Shanghai were not merely a by-product of wartime political control; rather, they should be viewed as a continuation of the discursive constructions from earlier decades. While Pan Guangdan reached back into China’s textual traditions for models of female sexuality, women writers in the 1940s focused their discussions of sexuality on the bustling, everyday lives of Shanghai’s women. Details from ordinary daily life fueled many public discussions. ETHNOGRAPHIES, OR WRITING IN RETROSPECT

As Pan Guangdan was completing his ethnographic journey into China’s textual past, a wartime popular culture was taking shape in

38 Wai-yee Li, Enchantment and Disenchantment, 47-88.

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occupied Shanghai. Su Qing and Pan Liudai’s fiction writing also employed the same mode of story-telling/history writing used by Pan Guangdan in his historical ethnography of Chinese sexuality. While Su Qing wrote about wartime Shanghai before memories of that era had faded, Pan Liudai’s writing brought it out of the shadows of the past. The two novels supply case studies of how women in occupied Shanghai negotiated the boundaries of normative sexual practices and sought alternative lifestyles during an extraordinary moment in modern Chinese history. Other writings of the time serve as commentaries to these fictional accounts, particularly the essays of Su Qing and Eileen Chang discussed earlier. Read together, they form an extensive narrative of individual women’s responses to the turbulence taking place both on the national front and in their private lives. Both Ten Years of Married Life and An Autobiography of a Divorcée employ female autobiographical voices to construct what could be called ethnographies of wartime . In this context, the term ‘ethnographies’ refers to the many systems of references that inform the making of a single fictional account. It also highlights the mode of writing exemplified by Pan Guangdan’s one-man crusade into the gloomy past of textual China.39 Both novels can be read as ethnographic accounts of young women from provincial areas who migrate to the great metropolis and adopt Shanghainese personae. The novels describe their various stages of self-transformation, survival during the war and occupation, varied expressions of sexuality, methods of channeling desire and their longing for connectedness, and the establishment of their individual cultural identities. A central theme in both novels is survival, though to the female protagonists, surviving the many challenges of living in the city is just as important as surviving the devastation of war. War is only part of the larger experience of adapting, adjusting, and succeeding in an urban environment. War also symbolizes the personal upheavals in the women’s lives. In this sense, these autobiographical novels can be read as manuals/guidebooks for young women who are in the process of shaping their public identities during a chaotic historical period. They were intended

39 For definitions of ethnography and the distinctions between ethnographies and fiction, see James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), and Kamala Visweswaran, Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994).

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to be read in conjunction with the countless number of popular journals of the time that aimed to teach the Shanghai middlebrow readership how to cultivate sophisticated urban personalities during the war. Novelistic knowledge became part of the public knowledge of the era. These novels can also be read as individual attempts at constructing a historical narrative that would give shape to one’s personal experience and memories of the war that had just ended. Equally as important as recounting a personal history of the recent past was the desire to come to terms with all of the cultural and political complexities of the larger historical context. How ‘true’ and how ‘autobiographical,’ then, were these fictional accounts? In her postscript to Ten Years of Married Life , Su Qing provides a generic definition of her novel: First I should declare that the work here is not an autobiography, it is an autobiographical novel [emphasis added]. Many characters in the novel are fictional, many incidents are completely fabricated, and much of what I consider as good material is not included. The story is set in our contemporary time; therefore I have to be careful in my writing….40

Here, the author emphasizes the fictional nature of her account, highlighting the narrative distance that must always be considered by readers when attempting to decipher the system of meanings within a literary text. Emphasizing the difference between the narrating and experiencing selves, Su also alludes to the tradition of a so-called “distanced self-narration.” Dorrit Cohn refers to this as the “gravitation of first-person narration toward the direct representation of a figural consciousness” 41 It is precisely such a figural consciousness or narrative distance that allows the first-person narrator to act as an ‘ethnographer.’ The narrator/ethnographer is distanced from her own story, knows fully how to use the performative/disguising power of the autobiographical voice, and successfully manipulates this voice to dramatically portray the wartime era.

40 “Jiehun shinian houji” ഻ ੹ ʏ ϶ ݈ ৩ (Postcript to Ten Years of Married Life ) in Ten Years of Married Life (Shanghai: Tiandi chubanshe, 1944); reprinted in A Complete Collections of Essays by Su Qing, 535-8. 41 Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978),172.

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In the first episode of Ten Years of Married Life , “Xin jiu hebi de hunli” ๘ᕄϐᔞ‫੹ڄ‬ᔩ (A Quasi-modern and Semi-old-fashioned Wedding), Su’s description of the female protagonist’s wedding sets up a historically-specific temporal and spatial frame. The wedding takes place in the provincial city of Ningbo. A semi-urban environment, Ningbo is positioned exactly between metropolitan Shanghai and the vast expanse of rural China. Shanghai standards are used to judge the style of the wedding. Though it is by no means traditional, it lacks the glamour and luxury characteristic of Shanghai weddings of the time. Here, the female protagonist/narrator is immediately situated in a transitional space. In the following episodes, she progresses a step forward as she and her husband move to the great metropolis of Shanghai. Before transitioning from her life in Ningbo, however, she struggles with the meaning of marriage as a social institution and contemplates the dangers and attractions presented by the unknown urban world that exists not far beyond her birthplace. After these initial episodes, the novel deals with the female protagonist’s long personal journey. Though she migrates to Shanghai with her husband, she visits Ningbo and Suzhou and other nearby cities during her ten years in the new city. Toward the end of the novel, the protagonist fully adopts a new urban identity, just as her marriage finally breaks down. The beginning of her new life also suggests the beginning of another journey, one that seeks a new way of life and of connecting with people and places. The sequel published three years later deals entirely with the protagonist’s many experiments with alternative relationships. None of her relationships work out; thus, the sequel concludes with the protagonist endlessly searching for a way of life that she believes can be found, just around the corner, in a place she has not discovered yet. The end of her marriage only serves to open up numerous new possibilities, so that the novel’s narrative progression becomes an open-ended journey into an infinite future. Pan Liudai’s An Autobiography of a Divorcée also depicts a decadelong journey. Despite some ironic moments in the novel, Pan’s first-person narrator primarily controls the way in which ‘truth’ is represented. Like Su Qing’s account, Pan’s novel also provides a linear account of a young bourgeois intellectual woman struggling to maintain both a career and a love life in the great metropolis. As the narrator gradually uncovers the ‘truth’ about her marriage—and about marriage in general—it becomes apparent that it is impossible to assure family stability.

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Similarly, she learns the impossibility of retreating or escaping from the urban world. The novel’s complexity lies in the fact that, on the one hand, the female protagonist attempts to seize and secure love through marriage, while, on the other hand, she ignores the conventional meaning of marriage. Her bold confrontation with the instability of modern marriage is coupled with her desperate effort to hold onto her own marriage. The narration tests the fragile boundaries of the bourgeois lifestyle and centers on the weakened institution of marriage, which, in this novel, is an institutional bond that does not secure or guarantee a solid relationship. Pan Liudai, like Su Qing and Eileen Chang, attempts to come to terms with the details of conventional urban family life, while at the same time trying to subvert the family model. Unlike Eileen Chang and Su Qing, however, Pan does not attempt to expose the oppressiveness of the ideology of marriage and family. What she attempts to show instead is not necessarily the economic or physical dependence of women, but rather the way in which these factors become psychologically distorted within the confines of institutionalized marriage/family arrangements. Here, Hollywood comes to her assistance. In the novel, the female protagonist compares herself to the Ingrid Bergman character in Gaslight, the 1944 MGM thriller directed by George Cukor. In the film, Bergman’s character is a young, naïve woman who marries a suave, romantic man played by Charles Boyer, who turns out to be a murderous scoundrel. In this classic film noir, Ingrid Bergman once again suffers beautifully on screen. Tormented by mysterious happenings in her dark and luxurious Victorian home, the woman slowly succumbs to madness at the hands of her husband. Pan Liudai’s narrator makes references to this film and to Bergman’s performance, concluding that her husband is also gradually driving her into insanity. There are indeed many Bergman moments in the second half of the novel, where the female protagonist is trapped in a state of endless torments and despair. Pan Liudai also strives to express the relative freedom enjoyed by the female protagonist as she travels between two different realms. One is the professional realm where she interacts with a large group of male colleagues, a world characterized by ruthless competitions. The other realm is characterized by the female protagonist’s highly-complicated sexual relationships with various men she loves, hates, or fears. Teacher, sworn brother, husband, lover, friend, or rival—each man’s relationship with her is different.

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Pan’s novel is unique because of the topography of a female firstperson narrative. The fast-moving scenery is charged with symbolic significance. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator’s geographic separation from her family in the North marks the social, economic, and cultural difference between Shanghai, the urban center, and Beijing, the ancient capital, which represents the rest of China. Landscapes in this novel represent rigid divisions that cannot be bridged. The story begins with the protagonist’s childhood in the old capital city. During her life there, she dreams of the South, which is represented by her first love, a young man from Shanghai whom she encounters while still a teenager. The narrative voice reminisces about this first love, a mysterious man who does not even have a real name. As the narrative unfolds, and as episodes of her early life continue to be enveloped by the harshness of the North, the image of this first love becomes more and more of an imaginary presence: Blindly, I imagined that I had a lover in the South; one day he would come to marry me, and take me to the colorful South.

It is inevitable that the protagonist will leave Beijing. The impression the reader gets is that family life is suffocating for the young woman. Leaving Beijing becomes a symbolic act of temporal and spatial removal from the old China that the ancient city and her family’s decline symbolize. After her departure from Beijing, the protagonist stops for a short time in two small towns in nearby Hebei Province, where she experiences one failure after another, both in her burgeoning career as a writer and in her stormy sex life. Her arrival in Nanjing symbolizes the start of her new life and the discovery of new bodily pleasures. It is thus the great metropolis Shanghai that becomes the true destination on this journey in search of her true self: Shanghai is truly grand. Men and women I see on the streets are all wearing stylish clothes, handsome and admirable. They appear pretentious and abundantly nourished. Looking at them, I feel like a country bumpkin.

Shanghai’s challenges help shape the protagonist’s new urban personality. During her years in Shanghai, she makes numerous trips to Nanjing and Beijing, only to be further convinced of Shanghai’s attractiveness. It also proves the success of her self-transformation and of her integration with the urban world of Shanghai. Hangzhou is the destina-

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tion of her final trip, which is to meet with her already-estranged husband. By the end of the visit, the marriage is completely dissolved. On the train back to Shanghai, the protagonist is described as fixing her vision on “a spatial and temporal freeze-frame on the train, halfway between” her decaying past and an unknown future. The bleak winter countryside outside Hangzhou symbolizes her past, while Shanghai, the vast urban world awaiting her, represents the unknown future stretching out before her. Again, her own desires and feelings are caught in a transitional moment. Therefore the novel ends exactly where Su Qing’s Ten Years of Marriage does, with the narration pointing forward into an infinite future. For both protagonists, the topography of desire and the locality of sexuality will always exist someplace else, at another point in time. The preceding discussion of the autobiographical voice illustrates what was at the center of public dialogues during this extraordinary moment in modern Chinese history. By taking into account both the biographical contingencies and the narrative strategies involved in creating these fictional accounts of life in wartime Shanghai, the detailed mechanisms and cultural/intellectual backgrounds surrounding the making of these personal stories are called into consideration. It remains to be emphasized that the emerging significance of Su Qing and Pan Liudai should be placed both in wartime and postwar contexts. Furthermore, the immediacy of their writing should be defined by how their works serve as both the representation and the postwar construction of wartime experiences. The autobiographical voices in both Ten Years of Married Life and An Autobiography of a Divorcée operate on three intersecting levels. On the first level, they serve as a mode of remembering the period before the war, as a personal history framed by war and occupation, and therefore, as an expression of individual responses to the era in which they lived. Second, they operate as a mode of inventing, imagining, and uncovering voices that were otherwise silenced or concealed, such as discussions about female sexuality and desire. Therefore, they serve as critical commentaries on the state of cultural production in this as well as the preceding periods. Finally, they act as a mode of self-promotion and as a means of cultural and political intervention, thereby turning personal histories into ethnographic accounts of the whole era. The autobiographical voices in these novels function in a way similar to the critical commentaries written in the margins of fictional works of earlier centuries. However, they play an

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even more crucial role in the reading process, and, perhaps they define the true meaning of ‘writing on the upper margins.’

CHAPTER SIX

GARDEN OF THE RUINS: SHI JIMEI’S DOMESTIC FICTION A recent redefinition of Shanghai’s collective memories of the pre-revolutionary era has given fresh meaning to the literary writing of Eileen Chang, Su Qing, and other women from the 1940s. Inspired by the words, images, figures, and artifacts of this glamorous era, a new type of popular literature began to emerge on the market in the last decade of the twentieth century. A series of books by the Shanghai writer Chen Danyan ௾˂ጝ (b. 1958) provides some of the finest examples of this new genre. Chen first established herself as a successful children’s author in the 1980s. In the late 1990s, she was transformed into a spokesperson for Shanghai’s past, particularly for women of earlier decades. Chen published three books in the last three years of the twentieth century: Shanghai de fenghua xueyue ʕऺ‫ګࡘڄ‬ఆ̇ (The Sentimental Shanghai), Shanghai de jinzhi yuye ʕऺ‫΂طہڄ‬། (The Delicate Women of Shanghai), and Shanghai de hongyan yishi ʕऺ‫߹ڄ‬ᖄ᎝Ֆ (Shanghai’s ‘Radiant Faces’ and the Stories of Their Demise). The front cover design of The Sentimental Shanghai is a collage of images: a photograph of a 1930s beauty parlor, a calendar poster featuring two dancing women in close-fitting cheongsams, faint images of a staircase and a balcony, and a pan-up shot of a neo-classical edifice. This is a collection of essays recording the author’s search for remnants of ‘Old Shanghai,’ with subjects ranging from Eileen Chang’s legendary balcony to the street corner where a Pushkin statue once stood. There is even an essay describing the author’s appreciation of a personal album that once belonged to an unknown foreign minister. On the book’s front cover, Chen Danyan’s Shanghai de fenghua xueyue is rendered in English as “Shanghai Memorabilia.” It is not clear whether the translation was intended by the author or was the publisher’s way of packaging the collection of essays. To be sure, ‘memorabilia’ is not a precise translation of the expression fenghua xueyue, which is in fact a grouping of recurrent elements in China’s sentimental liter-

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ary tradition: “wind, flowers, snow, and moon.” Nevertheless ‘memorabilia’ effectively sums up a generational fascination with everything from Shanghai’s past, even trivial items such as anonymous photo albums. This entire genre can therefore be referred to as ‘memorabilia literature.’ 1 If the titles of Chen Danyan’s books are any indication, ‘memorabilia literature’ features women’s stories more prominently than any other subject. This emphasis is indicative of a collective effort in redefining women’s history as an important link to the glories and glamour of the city’s pre-revolutionary period. This effort triggered a growing interest in some of the less well-known writers from the period, such as Shi Jimei ‫ݯ‬ᐡࠀ, whose writing epitomized the mystique surrounding pre-revolutionary Shanghai. While Eileen Chang is famous as an unconventional beauty and an unrivaled literary genius, and Su Qing, the self-assured entrepreneur of the wartime publishing world, is known for her boldness and heterodoxy, it is the classic tale of an enchantingly tragic fate that marks Shi Jimei as a literary personality of her own. In 1997, a new marketing strategy was adopted by the renowned Shanghai Classics Publisher (Shanghai guji chubanshe ʕऺͅᙗ̳‫)ڊٳ‬, which was previously dedicated to publishing canonical literary texts from pre-modern China. With its newfound interest in modern works, Shanghai Classics has in recent years continuously published a book series entitled Hongying congshu: Minguo nü zuojia xiaoshuo jingdian ࠬᅬᓳएíͺ੢ʩѕࣁʮი໩յ (Shadow of Rainbow Book Series: Fictional Classics by Women Writers of the Republican Era). Shi Jimei and nine other women authors were among the first group of previously obscure writers whose positions in literary history were reinstated. Ke Ling’s editorial preface to the series further secured the position of literature by these women in the newly enlarged canon. The editing and marketing strategies for the series are reminiscent of those employed in the early 1940s when the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies writers and editors joined together to promote a generation of young female authors. In the 1990s, literary historians joined a marketoriented publishing world and an ever-fascinated readership to, once again, promote and refashion a group of popular women writers from the pre-revolutionary period. Contemporary readers’ fascination with the Minguo ͺ੢ (Republican China) era is fed by romanticized tales of the writing careers of Shi 1 See Chen Danyan, A Sentimental Shanghai (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1998).

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Jimei and other women from the 1930s and 1940s. If Shi’s writing in postwar Shanghai was marketed to highlight the melancholy and solitary aspects of her life, as represented by the simple cover design of Fengyi yuan ᄨᄭฏ, or Phoenix Garden, then her rediscovery more than four decades later romanticized her writing and career. This is evident in the reprint edition’s sensationalized cover design, which features a portrait of Shi set against a luscious garden image [Plates 16 and 17].2 The tenderness and nostalgic longing conveyed by Shi Jimei’s brand of romantic sentimentalism fit perfectly into a collective effort to rewrite each Chinese city’s own distinctive urban history, a publishing trend epitomized by the recent publication of the “Old Cities” series by the Jiangsu Fine Arts Publisher.3 Many commentaries on Shi Jimei’s life, including a memoir essay accompanying the reprint edition of Phoenix Garden, point to 1949 as a pivotal year that eventually lead to her predestined tragic fate. Shi has been depicted as having a “desolate and sorrowful destiny,” and her writing has been described as being filled with “tragic and yet radiant sentiments.” Such words reinstate the forces at work behind her success and popularity some five decades ago and perpetuate the age-old legends of beautiful, often talented, women who die too early in life 4 ( hongyan bo ming ߹ᖄᒆ֡). In post-Mao China, Shi Jimei and her works were rediscovered precisely because they evoke these connotations in the popular imagination.

2 See Shen Ji, “Shenshi qichu de nü zuojia” Խ ̛ ᱢ ๤ ‫ ڄ‬ʩ ѕ ࣁ (A Woman

Writer with a Lonely and Sad Fate), Xinmin wanbao, January 24, 1999. Also see the editorial preface by Sheng Xiaofeng ୣ ዳ ࣐ titled “Zaoji qichu, qingsi beiyan” ቴ ᄑ ᱢ ๤ ç શ ‫ ݋‬౲ ᝙ (Lonely and Painful Destiny, Tragic and Beautiful Sent iments) in the reprint edition of Phoenix Garden, 1-3. 3 The “Old Cities” (lao chengshi Ч ‫ ) ͤ ܗ‬series, with a total of fourteen vo lumes, was published by the Jiangsu Fine Arts Publisher between 1998 and 2000. This started a publishing trend of labeling everything ‘old’ to achieve optimal market effect. The publisher solicited important writers to write about their home cities. These important writers in turn called upon previous literary traditions to give each city a richly textualized history. See, for instance, Wu Liang ѹ ‫ ې‬, Lao Shanghai: yi shi de shiguang Ч ʕ ऺ í ʵ ௦ ‫ ڄ‬इ γ (Old Shanghai: The Bygone Era) (Nanjing: Jiangsu meishu chubanshe, 1998). 4 See the editorial preface by Sheng Xiaofeng in the reprint edition of Phoenix Garden, 1-3.

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Shi Jimei’s name calls to mind youth, beauty, talent, and a moving, tragic love story. The often-told version of her sad love affair is that her lover, a young man stationed with the air force in the hinterland, died during the war, and Shi Jimei remained loyal to his memory for the rest of her life. While contemporary publishers and other cultural entrepreneurs have convinced their readers of this, the truth is that Shi was a writer who emerged from the ruins of her time and established her writing career against all odds—a fact that most have underplayed in their efforts to perpetuate a mythically constructed women’s writing tradition in twentieth-century China. Personal redemption might be one way to assess the significance of Shi Jimei’s writing, but to better understand the author and her work as a cultural phenomenon, a fundamental paradox in her writing career must be addressed: Why, amidst war and occupation, was a writer such as Shi, who was hailed as a talented successor to the modern tradition of ‘boudoir fiction,’ able to gain such widespread popularity? Further, to what extent can Shi’s fiction be read as ‘boudoir fiction’? Is her writing a kind of wartime narrative disguised as domestic fiction? How does she negotiate between wartime experiences and representations of the domestic realm? Can Shi’s brand of domestic fiction be read as a critical intervention during the war and occupation? Does her career shed any light on understanding the human agencies involved in the emergence of a unique body of literary production from history’s ruins? THE PROBLEM OF ‘BOUDOIR FICTION ’

Shi Jimei was the most critically acclaimed writer in a group of young women who were promoted as the talented descendants of the school of ‘boudoir fiction.’ It was this imaginary fictional lineage that Shi herself fully exploited during the war and postwar eras. Guixiu ᄊԣ is the Chinese word for ‘boudoir,’ meaning elegance that emanates from the inner quarters. It describes a young gentry woman with literary and artistic talents. In Chinese literary history, guixiu has always been used to label the writings and art of aristocratic women. Recently, scholars have shown renewed interest in a body of women’s literature, consisting primarily of poetry, produced in Ming and Qingera China (seventeenth-nineteenth centuries). This was the period when a generation of aristocratic women and courtesans began to write.

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Although much of this literature has been traditionally labeled as guixiu , a large part of it was produced by women of the pleasure quarters.5 Until the 1930s, guixiu remained a categorical term encompassing all women writers who wrote without an explicit social or political message, demonstrated a delicate lyricism, and predominantly focused on details of domestic life. Writers in this group include Bing Xin κ˻ (1900-1999), Su Xuelin ᙨఆ‫( ظ‬1899-1999), and Ling Shuhua ࢃ֋ൡ (1900-1990). 6 The emergence of Shi Jimei and other women writers in wartime occupied Shanghai created an intriguing connection to the tradition of writing women and the culture of domesticity shaped in the preceding few centuries. May 1947 saw the publication of a collection of short stories by Shi Jimei, entitled Phoenix Garden. Among the twelve stories collected, ten were written during the war and two afterward. In her postscript entitled “Wuti” ೷ᖅ (Left Untitled), Shi reminisces: When I was a child, every year on the day of Pure Brightness, I would scatter some balsam seeds next to the garden wall. By summer, the balsams were in bloom. There was no fragrance, the petals were not that pretty, and the colors were not that striking either. But simply because I had planted them myself, I liked them and looked at them with great interest. I plucked a few petals and carefully placed them between book pages. A few days later, I opened the book and checked how the petals were doing. They had all withered and lost their colors, even less appealing than before. But I did not have the slightest intention to discard them. My blind efforts might have been a waste, but by then I became somewhat attached to the petals. So I kept them. Of course I had no idea what I had tried to preserve. Those not so attractive balsam petals, or a sense of nostalgia?7

While a reader familiar with Chinese literature would immediately categorize this type of writing as the so-called ‘boudoir style,’ others might label it as ‘sentimental,’ ‘pretentious,’ or even ‘childish.’ Shi Jimei achieved a remarkable level of literary fame in occupied Shanghai with 5 See Ellen Widmer and Kang-I Sun Chang, eds., Writing Women in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 6 See Rey Chow, “Virtuous Transactions: A Reading of Three Stories by Ling

Shuhua,” Modern Chinese Literature 4 (1988): 71-86. 7 See Phoenix Garden (Shanghai: Dazhong chubanshe, 1947), 249.

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her signature brand of writing, the trademarks of which are: light sentimentality, a tinge of melancholy and nostalgia, and an array of trivial details, such as planting flowers and watching them grow. Her narrative voice speaks slowly and delicately in low tones, sometimes simulating the sound of murmuring or whispering. It was because of this signature style of writing and the popularity of her works that she was promoted several decades earlier with a group of other famous young women from the same period. As argued earlier in the present study, the older generation of Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies writers and their journals set the stage and provided an infrastructure for the emergence of a new generation of urban writers made up mostly of young women fresh out of college. Writers and journals of the Butterflies school used this as an important marketing strategy to encourage public involvement in the print media. These young women writers were indeed the driving force behind the prosperity of wartime popular culture in Shanghai, especially during the first two years of the occupation era. Young women authors like Shi Jimei were recruited by veteran writers and publishers of the Butterflies school as part of an effort in the early 1940s to attract younger readers, namely, college and high school students, in order to sustain the school’s impact on urban life amidst the intense pressures of war and occupation. Strategically, the younger generation was gathered around several important figures and the flagship journals of the school. The goal was to foster a new generation of urban writers who would, in turn, channel their creative energies into the making of these journals. Special columns created for the purpose of attracting young writers included: “Duzhe wenyi xizuo jiangjin” ᜃ‫́ږ‬ᗟ஑ѕᇎ‫( ہ‬Readers’ Writing Practice Contest Award) in Ten Thousand Years Biweekly , “Xuesheng wenyi” ዕΆ́ᗟ (Students’ Literature) in The Fiction Monthly , and “Xuesheng wenyi xuan” ዕΆ́ᗟ᎚ (Selected Students’ Literature) in The Phenomena Monthly . The first issue of The Phenomena Monthly , published in July 1941 under the editorship of Chen Dieyi, also advertised an “Award for Student Literature,” encouraging the participation of college and high school students. Works by students were then published in the subsequent issues of the magazine. These studentoriented columns demonstrate the amount of effort that went into sustaining the regenerative relationship between reader, writer, editor, and publisher, all of which together formed an unbreakable circle.

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Chapter Two of this present study highlights the remarkable efforts of Zhou Shoujuan, the editor of The Violet Monthly , in promoting young women authors directly from the college student population. After discovering the talents of Eileen Chang, Zhou went on to foster an entire group of young women who had recently graduated from college, particularly those from the Catholic all-women’s Dongwu University. Writers in this group included Yang Xiuzhen, Yu Zhaoming, and Zheng Jia’ai, as well as its two most successful members, Shi Jimei and Cheng Yuzhen. As a marketing strategy, these young women were promoted as successors of the so-called ‘boudoir style’ of prose writing from the 1920s and 1930s. In order to legitimize their presence on the cultural scene of the 1940s, the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies writers and editors resorted to drawing from a variety of literary schools and traditions. A key strategy for reestablishing the popularity of this school of cultural production was to argue that different writing styles were continuous and inherently connected within an arbitrary history of women’s writing in modern China. Ironically, the next generation of Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies writers included none other than the young daughters of some of the school’s founding ‘fathers.’ Cheng Yuzhen, for example, was the daughter of Cheng Xiaoqing, a veteran Butterflies writer who was known as the “Chinese A. Conan Doyle.” Zhou Shoujuan also promoted the writing of his daughter, Zhou Ling. Were these young women truly a new generation of Butterflies writers? Did they successfully continue the legacies of their forefathers, or did they go on to launch an altogether different school of literature? One of Shi Jimei’s first published stories, “Wanxia de yuyun” ૴ᓝ‫ڄ‬ ኜᘜ (Traces of a Sunset), appeared in the students’ literature section of the The Fiction Monthly in September 1941. 8 In addition to her name, she was identified as “a junior at Dongwu.” By 1942, however, she and her classmates had outgrown their ‘adolescent’ identities and were all publishing their creative work in the journal’s ‘grown-ups’ section. Sharing a sense of urgency with many other women writers of her time, Shi Jimei wrote prolifically, and sometimes several of her stories appeared concurrently during the same month.9 Her writing style began

8 The Fiction Monthly 12 (September 1941): 107-116. 9 For instance, in the year 1942 alone, she published over a dozen short stories, including the following: “Gucheng de chuntian” ͅ ‫( ˭ ݱ ڄ ܗ‬Spring in the Old

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taking shape in 1943, which was a year when she composed many stories that already challenged the ‘boudoir’ label. Soon she would be writing stories and essays that took on rather subversive meanings, especially in the postwar context. Even in 1942, Shi Jimei’s story entitled “Nuanshi li de qiangwei” ๝‫ܮ‬༬‫ڄ‬ᒊᒍ (Roses in the Hothouse) went beyond the notion of ‘boudoir’ fiction.10 In the story, the first-person narrator meets an old schoolmate after several years: “This rose in the greenhouse has found her home in warmth and happiness, but I feel sad for her nonetheless. That unrivaled talent, that rare beauty, that shiny wisdom, is all flowing away silently in the river of a peaceful life.” Although the story’s sentimental tone is characteristic of student literature of the time and typical of what Eileen Chang critically dubbed “the banal tone of the New Literature” ( xin wenyi qiang ๘́ᗟ്), the narrative voice is already tinged with a note of satire and suspicion. Domestic life is presented as a trap where any possibility of fostering a healthy public identity is doomed. The message is clear enough, especially for young women about to graduate from college: educated women should lead public lives—that is, they should venture into the fresh air of the world outside their insular, petty-bourgeois homes. Shi Jimei’s stories never really deal with the ‘boudoir,’ which is the case with all of the twentieth-century women writers who have been put into this ill-fitting category. In one of Shi’s 1943 stories entitled “Di yi ge huanghun” ୶ɾࡴ෦‫( ة‬The First Dusk), Jialei, the luxury-loving female protagonist, is unable to win back her old love when she encounters him again after a separation of six years. He is determined to pursue a meaningful life in the hinterland and Jialei is eventually left alone. This is yet another satirical tale, told in a didactic tone that criticizes the limited space of a confined home life. 11 City) in The Phenomena Monthly 11 (May 1942): 71-8; “Di yi ge chutian” ୶ ɾ ࡴ ‫ݱ‬ ˭ (The First Spring) and “Putaojiu de fenfang” ༒ ൮ ਍ ‫( ڤ ڬ ڄ‬The Fragrance of Wine), both in Healthy Home Monthly 7-8 (July 1942): 13-5, 20-7; “Xiao San de chouchang” ʮ ʒ ‫ ڄ‬ઽ સ (The Melancholy of Xiao San) in The Phenomena Monthly 3 (September 1942), 50-5; “Wanli changcheng zhi yue” ໗ Ս ‫̇ ˃ ܗ ۂ‬ (The Moon over the Great Wall), in The Phenomena Monthly 6 (December 1942): 16-20; “Yu’er wanwan” ̇ հ ᛮ ᛮ (The New Moon) in Healthy Ho me Monthly 1112 (December 1942): 25-8. 10 The Phenomena Monthly 10 (1942): 51-8. 11 The Phenomena Monthly 9 (1943): 18-23.

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Shi Jimei’s most characteristic stories of 1943 were all published in Zhou Shoujuan’s Violent Monthly . One of them called “Yecao” ௴ৎ (Wild Grass) was specifically promoted by Zhou in his editorial preface: “‘Wild Grass’ creates a clear divide between love and career and provides those who have lost their love much moral support and encouragement.” 12 Fans of Shi Jimei read the story for its indirect references to the author’s own life experiences. “Ye Cao” certainly exemplifies a typical theme in Shi’s short stories of the period: the juxtaposition of love and career. Pauline, the female protagonist who is often seen reading Gone with the Wind , prefers the moral strength of Melanie Hamilton to the blind passion of Scarlett O’Hara. Midway through the story is an implausible turning point, when Pauline abruptly comes to the realization that she needs to set aside her personal feelings and devote her energy to helping orphans to do something that can be called a “real lifetime career.” In this final moment of enlightenment, her face glows with a charming radiance. A seemingly naïve story becomes complicated when interpreted against the backdrop of the author’s much-publicized personal tragedies and radical life transformations, which is precisely how Shi Jimei’s writing was received in occupied Shanghai. Readers took an active role in incorporating external systems of references into Shi’s sentimental tales. The significance of her early writing was often reinvented in this process of reception. Readers took her very seriously and generally interpreted her tender, emotional tales as being imbued with impeccable moral strength. Shi’s next story published in The Violent Monthly was again promoted by Zhou Shoujuan: I made the comment in the last issue that Ms. Shi’s writing often focused on the relation between men and women. I praised the fact that every single piece by her delivered some serious meanings. But all of sudden she seems unsatisfied with her writing. She swiftly turned around, changed her style, and wrote this story “Returning” for us. In the story she depicts the deep love between a father and a son. This is a story that can move a reader just the same and at the same time leaves the reader with different feelings and impressions.13

12 The Violet Monthly 1 (1943): 7. 13 The Violet Monthly 4 (July 1943): 1.

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“Guilai” ᔏգ (Returning) is the title of this story in which the male protagonist leaves his father and his son to teach in disadvantaged, remote areas of China. Once again, Shi’s narrative glorifies a “great cause” which is carried out at the expense of the protagonist’s private life. And yet again, an inconceivable story becomes more believable and intimate when it is compared to the public version of the writer’s life and her personal fate.14 Shi Jimei’s next story, which is entitled “Yi ge luohua shijie de meng” ɾࡴ༈‫ګ‬इ໢‫ڄ‬࿗ (A Dream in the Season of Fallen Petals), features a female protagonist, a doctor who devotes herself to helping others: Who can believe this? This gentle and willowy young woman, she does not understand personal love, but believes in love for all. She does not have tender erotic feelings, but she is equipped with a burning passion and a steel-like strong will.15

The Violet Monthly could not get enough of Shi Jimei and her sentimental tales of personal sacrifice. In the journal’s October 1943 issue, Zhou Shoujuan introduced yet another of these stories, which was entitled “Jialing Jiang shang de qiutian” ࿂௽Еʕ‫( ˭߲ڄ‬The Autumn on the Jialing River).16 Zhou praised the story in the very first paragraph of his editorial foreword, which is indicative of the vital role Shi played in the journal’s success. Shi’s story describes a group of young people driven to China’s hinterland by the war. It conveys a sense of melancholy resulting from the characters’ displacement. The Jialing River serves as a remote, exotic place symbolizing the lapse of time and the flow of personal memories. Without directly referring to the ongoing war, Shi’s lyricism weaves a symbolic tale that is every bit about the war as it is about the fate of the group of young people. As quietly as Shi emerged as a leading figure in the new generation of boudoir writing, wartime battlefields are as subtly depicted in the background of her fiction. Violence is never presented directly, but instead emerges through flashbacks, dreams, nightmares, and memories. Sacrificing one’s own individuality for a collective cause is a recurrent theme in Shi Jimei’s writing from the occupation years and her stories go far beyond the realm of the ‘boudoir.’ In a sense, the spatial signifi14 The Violet Monthly 4 (July 1943): 4-13. 15 The Violet Monthly 5 (August 1943): 59-76. 16 The Violet Monthly 7 (October 1943): 3-16.

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cance of the ‘boudoir’ has been replaced by an imaginary social space outside of the female protagonist’s own household , a space in which she abandons her private world for a cause that benefits everyone but herself. Shi Jimei’s stories depict an idealized means of solving personal conflicts by replacing them with a utopian dream world filled with peace and harmony. The irony of Shi Jimei’s brand of ‘boudoir fiction’ lies in the fact that her characters finally achieve peace and harmony by moving out of the domestic space. Home no longer provides solace or tranquility; instead, it is the battlefield that provides her characters a sense of relief. Despite this, Shi Jimei never actually describes a battlefield scene in any of her stories. Concrete domestic spaces are provided for her protagonists, who eventually abandon their comfortable, familiar surroundings in favor of unknown territory, such as the battlefields of wartime China. CHILDREN AS AMBASSADORS OF GRIEF

Many of Shi Jimei’ stories that glorify personal sacrifice also depict how personal and erotic love is displaced by more sacred kinds of emotion, such as love for children, nature, and all humankind. Such love is described in the story entitled “Ai de shengli” ื‫ڄ‬ఢѦ (The Triumph of Love). 17 When romantic love is effaced in Shi Jimei’s stories, children become the ambassadors for her brand of domestic order. In “Xiao San de chouchang” ʮʒ‫ڄ‬ઽસ (The Melancholy of Xiao San), a little sister’s quest for a small pet meets with one obstacle after another. Her mission is punctuated by an underlying sense of perpetual loss.18 A ten-year-old girl awaits her birthday celebration in “Zhenzhu de shengri” ߇ग़‫ڄ‬Ά̅ (Pearl’s Birthday), only to experience her first lesson in abandonment and loneliness.19 In “Lan tianshi” ᕇ˭՟ (The Blue Angel),20 a middle-class girl yearns for a beautiful blue coat, which to her symbolizes a high-status life of wealth and luxury. In the end, she receives nothing but grave disappointment. According to Shi Jimei, a

17 The Phenomena Monthly , extra issue (1944): 20-33. 18 The Phenomena Monthly 3 (September 1942): 50-5. 19 The Phenomena Monthly 10 (1944): 136-9. 20 The Phenomena Monthly 1 (1943): 100-3.

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material void could affect a child or young adult in the same tragic way that an emotional vacuum could. These three stories represent Shi Jimei’s effort to capture the sentimentality of young girls, a technique that came to define her narrative style during the war years. In the aforementioned postscript to Phoenix Garden, Shi Jimei further reminiscences: Even until now, inside mother’s cedar trunk, there are some well-kept things that we had when we were kids, such as tiger-shaped cotton shoes, small red silk jackets embroidered with blue plum blossoms and green birds—all worn-out pieces. There are also a Turkish hat Father bought and some faded girl scouts’ uniforms. These things are already useless and should be discarded. Why does mother still keep them? Even though it does not count as stingy, it still seems a little silly. Why do we still keep these things? Precisely out of that silliness. Sometimes I would imagine that this clumsy cedar trunk became a crystal treasure box filled with memories. Inside there are many of those yesterdays; moonlight, sunlight, stars, and brilliant times of yesterday are also sealed in there. These useless things which should have been thrown away all of a sudden became precious. With a sense of uneasiness and shyness, I have collected these stories under the title Phoenix Garden, like stowing away worn-out clothes, like cherishing withered balsam petals.21

Shi Jimei’s description of the clothing in her mother’s trunk is similar to Eileen Chang’s famed essay “A Chronicle of Changing Clothes” analyzed earlier. In the first paragraph of Chang’s essay, she writes about the annual ritual of sunning clothes and about how clothes could bring one so much closer to a lost time and a forgotten place set deep in one’s memories. 22 However, the difference between the two works is striking. While Chang presents figures without facial features, comprised mostly of lines, shapes, colors, and gestures, Shi Jimei’s references to a distant childhood and the material memories associated with it are autobiographical, full of flesh, blood, and tears. Chang’s detachment forms a sharp contrast to Shi’s sentimentalism. Shi Jimei’s brand of first-person narrative is a reconstruction of childhood voices and images. Both

21 Phoenix Garden, 249. 22 See Chapter Four, Footnote 39.

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women authors exercised their talents to piece together fantastic worlds. Chang’s display of heirloom clothes and artifacts resulted in a radical rewriting of the last one hundred years of modern Chinese history. Shi Jimei’s indulgence in imagining, reconstructing, and reminiscing a dreamy girlhood placed her narrative on a separate level so that her writing was endowed with a timelessness that transcended the political strictures of her time. In the fiction of Shi Jimei, childhood equals a past filled with treasured memories; these memories can be tucked away safely in a cedar trunk where they will be protected from the present. Shi Jimei’s depiction of children and her conceptualization of childhood provide a key to understanding the understated complexities of her brand of domestic fiction. It is for this reason that her stories about children can never be read only as ‘children’s literature.’ In children and the innocence and fragility they evoke, Shi locates an effective way to convey the sorrow and disillusionment experienced in the adult world. AFTERLIFE IN THE PHOENIX GARDEN

When read together, Shi Jimei’s wartime stories resemble a long, winding song expressing loss, sadness, melancholy, yearning, and waiting. An example of one of these songs is the 1938 hit “Heri jun zai lai” щ̅Ѽι գ (When Will You Return), in which “Golden Voice” Zhou Xuan ֟⦠ (1920-1957) sings: “After you leave tonight, when will you come back again?” In Shi Jimei’s work, invoking memories of a distant childhood further highlights the painfully slow elapse of time that one experiences when waiting for a long, drawn-out era to finally end. In the years immediately following the end of the Sino-Japanese war, Shi Jimei continued to write short stories and essays, portraying an array of personalities, mostly women, dealing with the unbearable traumas of war. These women are often left by themselves because their loved ones have either been sacrificed on the battlefield or declared missing, so that there is no hope of their return. The girlhood images of Shi’s wartime fiction are gone. Her new female protagonists are usually close to middle age, just on the verge of losing their youth and vitality. Stories glorifying personal sacrifice for a larger cause have also disappeared. Consequently, Shi’s postwar narratives appear to be war eulogies disguised as ‘boudoir fiction.’ The setting of most of Shi Jimei’s postwar stories is usually outside Shanghai, or vaguely on the outskirts of an unidentified metropolis.

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Main events often take place in a domestic type of setting: a run-down old house, a dark boudoir, and a kitchen that is generally used as a gathering place. Usually there is a back-garden that lays in the ruins, displaying only a hint of its former charm. Sometimes there is a family room where different generations of family members interact and where strangers occasionally show up to upset the existing order of the household, making even more acute the dark, ever-present memories haunting the family. “Fengyi yuan” ᄨᄭฏ (Phoenix Garden), the title work of Shi Jimei’s 1947 short story collection, best represents her mature writing style. The story is set in Suzhou, a quiet, smaller city that is a one-hour train ride from Shanghai. For a long time, Suzhou was considered a more feminine and gentle version of Shanghai. Mrs. Feng, the story’s female protagonist, lives in an old family compound outside of the city. Quiet and desolate, the place is a mirror image of Mrs. Feng’s inner world. The vast, wasted compound also symbolizes an empty emotional space marked with deeply hidden scars from the war. A young widow in her thirties, Mrs. Feng has voluntarily exiled herself from modern urban life. Her secret hopeless longing, represented by a husband who never returned home and possibly died in the war, is for a bygone era. One day, a young man arrives at the huge family compound to tutor Mrs. Feng’s two young daughters for the summer. “In this antiquated Phoenix Garden, I feel that I am walking right into the world of a hundred years ago. You know, these fancy and yet old objects really are not what I like—they remind me too much of childhood memories….,” Kang Ping explains to his fiancée in a letter. However, as time goes by, the young man finds himself inevitably drawn to the otherworldly qualities of the place and its female inhabitant. “There is a magical charm in a withering and desolate scene,” he declares. Like the mysterious garden that is filled with erotic imagery, there is an aesthetic depth in the depressed Mrs. Feng that the young man cannot resist. Mrs. Feng is also drawn to Kang Ping who awakens the long-buried youthful desires inside her. At the end of the story, the young man departs from Phoenix Garden, and the quiet order of the compound and Mrs. Feng’s inner world are both restored. Shi Jimei’s “Phoenix Garden,” which was written in 1946, does not by any means have a unique storyline. Nevertheless, it is a direct product of the author’s individual journey through years of war and trauma. Its importance becomes evident when it is read in the same context as the better recognized masterpieces of postwar literature and cinema.

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“Phoenix Garden” forms an interesting dialogue with Fei Mu’s ඗ጽ (1906-1951) 1948 filmic masterpiece Xiaocheng zhi chun ʮ‫ݱ˃ܗ‬ (Spring in a Small Town), a film that is the most critically acclaimed in pre-revolutionary Chinese cinema. Both works can be considered as critical commentaries on the ongoing civil unrest, and as generationally representative works coming to terms with memories of the preceding war. While Shi’s short story features a wasted garden, Fei Mu’s film is also set outside Shanghai, though in a small, unidentified town. Placing the story outside the metropolis enabled the filmmaker to conceptualize a knowable community deeply scarred by national and personal tragedies. A wife who has been leading a quiet life in the small town encounters her former lover, after which she begins to consider leaving her sick husband and the depressing community forever. At the film’s conclusion, the former lovers decide that it is wrong to be together, and the man departs. Thus, order within the family and the small town is restored. What links Shi Jimei’s story and Fei Mu’s film together is not the similarity of their plot lines, but rather, it is the attempt by both to portray the pervasiveness of wartime memories in daily postwar life. Fei Mu’s film opens with narration by the female protagonist: Living in a small town, living a life where nothing ever changes. Every day after I’m done buying groceries I like to walk for a while along the top of the city wall. It’s already become a habit with me. Walking along the city wall, I feel as if I’ve left this world behind. My eyes see nothing. My mind is empty. If it weren’t for the vegetable basket on my arm and the medicine for my husband in my hand, I might not go home all day.23

The image of the city wall haunts the entire film, even when it does not appear on screen. This ruin-like structure has recorded years of damage caused by war and other catastrophic events. The female voiceover repeatedly laments that in this small town and quite household, nothing changes and life elapses quietly. But perhaps the underlying message is that everything has changed. Changes are immediately absorbed into the background and become part of the painful state of life that one has to deal with on a daily basis.

23 All translations of the film script are by Andrew F. Jones, published at the Modern Chinese Literature and Culture On-line Resource Center.

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Viewers are guided by the female narrator from the city wall, through the conspicuously empty town, and into the alleys encircling the old family compound: Home. In a small lane, past a little bridge, is the back gate to our house. Now we have just one servant, Lao Huang. Lao Huang always throws the dregs from the medicine pot out of the back gate. That’s Lao Huang’s superstition.

In this scene, visual language achieves the effect created by Shi Jimei’s fictional language; that is, the damage of war can be perceived at every level of existence. Moving along into the family’s compound, the narrator refers directly to physical damage caused by the war: Our Dai family house was mostly destroyed by artillery fire. No one can live in the main house any more. I live with him in the garden courtyard. We each have our own room.

In addition to the structural damage to their house, the long-term violence has scarred their marriage. The female protagonist leads viewers into her own living quarters as her voice continues to narrate: Pushing open the door to my room … Sitting down on my own bed … I don’t know how I can get through the days that lie ahead. The days pass by, one just like the next, one after another. I’ll take my needlework and go over to his sister’s room. It seems the sun is especially nice sitting in this room. I’ve long since forgotten the past. I’ll never think about anything again.

Even in the protagonist’s present state of forgetfulness, the past pervades every aspect of her daily routine, both inside and outside her home. The restraint in her voice reveals a sense of weariness and melancholy. She carries her painful past everywhere with her like a paperback drama. Fei Mu’s film does not have the autobiographical dimension of Shi Jimei’s story. “Phoenix Garden” is autobiographical on a symbolic level; it does not actually replicate Shi Jimei’s own scarring wartime experiences. The story’s most important aspect is that it represents the state of cultural production immediately following the end of the war. The dynamics between the widow, Mrs. Feng, and the young tutor can be said to symbolically mirror the entangled relations between Shi Jimei and her captivated readership. Shi wrote with a sheer sense of selfreflexivity, aware that her own tragic past was part of her identity as a

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writer. Whenever she took up her pen to write a new story, she was haunted by memories. While her readers came to expect elements of Shi’s own life in her stories, Shi Jimei boldly presented her readers with a slice of her innermost memories, using an autobiographical pact to disguise each uniquely personal eulogy of her own life. An image toward the end of Eileen Chang’s essay “From the Ashes” accurately sums up the position of Shi and her writing in history: “The vehicle of the times drives inexorably forward. We ride along, passing through streets which are perhaps already quite familiar. But seen against a backdrop lit by flames, these scenes shake us to the core.” Only when set against a backdrop of war, can Shi’s life and her stories be viewed by the glare of battle fire. When illuminated by such a light, familiar, everyday scenes become shocking and the image of a battlefield is superimposed on the ‘boudoir.’ Shi Jimei’s persona epitomizes a fundamental paradox in wartime popular culture—in speaking the language of domesticity, Shi and others constructed their own wartime narratives. In such literature, the fictiveness of a ‘boudoir’ underscores the concerns and values of a ‘battlefield,’ as well as the lingering effects of war. A sentimental and delicate world often gives away to a backdrop lit up by the gunfire of modern war. Shi’s ‘boudoir fiction’ unsettled the writing conventions of domestic fiction to become a unique war memorial in its own right. Shi Jimei’s fictional memorialization of the war began even before the war ended. She continued writing tragic stories into the postwar era, as the end of the war with Japan brought no consolation. With China on the verge of an all-out civil war, her writing took on a renewed sense of urgency, and she continued to shape her battlefield memories to fit within the frame of ‘boudoir fiction.’ Between 1945 and 1949, in addition to Phoenix Garden, Shi also published a second collection of stories Gui yue ਥ̇ (Ghost Moon) in 1948. In the early 1950s, Shi Jimei wrote her last work, a novel entitled Mochou xiang நูܸ (Lane of No Sorrow), which was published in Hong Kong. Yonghua Studio, one of the leading mandarin film studios in the early years of the golden age of Hong Kong cinema, subsequently adapted it as a film in 1955. Shen Ji, the editor of Domestic Bliss, wrote the screenplay with veteran filmmaker Zhu Shilin, a Shanghai expatriate, as the film’s director. Li Jing and Chen Juanjuan, two rising young actors from the Shanghai era, starred in the film. Nevertheless, Shi’s fictional audience gradually dissipated; journals and newspapers no longer

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sought her stories as they had before, because none of her writing was considered appropriate in the ‘new society.’ Soon after Lane of No Sorrow, Shi terminated her writing career and lived quietly in Shanghai as a high school teacher until the Cultural Revolution broke out. With her middle-class upbringing, college diploma from a Catholic women’s college, non-revolutionary writing, and ‘petty bourgeois’ lifestyle, she became an easy target during the height of the Red Guards movement (1966-9). In 1968, at the age of forty-eight, in the prime of her life, she committed suicide amidst unbearable torture and humiliation.

EPILOGUE

TRAVELS OF EILEEN CHANG Japan surrendered on August 15, 1945, after which time the Nationalist government returned to claim the previously occupied cities in Eastern China. While China’s war of resistance had ended, conflicts between the Nationalists and Communists over the control of China intensified. Peace was fleeting. As Eileen Chang had foreseen, an even larger destruction was on its way. The end of the war brought an abrupt end to the flourishing popular culture of occupied Shanghai. Nonetheless, the personal narratives of each of the women writers examined in the present study would not be complete without an account of how their wartime activities and experiences were measured within the postwar context. A thorough understanding of how the women’s print culture took shape in occupied Shanghai also calls for an examination of the impact and extent of this culture once the era had receded. In the decade following the end of the war, some of the writers discussed in this study silently witnessed the impact of their writing and memories of that time fade away while others resolutely chose to participate in the process of producing and preserving memories of war and occupation. Some writers, such as Su Qing and Pan Liudai, adopted an authoritative voice in recording their wartime experiences, as they strove to claim a legitimate right to recount their own memories. In the end, such efforts became further evidence of their much scrutinized political past during the immediate postwar years. Perhaps the extent of wartime collaboration and compromise with the Japanese was much deeper and more extensive than anyone was willing to admit. Su Qing and Pan Liudai’s candid accounts were likely viewed by many as a shameful reminder of a scarred past. Considering that most writers were eager to rewrite their wartime history and tried to avoid any connections with the fallen regime, Su Qing’s postwar declaration that “Su Qing is the Su Qing who wrote books such as Washing Brocade and Ten Years of Married Life during the occupation era” was indeed naïve and self-incriminating.

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The end of the war certainly did not guarantee happiness for everyone. As in Eileen Chang’s 1943 short story “Blockade,” the narrative concludes with an ironic twist: the brief ‘romance’ is drawn to an abrupt close when the blockade ends and the streetcar moves again. The female protagonist has yet to experience another awakening following the end of the blockade: “The lights are switched back on inside the streetcar. She opens her eyes and sees that he is seated far away in his original seat. Somewhat shaken, she realizes that he never got off. It just dawns on her what he means: It is as if all that took place during the blockade never actually happened; the entire city of Shanghai dozed off and dreamed an absurd dream.” 1 If a blockade is to be read as a metaphor for war and occupation, as argued in earlier chapters, Eileen Chang was ahead of her time here in prefiguring a sense of bewilderment following an abrupt end to a period of prolonged torment. In Chang’s “From the Ashes,” the memoir essay written one year later in 1944, she once again foretold these same dreamlike, dazed postwar sentiments. Recalling her experiences in Hong Kong and conveying the sense of bewilderment shared by her Hong Kong University classmates following the end of the bloody Hong Kong battle of 1941, Chang wrote: “The battle ended after all. When it first stopped, it was somehow hard to adjust. Peace was a sort of agitation, a drunkenness.” 2 This kind of wartime tale would still carry immediacy if read in postwar Shanghai. Eileen Chang’s bewildered sense of loss was echoed throughout postwar Shanghai while many expressed a similarly doubtful optimism about their future. Leading a 1946 roundtable talk of Shanghai filmmakers, Bai Yang Ύ๫ (1920-1996), the famed actress best known for her roles in a series of leftist film classics such as Shizi jietou ʏϪർᏃ (Crossroads, 1937) and Yi jiang chunshui xiang dong liu ɾЕ‫̐ݱ‬ώ‫ز‬ ‫( ޟ‬Spring River Flows East, 1946-7), stated in a hopeful, yet hesitant tone: “Everyone says that it is daybreak. If so, the sun should belong to all. Let’s hope that the sunlight is not blocked by shadows and it shines on every corner. Let’s hope that we can now breathe an air of light and

1 “Blockade,” in Romances, Enlarged Edition, 377-87. 2 “From the Ashes,” in Written on Water , 43-56. This translation by Andrew F. Jones is forthcoming in Written on Water: A Collection of Essays by Eileen Chang.

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freedom in our theaters.”3 Reading this today, one cannot help but detect the peculiar lack of enthusiasm in Bai Yang’s tone as she participated in discussions on how to revive leftist cultural activities in the ruined city. Popular music of the postwar era best captures this feeling of ambivalence. In their 1946 duet hit called “Gongxi” ࣣమ (Congratulations), “Silver Voice” Yao Li ‫ܧ‬஬ (b. 1921) and her brother Yao Min ‫ܧ‬૨ (1917-1967) captured the postwar mentality of generations of Chinese who survived eight years of Japanese tyranny only to find themselves amidst a full-scale civil war: We’ve been through so much hardship We’ve endured so many struggles So many hearts have been longing Longing for news of spring Congratulations….4

The measured and somber pace of this popular song overshadows the sheer joy and relief conveyed by the lyrics and the voices suggest hesitation, exhaustion, and melancholy. Voices of the singers seem to say: “When will this be over? Hardship never seems to endå ”This contrasts with how the song is typically performed today, as a cheerful, celebratory theme song of the Chinese New Year. The original 1946 recording, however, highlights a different way to measure wartime experiences in the context of postwar politics. As argued throughout this book, the beginning of war and occupation did not completely wipe out the quotidian life of Shanghai; on the contrary, a middlebrow culture flourished during the occupation. The popular culture of the immediate postwar years presents an equally intricate picture. It was received in a complex, contrasting fashion—a mixture of joy and sadness, great anticipation and day-to-day agitation, promised peace and harsh disappointment.

3 See Bai Yang et al, “Wo dui shengli hou de xiwang” Ӎ ࿬ ఢ Ѧ ݈ ‫ ڄ‬ҹ ૻ (My Hope after the Victory), Yinju shijie (World of Film and Theater) 1 (February 1946). 4 Unpublished translation by Andrew F. Jones. For a study of Yao Li and four

decades of shidai qu इ ̩ Ї (modern song), see Huang Qizhi, ed., Shidai qu de liuguang suiyue 1930-1970 इ ̩ Ї ‫ ޟ ڄ‬γ ๶ ̇ (A Shiny History of the Modern Song, 1930-1970) (Hong Kong: Sanlian shudian, 2000).

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POSTWAR DEPARTURES

What further complicates the cultural atmosphere of postwar Shanghai is that the postwar narratives extend beyond dichotomies of joy and sadness. They continue with the even more significant themes of departure and travel. Among the generation of Shanghai’s popular wartime fiction writers—those who had experienced both a rapid rise to fame and a quick descent into obscurity in such a brief period of time—Pan Liudai and Eileen Chang were the only two writers who left Shanghai by the late 1940s and early 1950s. Further, Eileen Chang was the sole writer from occupied Shanghai whose literary legacy not only survived, but transcended national boundaries and waves of radical transformation in the following decades. Dubbed as the “Chinese Greta Garbo,” Chang’s unsurpassed status as a cultural celebrity in occupied Shanghai, as well as her chosen reclusive life during her four decades in the United States, formed a sharp and puzzling contrast that contributed to her near mythical status.5 When she died in 1995, she had lived long enough to witness how the legends surrounding her life increasingly grew in the popular cultures of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and other Chinese communities around the world. Although she chose to witness the growing legends from a safe distance, remaining unaffected most of the time, no cultural history of twentieth-century China would be complete without an account of how the urban legends surrounding Chang took shape amidst wartime turmoil and subsequently evolved and traveled across national and political boundaries in the following decades. The reception of Eileen Chang’s writing in the last sixty years itself comprises a rich cultural history, one that is closely intertwined with war, revolution, migration, and urban transformations. With the end of the Sino-Japanese War in 1945, Chang was politically impaired because of her personal association with Hu Lancheng

5 For accounts of Chang’s American years, see Sima Xin ͌ ਠ ๘ , Zhang Ailing

yu Lai Ya ઠ ื ߆ Ⴉ ᎋ ු (Eileen Chang and Ferdinand Reyher) (Taipei: Dadi chubanshe, 1996). Also see Zheng Shusen ቷ ዾ ಷ (William Tay), Zhang Ailing de shijie ઠ ื ߆ ‫( ߍ ̛ ڄ‬The World of Eileen Chang) (Taipei: Yunchen, 1994).

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ࠍᚱϾ (1906-1981), 6 a key intellectual player in the Wang Jingwei col-

laborationist government, and her professional association with the literary circle surrounding The Miscellany Monthly and several other Japanese-backed literary journals. She continued writing, though sparingly, during the postwar years, sometimes under a pseudonym. Her first novel Shiba chun ʏʉ‫( ݱ‬Eighteen Springs), later reissued as Bansheng yuan ̽Άሇ (Destined for Half a Lifetime), was serialized in an entertainment newspaper called Yi bao Πే in 1948 under the pseudonym Liang Jing ૼ՚. With the Communist takeover of 1949, Chang was further disillusioned by the prospect of continuing her writing career in Shanghai. In 1952, she decided to bid farewell to the city and headed south to the other metropolis of the Far East—Hong Kong. The passport photo she took preceding her departure shows a more mature woman now in her early thirties. Like Bai Liusu, her female protagonist in the novella Romance from the Ruins , Chang also returned to Hong Kong, the place where she spent her college years. This was the second time that she took up residence in the city, but Hong Kong was not to be a permanent home for her. Perhaps she never intended to make Hong Kong the final destination in her travels. From 1952 to 1955, Chang worked at the Hong Kong branch of the USIA (United States Information Agency) as a translator. She translated Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays, among other works, into Chinese. She also translated Chen Jiying’s ௾ߺ⽲ anti-Communist novel Dicun zhuan யӫ෭ (The Story of Di Village) and other propaganda materials into English for the agency to disseminate in Southeast Asia and other third-world regions. 7 Chang’s three years in Hong Kong were productive since she also completed her two major novels, The Rice-Sprout Song and The Naked Earth , first in English, and then translated into Chinese by herself. Both 6 Chang was briefly married to Hu Lancheng during the Japanese occupation. For

an account of the courtship and their married life, see Hu Lancheng, Jinsheng jinshi ˑ Ά ˑ ̛ (This Life and This World) (Taipei: Yuanjing, 1996), 167-200. 7 See Chen Jiying, “Dicun zhuan fanyi shimo: jian ji Zhang Ailing” ய ӫ ෭ ᔿ ᙲ ֻ Ͷ í ࡾ ৩ ઠ ื ߆ (Eileen Chang and the Translation of The Story of Di Village), Lianhe wenxue (Unitas) 3. 5 (March 1987): 92-4. Rendered as Foods in the Reeds, Chang’s translation of Chen’s novel was first published by the Rainbow Press of Hong Kong in 1959.

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were anti-Communist novels commissioned by the USIA, first serialized in the monthly journal Jinri shijie ˑ̛̅ߍ (World Today), the flagship publication of the agency’s Hong Kong branch, and then published in book form, both in English and Chinese, by the agency’s press in 1954. 8 Both novels came at the height of the repressive McCarthy era and should be examined within that political context. With the completion of these two novels, Chang gained an immigrant visa to go to the United States in 1955. Typically there have been two ways of viewing this part of Chang’s life: one is to dismiss her two novels as political propaganda, while the other is to commend them as Chang’s political and artistic protest against the authoritarian government of China and its repressive cultural policies. However, neither stance is historically accurate, since, for decades, Chang had resisted becoming a spokesperson for any ideological front and chose to walk a fine line along cultural, ethnic, political, and national boundaries. This was an unpredictable position complicating not only the difficult choices she made throughout the Cold War era, but also her activities during the wartime occupation, including her involvement with the Nazi funded English language journal The XXth Century. 9 Political ambiguities aside, Chang’s literary fame traveled far beyond wartime Shanghai. In recent decades, her works have been canonized in new literary historiographies produced on both sides of the Pacific Ocean. Scholars have reestablished Chang’s reputation, assigning her an unparalleled position as one of the most gifted stylists in the modern

8 The Rice-Sprout Song was also published in the U.S. by Scribner’s in New York

in 1955. The Chinese title for The Rise-Sprout Song is Yangge ঌ ိ , and the Chinese title for The Naked Earth is Chidi zhi lian Ժ ϙ ˃ ᜣ . 9 For a background of the journal XXth Century, see Bernard Wasserstein, Secret War in Shanghai: Treachery, Subversion and Collaboration in the Second World War (London: Profile Books 1998 and Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999). According to Wasserstein, “by far the most intellectually impressive and polished propaganda vehicle in any language produced in Shanghai during the war was the German-controlled English-language literary and politic al monthly XX Century. This journal, produced from October 1941 until the summer of 1945, was funded by the propaganda section of the German Foreign Ministry. Its editor, Klaus Mehnert, became a well-known personality in wartime Shanghai.” Also according to Wasse rstein, “Thanks to its official subsidy, the magazine cost very little and through it had only 3,500 subscribers was considered one of the most influential propaganda outlets in the Far East. A postwar American intelligence report called the magazin e ‘one of the slickest bits of propaganda work that has been done anywhere.’”

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Chinese literary canon. At the same time, Chang’s works once again became popular among readers in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Chinese diasporic communities around the globe. Her life and work had a particular impact on a group of young women authors in Taiwan and Hong Kong who formed the Chang School of fiction in the 1970s and 1980s. As a result of the wholesale reexamination of literary histories in post-Mao China, “Eileen Chang fever” also swept through cities on the mainland. Pirated editions of her early fiction and essays flooded sidewalk bookstalls in Shanghai and elsewhere. This newfound interest became one part of a collective effort to uncover the cultural history of pre-revolutionary Shanghai and to redefine the city as a major metropolis on the new global map. Consequently, Eileen Chang, as a literary figure, has become an intriguing trademark for the reconstructed ‘Old Shanghai.’ Both sides of the Pacific witnessed the final wave of frenzied media coverage of this enigmatic figure following her quiet death in a west Los Angeles apartment on a late summer day in 1995. Chang seemed fully aware of her waves of popularity, but stayed out of the limelight throughout the decades, except when she occasionally dropped clues pertaining to missing pieces of her literary past. None of those clues, however, offered a sufficient explanation for her travels. The external factors leading to Chang’s travels from the late 1930s through the mid-1950s seem apparent. However, there are many twists and turns in events, which these external factors do not account for. The reasons for Chang’s move from Hong Kong to Shanghai in 1941 seem sufficient; so does the direct cause of her final farewell to Shanghai and the People’s Republic of China in 1952. What remains a mystery are the factors that compelled her to board a ship sailing for Honolulu in the fall of 1955. While this has long been a mystery to Chang biographers, clues are sure to be found elsewhere, preferably within the literary texts themselves. Solving such a mystery would help in situating the 1940s women’s writing culture of occupied Shanghai within the broader context of its own era, as well as within the postwar period. Eileen Chang’s writing from the occupied and postwar eras tells the tale of two cities, Hong Kong and Shanghai. Many scholars have searched for evidence in literature, film, and popular culture of the last five decades to illustrate the inherent connections between the two cities, but exactly how Eileen Chang positioned both cities on her map of fictional global travels in the years following the war remains a mystery.

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Here, the precise words that would elucidate the dynamics between the two cities in Chang’s modern legends have not yet been located. What did Chang’s final departure from both cities in 1955 mean? Furthermore, what did it mean for her to write about stories of departure during that period? Many of her fellow Shanghai expatriates stayed on in Hong Kong. Why did she not stay in Hong Kong, as so many others did? Are there any textual clues that might shed light on why she did not follow the trend? Is it possible to locate the importance of Chang’s own travels in her fiction narratives of departure and travel? One way to solve the puzzle is to recognize the fact that in the 1950s, Eileen Chang finally developed a way to use narrative techniques to travel between the two cities, and, by doing so, was able to situate her Shanghai stories within a global context. In other words, the significance of her real life travels is mirrored in her narratives of traveling Chinese nationals. On a more personal level, Chang once again manipulated the autobiographical contingencies in her writing to complete a life story uniquely her own. Textual strategies were again used as an everyday means of coping during a turbulent and violent era. In the cultural memories of Shanghai, one of the most striking images is of Eileen Chang spontaneously writing “Hurry! Hurry! Otherwise it will be too late! Too latK!”10 Written in 1944, she was in a hurry to establish her life and to secure her fame as a popular icon. In the autumn of 1955, there seemed to be a similar sense of urgency running through her writing, a desire to leave everything behind, to escape, to flee, and to demonstrate her reluctance to live in a place filled with shadows of her own past, and of a national past. This can be seen in the three short stories that Chang wrote between 1952 and 1955: “Se jie” иӌ (Lust and Precepts), “Xiangjian hua” ߟԳ ᛲ (Joy of Reunion), and “Fu hua lang rui” ि‫ګ‬ऴ፡ (Flowers at Sea). These are three somewhat obscure stories by Chang that critics rarely talk about. They have always been overshadowed by the two antiCommunist novels she wrote during the same period. Nonetheless, within these stories lies an important narrative of the Chinese diaspora, providing a crucial definition of the actual positions of Shanghai and Hong Kong in Chang’s image/map of a Greater China. The obscurity of these three stories is due to the fact that Chang did not get them published until 1979, more than two decades after she wrote them. Furthermore, the stories are rather difficult to read. They 10 See “Preface to Romances, Second Edition,” in Written on Water , 203.

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are at odds with her early writings and even with her writings of the same period. Her wartime fiction contrasts with these stories in the sense that, even when writing about turbulence, the narrative strives for a state of settling in, and working to find a sense of stability and continuity in life against all odds. In these stories from the mid-1950s, Chang conversely only seems concerned with themes of travel and fleeing—not belonging—and forever being on the move. The greatest difficulty in interpreting the stories lies in the narrative style, which appears to be new. Compared with her earlier writing, these three stories are fragmentary. There are multiple layers of narration, and juxtapositions of several perspectives, with little plot development. The narrative also intersects several time frames, all woven together in a complex fashion. The story entitled “Lust and Precepts” is the only story among the three that is set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. While Chang’s earlier stories published in the 1940s normally do not address the situation of wartime occupation directly, “Lust and Precepts” presents the specific social and political atmosphere in occupied Shanghai in an uncharacteristically direct fashion. The story depicts a young woman named Wang Jiazhi ̙՞‫ڥ‬, a Hong Kong native, who travels to Shanghai to work as a spy for the exiled Nationalist government. Infiltrating the upper-class circles of the collaborationist regime, she becomes the secret mistress of a high-level official. Wang’s mission is to assist her male comrades in assassinating the man, but at the most crucial moment, she lets him go. Escaping from the trap, her lover orders his men to seal the entire city, thus capturing Wang and her comrades. The story implies that he orders their executions. If other writers of her era had written this story, it would be about a young woman sacrificing her youth and dreams to save her nation from foreign invaders and their local collaborators. It would become a heroically tragic tale in which the woman’s life is the price of an aborted mission. However, Chang’s “Lust and Precepts” is an unusual wartime narrative. The female protagonist Wang Jiazhi is portrayed as the most unlikely heroine for a nationalistic cause. At the beginning of the story, readers are led into Wang Jiazhi’s inner psyche to understand that this young woman views her new mission as similar to her experience of acting in a school play: She was an actress before, right now she is still exerting all her strength on a ‘stage.’ The difference is that nobody knows about it and she cannot become well known for this act.

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What she performed at school were also passionate historical dramas about nationalistic themes. Now the act continues….11

Toward the end of the story, in the jewelry store where the assassination is supposed to take place, it is Wang Jiazhi’s fantasies that disrupt the planning and eventually doom her: åShe feels that it was just the two of them cuddled together in the light of the lamp. She feels taken over by an intimate feeling for him. She has never felt this way before. åHis silhouette faces the light, his eyes look downward, and his eyelashes seem like cream-colored wings, resting on his haggard face. For her this is an expression of tenderness and compassion. This man really loves me, it suddenly occurs to her. Something is falling apart in her heart. She feels somewhat lost.12

At this critical moment, Jiazhi is the person who seems to be in control, who gets to choose between the larger cause of national salvation and her innermost feelings. Neither has a clear shape to her, nor makes much sense. Life consists of one scene after another, but in this particular one, it is her innermost feelings that become clearer. Her longing for connectedness and intimacy, is brought to the foreground, under the dreamy orange light of the jewelry store, while her moral and national obligations recede into the dark background. Justice, righteousness, comradeship, nation, duty, and morality—all become irrelevant. Wang Jiazhi chooses to focus on one single moment of lucidity and sadness. Chang’s only story dealing with wartime politics is a loudly discordant tune, one that puzzles her critics and forces them to turn away from this story so as to avoid placing it within the context of the literature of her time. Chang’s transgression across national and geographic boundaries continues in the story entitled “Flowers at Sea.” Here Chang once again plays with language in her title and makes it difficult to render it precisely in English. The title itself suggests multiple readings of the central 11 See Wangran ji ઻ ೸ ৩ (Disillusionment) (Taipei: Huangguan chubanshe,

1983), 18-20. 12 Ibid., 30.

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image. It can be rendered as “Floating Petals,” which is its literal translation, or might suggest “Flowers of Frivolity” in an extended fashion. ‘Fu’ and ‘lang’ in Chinese both suggest ‘frivolous.’ To render it as “Flowers of Frivolity” highlights the shifting moral, ethnic, as well as national identities that the female protagonist occupies, but it compromises the powerful imagery of boundless waters. Consequently, an appropriate translation would be “Flowers at Sea,” which retains the figurative nature of the naming and also to suggest the story’s inherent connection with a late nineteenth-century novel, Han Bangqing’s ᓟՉ ᅯ (1856-1894) Hai shang hua ऺʕ‫( ګ‬Flowers of Shanghai), which Chang was very fond of and claimed to have gained much inspiration from. “Flowers at Sea” accounts for the female protagonist, Luozhen’s ީ࠶, mental as well as physical journeys from Shanghai to Hong Kong, which were followed by her departure from Hong Kong aboard a cargo ship sailing into the South China Sea. The story describes Hong Kong as one stop in a long and winding journey that seemingly points nowhere, while at the same time it depicts the female protagonist as a lonely traveler with no home to return to—as someone who is constantly searching on a map devoid of a final destination. Simulating the jolting motion of a small cargo ship on a boundless ocean, the narrator plunges her character back and forth, to a Shanghai of a somewhat distant past, to a Hong Kong of a more immediate past, to the present that is depicted as frozen in a vacuum tunnel, and to a future that lies quietly on the horizon. The title “Flowers at Sea” is then a metaphor for the diasporic experience. The story is a witness to Chang’s participation in a so-called “transnational migrant circuit”13 from mainland China to Hong Kong or Taiwan, and eventually to the United States. It should be read as diasporic literature, which was written in flux and was two decades in the making. A sea filled with floating flower petals is also a spatial symbol that describes the historical, cultural, political, as well as geographical relation between Hong Kong and major political entities, including that of the People’s Republic of China, the United States—the ‘free world’ —and the island nation of Taiwan. The female protagonist finds that it 13 A term used by Roger Rouse in his “Mexican Migration and the Social Space

of Postmodernism” published in the inaugural issue of Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1. 1 (Spring 1991): 8-21.

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has been impossible for her to establish roots—certainly not in Hong Kong, a place that is itself floating and shifting on the world map, as it is constantly changing its dynamics with other geographic and political locales. As the story opens, we find Luozhen crossing the South China Sea on a cargo ship: A cargo ship on the South China Sea, a peculiar group of passengers, the milieu of the 1920s and 1930s, and even the submissive male servant, all suggesting a sense of the uncanny….14

The cargo ship on the South China Sea simulates a carved out time and space removed from both Hong Kong and Shanghai. In a daze she seems to be passing through a hotel corridor. The place is like a well-preserved archaic structure, with thick carpet absorbing footsteps. A meticulously concealed space, or a round tunnel for time travel. The ground is a little slippery and thus her feet feel a little weak.15

Then there is a flashback of another border-crossing, which is pushed to the foreground. This is the transition from China to Hong Kong, through the bridge over the Luohu Lake: The bridge over the Luohu Lake was somewhat like this. Shielded by a rooftop and lined with two coarse walls, one could not see any outside view since the small window cells on the walls were set well above a normal person’s height. A hastily assembled structure. The rooftop and the wooden boards across the bridge must have been there for a while, painted in dark brownish-red. Showing signs of decades of wear, those thin wooden boards became soft, warm, and a little springy. Flustered, she carried two thick and heavy suitcases and inched forward, bouncing up and down. The body of the bridge was wide, and the rooftop was high. With small electric lights sparingly set on the ceiling and not much daylight steeping in, it was dark and hazy. She lost count of her steps, but the bridge could not have been so very long—this was only a small river that ran along the border—or was it a small lake? The Luohu Lake.16

14 See Disillusionment, 39. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid.

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Here the cargo ship also resembles a corridor of time and an important passage. The bridge over the Luohu Lake, connecting mainland China and Hong Kong, is another such corridor. The two journeys are superimposed upon one another. As in many of her earlier stories, Chang’s means of evoking visual effects through words is cinematic. In this story, Hong Kong of the supposedly ‘free world’ is not at all free. There is still a constant sense of being watched, and an atmosphere as gloomy and repressive as Shanghai under the Japanese occupation or under Communist rule. From the perspective of the female protagonist, the expatriate society is suffocating. Hong Kong represents both a shadowy distant past and an uncertain present. While living in Hong Kong, Luozhen is trapped within her own mind; trapped by thoughts of a past she wants to flee from, a difficult-to-grasp present, and a future that is as vast and unreachable as the other end of the ocean. The story then continues: ååFortunately it was time to leave soon afterwards. On the boat, everything else is kept away by the ocean. Sometimes space functions just like time which helps people forget. No wonder in foreign novels doctors often prescribe a medication called ‘travel.’ Traveling by sea is even more effective, like American ginseng, a potion that cures all.17 ååShe treasures this moment of passing through a vacuum tunnel, clinging to nothing, so at peace with herself, as if drifting in the air.18

The story is about a prolonged process of transition. Unlike Chang’s earlier works about Shanghai or Hong Kong, this story is no longer about a particular place, but about the duration of time when passing from one place to another: The boat is small but the waves are fierce. Leaning against the small white copper washbasin, she feels that the boat is shuddering underneath her feet, as if in an earthquake, sending her to a bewildered state. People next door are still vomiting violently—those fearful noises. Listening to those noises would normally be painful, but she remains unaffected. The terror from a life of tumbling and drifting is kept outside the closed door. Though still lurking nearby, it seems far and distant.19

17 Ibid., 63. 18 Ibid., 65. 19 Ibid., 65-6.

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In this long and winding moment of transition, the narrator conveys an acute awareness of memories returning to her in different shapes. “Flowers at Sea” is a story about positioning, transition, and connections between places, rather than about the places themselves. Chang’s ability to weave together a sequence of plotless, yet dynamic images is truly remarkable. The mid-1950s to the late 1970s was the period when Chang, tucked quietly away from the frenzied public, searched for a new narrative style that would effectively capture the layered experiences of diasporic Chinese in the twentieth century. This was also the period when she did extensive research on two of her favorite pre-modern novels: The Dream of the Red Chamber and Flowers of Shanghai. Additionally, she was finally able to compose a sequel to all of her early narratives. Most significantly, this was also the period when Chang was finally able to package her Shanghai memories and contextualize them within the entire twentieth century. These three obscure stories from the 1950s are Chang’s conscious effort to practice writing so-called socio-documentary fiction ( shehui xiaoshuo ‫ڊ‬๡ʮი), reminiscent of a type of narration prevalent during the late nineteenth century, exemplified by Han Bangqing’s novel Flowers of Shanghai . No central plot is carried throughout the fragmentary events of the narrative and the characters are presented as a gallery of figures. Omnisciently, the narrator’s voice relates the story and comments on events from a distance. There is a multiple presence of the author in the narrative: as a character, observer, witness, narrator, and commentator. Through an application of the technique of layering, the narrator in novels such as Flowers of Shanghai has no trouble juxtaposing different perspectives, sometimes making dramatic leaps from one to another. Chang’s use of the title “Flowers at Sea” grew directly from her understanding of the late nineteenth-century narrative tradition. One might even argue that the 1955 story pays tribute to the Chinese fictional tradition that she revered. As in other well-known traditional Chinese novels, the opening of Flowers of Shanghai is a meditation on the fictional origins of the novel. The traditional Chinese narrator in an extended narrative such as this also begins the story in a strongly self-referential tone. Here Mr. Hua Ye Lian Nong ‫ګ‬ʛᅺᄱ, meaning “even flowers pity you,” which is the author’s pseudonym, becomes a fictional character in the opening chapter. This fictional narrator claims that the novel is generated from one of Mr. Hua Ye Lian Nong’s dreams:

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The events unfold with a dream of Mr. Hua Ye Lian Nong. We do not know how this Hua Ye Lian Nong enters into this dream, but all he can feel is that his body starts drifting, as if weightless, swaying back and forth, and then rolling forward as if powered by clouds and mist. Hua Ye Lian Nong looks up and sees that he has left his original spot. Looking around and unable to distinguish a pathway, he realizes that he is surrounded by a boundless sea of flowers.20

Following this, the narrator addresses his readers directly, as the storyteller in traditional linked-chapter narratives typically does, explaining the symbolic meanings of “YKG of flowers”: Gentle reader, you should know that the words “flowers” and “sea” have specific meanings. One sees no water in this sea, only numerous flower petals, with leaves and twigs still attached, floating on the surface, smooth and soft as a brocade quilt, sheltering the water underneath.21

This “sea of flowers” is by no means a peaceful place, as Mr. Hua Ye Lian Nong learns when his thoughts dramatically transform: Seeing only flowers and no water, a much delighted Hua Ye Lian Nong paces and gestures in dance movements, not in the least bothered by the enormous span and depth of the sea. As if on a solid ground, he lovingly lingers around, with no intention of abandoning the scene. But much to his surprise, though adorned with leaves and twigs, those flowers are, after all, rootless. Only supported by the water underneath, they are constantly charged by waves, can only go with the flow, and let the surge take them to wherever it settles. [All petals are thus dramatically damaged and ruined on the way]….22

His dream has now been transformed into an emotional journey of discovery, loss, and lamentation: Hua Ye Lian Nong witnesses the changing scene and becomes overtaken by a sense of loss and sorrow. The sudden shift from joy to sadness upsets him. Flustered and dazzled, he is further impacted by the gusty wind. His body begins to lose its balance, swinging back and forth. He then

20 Han Bangqing, Haishanghua liezhuan ऺ ʕ ‫ ګ‬λ ෭ (Histories of Flowers of Shanghai) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1981), 1-2. Chang translated the novel both into standard vernacular Chinese and English. The translations of the excerpts of the novel here are all by the present author. 21 Ibid., 2. 22 Ibid.

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steps into an empty spot among the flower petals, slips underneath, and eventually falls into this sea of flowers.23

In the next scene, the strong emotions have pushed Mr. Hua Ye Lian Nong into another state of mindfulness: Hua Ye Lian Nong lets out a cry. In vain he struggles and falls a thousand feet until he hits the bottom. He opens his eyes to detect where he has landed. He discovers that it is right on the ground of the city of Shanghai and the exact location is the Lu Family Stone Bridge that borders the Chinese city and the Western concession. Hua Ye Lian Nong rubs his eyes and manages to gain a solid footing, remembering that the date is February 12. Since early morning after he left home, he must have taken a wrong path and been overwhelmed in the sea of flowers until the dramatic fall. But he has this fall to thank for bringing him back to lucidity. Thinking back to previous events, all is still vivid. “In the end that was a big dream,” he sighs and continues in a state of bewilderment.24

Han Bangqing’s ingenuity lies in the fact that he further complicates the narrative by introducing yet another state of wakefulness: Gentle reader, do you think Hua Ye Lian Nong has indeed awakened or not? Please all take a wild guess. Of course Hua Ye Lian Nong himself thinks that he is awake. Intending to go home, he can’t decide which direction to take. In a daze, he walks down the bridge and runs into a young gentleman who happens to be rushing down the bridge….25

Rushing down the bridge, this young man knocks Mr. Hua Ye Lian Nong down, thereby plunging him into a different state of wakefulness, into the unfolding of the story’s central events in the pleasure quarters of Shanghai’s Chinese city in the late nineteenth century. Throughout the novel, the reader senses the pervasive presence of the author in the form of a narrator, an eyewitness, and a crude commentator, simultaneously. Eileen Chang viewed the novel’s abrupt ending as “very modern.” There is no explanation as to what becomes of many of the characters, the narrator, the witness, and the author’s voice. The reader is prompted to wonder whether Mr. Hua Ye Lian Nong ever returns to his original state of wakefulness. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 2-3. 25 Ibid., 3.

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Events in this late Qing novel take place on three different levels. On the most basic level, there is the act of storytelling, of moving through a gallery of figures and playing out daily details in an episodic fashion. On a second level, one perceives the voice of a commentator narrating the social/cultural/political history of the late nineteenth-century Shanghai. This narration of Shanghai is characterized by contrasts between the Chinese city and the Western concessions, contributing to a visualization of a very specific locale and historical period. On yet a higher level, the sea of flowers is an allegorical structure, possibly a symbol of China or a metaphor for individual fate, particularly women’s fate. Correspondingly, Chang’s short story “Flowers at Sea” also operates on three intersecting temporal and spatial layers: the Shanghai experience, the Hong Kong experience, and the timeless corridor of the ocean. Yet another layer of perspective is Chang’s hindsight of the previous two decades. Writing about a period twenty years past, Chang was finally able to refine the art of layering to convey these intersecting perspectives. Ultimately, her rediscovery of a lost form of the art of fiction, which was an integral part of the Chinese aesthetic tradition, helped her to develop an essential means of connecting these different places and remapping China. In Chang’s postwar imagination, occupied Shanghai no longer existed in a vacuum, as a lonely spot on the trajectory of modern Chinese history. Perhaps for Chang, living in Shanghai during the 1940s, her college years in Hong Kong began to seem like a phantasmal experience, one that could serve as an allegory for the ongoing war. Upon returning to Hong Kong ten years later, she was probably haunted by memories of life in both cities. An ocean-going cargo boat bears Chang’s fictional narrator far away from Shanghai and Hong Kong in the story “Flowers at Sea.” Her experiences in the two cities represent separate states of wakefulness in the narrative. Here, the ocean creates a vacuum-like space in which the narrator can see all of the intersecting layers of her past life. Interestingly, it was a traditional technique of fiction writing that allowed Chang to finally put all of the pieces together, in order to figure out the meaning of her departure from Hong Kong in the 1950s. By the late 1970s, Chang, who first conceived the story two decades earlier, finally gained the insight of a traditional storyteller, and was able to look back into the past as a true novelist. In a story that might not seem autobiographical at first glance, Chang’s seasoned narrative voice textualized her own personal past, packing it into heavy suitcases crammed

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with metaphors, symbols, and storylines. Fiction finally became a meticulously constructed realm where both Chang’s personal and China’s national pasts were neatly scrutinized, localized, packed, and sealed. Hong Kong was not merely a mirror image of Shanghai, nor was it only a short stop in a long journey. Both Shanghai and Hong Kong fulfilled Chang’s narrative of diasporic Chinese as well as her image of China. Read today, Chang’s 1955 short stories speak to an important cultural phenomenon, that is, how legends about her personal life have been read together with her published works and circulated for decades among various Chinese communities in the world. The three stories, in particular “Flowers at Sea,” present Chang’s own interpretation of her personal journey through the decades as a response to numerous efforts by others to interpret her life and work. Most importantly, “Flowers at Sea” addresses a global circulation process that includes the movement of people, specifically from mainland China to Hong Kong/Taiwan and finally to the United States. Included in this circulation process is also a traveling popular culture consisting of literature, film, music, and other cultural forms that were created and disseminated throughout China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, the United States, and the rest of the world. Chang’s 1955 story created a travel map containing these key landmarks while at the same time reminding her readers of the specific histories of each individual site. By the late 1970s, Chang’s wartime narrative was finally complete with “Flowers at Sea.” FINAL DEPARTURES

In this book, I have made a conscious effort to portray Eileen Chang as a more or less reluctant spokesperson for her generation of women writers. This is not only because she was the most prominent writer from the period, but more importantly, her presence helped keep the memories associated with her time intact. In other words, Chang serves as a crucial link to a lost page in Shanghai’s recent history. The time-tested eminence of Eileen Chang helped make it possible for a researcher such as myself to locate a body of texts that had long been forgotten and to unveil a dust-covered page of cultural history of modern China. This study’s examination of Chang and other non-revolutionary women of her time demonstrate how much they achieved in such a brief

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period and under such adverse conditions. Women writers in occupied Shanghai transformed a variety of cultural genres, including the popular journal, autobiographical fiction, and the modern essay, to write the experience of war and turbulence into their new urban mythologies. They overtly challenged literary conventions and sought alternatives in literary writing. In addition to generic innovations, Shanghai women’s urban legends also provided an alternative way of viewing everyday life. Women writers redefined the boundaries between life and work, fundamentally redefined femininity, and devised everyday survival strategies for women both inside and outside the household. As a result, a distinctive chorus of voices and identities was created, in which the details of women’s lives were choreographed, including the living spaces inside and outside of the household, clothes, food, leisure, and other temporal and spatial categories of culture characteristic of the wartime period. Their messages shine through the pages of archived books that are now thickly covered in dust and stamped with the red seals of their former owners. Scarlett O’Hara traveled across the Pacific Ocean to reach her audience in the besieged Shanghai of the early 1940s. Eileen Chang, the most prominent writer of the occupied city, became a cultural icon in her own right. After decades of exile, Chang reemerged as a cultural icon in the popular culture of post-Mao China. Reprinted editions of works by Eileen Chang and Su Qing became hot commodities in the bestseller market of contemporary China. The writings of Chang and Su appealed to the contemporary readers’ continuing fascination with women’s literature and went hand-inhand with major commercial successes launched by a generation of young female bestselling authors, such as Wei Hui ሴᅰ, Mian Mian ೂೂ, Pi Pi ΏΏ, and Zhou Jieru ֟ᆸ৓. Emerging in major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai in the late 1990s, these young women identified themselves as “a new literary breed” ( wenxue xin renlei ́ዕ๘ʆᘝ) and engaged in what they proclaimed to be “another kind of writing” ( linglei xiezuo ͏ᘝᅝѕ). Urban women writers of the pre-revolutionary era are named as the forerunners and sources of inspiration for these new authors. From the traditional women’s domain of the ‘boudoir,’ their fictional characters, often with an autobiographical touch/flourish, now occupy cafés, ballrooms, discos, movie theaters, downtown offices, streets, parks, newspapers, and magazines. To a literary historian, the commercial success experienced by the 1990s generation of media-savvy writers is reminiscent of the enthusi-

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astic reception of women writers in occupied Shanghai more than half a century ago. Much to the envy and dismay of mainstream writers, this second group of women writers enjoyed major commercial successes in the tradition of Eileen Chang and Su Qing. 26 Contemporary critics labeled the new literature as “beautiful women’s literature” ( meinü wenxue ࠀʩ́ዕ), with a derogatory emphasis on meinü to downplay its literary value. 27 So controversial was this style of writing, that in 2000, novels by Wei Hui and Mian Mian were officially banned in mainland China, with censors claiming that their sexually explicit details had an adverse effect on the reading public. Wei Hui and Mian Mian have traveled to territories that Eileen Chang and Su Qing could not possibly have imagined over half a century ago. Censorship once again proved to be the best publicity tool; even more substantial success awaited Wei Hui and Mian Mian after Chinese censors banned their works from the domestic market. In search of another readership, they journeyed across the strait to the bestseller market of Taiwan, which claimed it would publish anything that could not pass the censorship of mainland China.28 The same commercial pitch from Taiwan was used to market Wei Hui and Mian Mian and their works on the other side of the Pacific Ocean. In 2001, an English translation of Wei Hui’s Shanghai baobei ʕऺᘽԹ, or Shanghai Baby, was published. The fact that the novel was banned in China became the selling point for its English edition. “Dark and edgy, deliciously naughty, an intoxicating cocktail of sex and the search for love, Shanghai Baby has already risen to cult status in mainland China,” claims the jacket description, “The risqué contents of the breakthrough novel by hip new author Wei Hui have so alarmed Beijing authorities that thousands of copies have been confiscated and burned. 26 See Tu Wu, “‘ Linglei xiezuo’ de fumian yinying” ͏ ㌙ ᅝ ѕ ‫ ࡒ ࠷ ڄ‬ᅬ ᛏ

(The Negative Impact of ‘Another Kind of Writing’), Beijing ribao (Beijing Daily), March 29, 2000. 27 See He Shaojun, “Xiaofei shidai de ‘meinü wenxue’” श ඗ इ ̩ ‫ ࠀ ڄ‬ʩ ́ ዕ

(Beautiful Women’s Literature in the Age of Consumerism ), Yangcheng wanbao (Guangzhou Nightly News), April 23, 2000. 28 See, for instance, the packaging of the Taiwan edition of Wei Hui’s Shanghai baobei (Shanghai Baby) (Taipei: Shengzhi, 2000). Sensational headlines such as “an alternative narrative taking place in a secret garden of Shanghai,” “intimate exper iences of an extraordinary Shanghai lady,” “mainland bestseller,” and “banned by the Commies” adorn the cover of the book.

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As explicit as Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, as shocking as Trainspotting , this story of a beautiful writer and her erotically charged affairs jumps, howls, and hits the ground running as it depicts the new generation rising in the East.” 29 Here literary sensationalism, blended with the rhetoric of ongoing global and national politics, speaks in terms of desire and cultural taboos to a Western readership that has always regarded China as both an alluring and dangerous political and cultural icon. Unlike those of their much younger counterparts, works by Eileen Chang and Su Qing were not banned in China, even though some might be considered just as ‘explicit’ and provocative in terms of challenging social conventions. Instead various reprinted editions of works by Shanghai women of their generation continued to fare excellently in the mass market. Nostalgia for the glamour and mystique of the 1940s has contributed to the rediscovery and continued success of Shanghai women’s literature. In other words, it has been marketed as more than just ‘women’s literature.’ Most importantly, settled comfortably within the last one hundred years of the city’s cultural history, this body of work is labeled as the quintessential Shanghai literature, and regarded as a guiding light into a past that is forever glamorous, pure, and unreachable. In recent decades, rediscovering forgotten historical figures and bringing the ‘old Shanghai’ of the Republican era to life with words, images, and sounds has become the job of several generations of writers and editors living today in Shanghai. Ke Ling, Shen Ji, and Wei Shaochang ᖒஂ‫( ؤ‬1922-2000) are among the oldest of these writers and editors and have been three of the most important figures in this collective rewriting of Shanghai’s cultural history. Through their personal ties with many of the forgotten cultural figures of “old Shanghai” they have gained an authoritative status in the flourishing field of Shanghai Studies, both inside and outside of Shanghai. Ke Ling’s 1985 essay entitled “To Eileen Chang from a Faraway Place” initiated the process of rediscovering women’s writing from occupied Shanghai. 30 Before his death in 2000, this much respected leftist writer of the war years published several volumes of memoirs and claimed to have begun working on a long historical narrative he tentatively entitled Shanghai yibainian ʕऺɾР϶ (One Hundred Years of 29 Wei Hui, Shanghai Baby, translated by Bruce Humes (Pocket Books, 2001). 30 In Selected Essays by Ke Ling, 191-201.

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Shanghai), which was never finished. Wei Shaochang, better known as a scholar on Dream of the Red Chamber and the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies School of popular fiction, also published many memoir essays about 1940s Shanghai culture before his death in 2000. 31 Dubbed “a treasure of Shanghai” ( Shanghai yi bao ʕऺɾᘽ), Wei had a zest for both archival research and storytelling, and had spent a good part of his productive life collecting and presenting any available information that would help contribute to the understanding of the old Shanghai. Shen Ji, the editor of Domestic Bliss and the youngest member of the leftist literary camp from the Orphan Island Era, is the only writer among his generation that is still alive today and is actively engaged in writing about Shanghai in essays, memoirs, and novels. 32 Much of the rediscovery of this body of literature is about the act of remembering and redefining what constitutes Shanghai’s past. As a researcher, I am constantly struck by how the textual strategies employed by writers decades ago still play a part in manipulating how they and their works are remembered and reconstructed by future readers. The autobiographical tendency so prevalent in women’s literature of the 1940s is a key writing device still controlling contemporary popular culture’s fascination with the writing of Eileen Chang and her contemporaries, thereby leading to the rediscovery, redefinition, and repeated marketing of this body of writing. The visual aspect of the 1940s Shanghai culture has also fueled the contemporary fascination with its literature. The cover design of Eileen Chang’s acclaimed short story collection Romances [Plate 18] is an image that has been repeatedly read and interpreted by scholars and critics. To me, it is an outstanding example of how cover art works to help generate an ongoing interest in this body of women’s literature and

31 See, for instance, Wei Shaochang, “Huang Jinrong yu Lu Lanchun” ෦ ‫ ہ‬ဝ

Ⴉ ᛎ ᚱ ‫( ݱ‬The Love Affair of Huang Jinrong the Gang Leader and Lu Lanchun the Peking Opera Star), Haishang wentan 4 (April 1994): 62-7; and “Jiu Shanghai de tingzijian” ᕄ ʕ ऺ ‫ ۏ ڄ‬ʪ ෇ (The Pavilion in Old Shanghai), Haishang wentan 3 (March 1994): 48-51. 32 See, for instance, the two books by Shen Ji, Yidai gexing Zhou Xuan ɾ ̩ ိ ‫( ⦠ ֟ ݶ‬Zhou Xuan: The Singing Star of a Generation) (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 1986) and Fengyun renshen ࡘ ‫ ۋ‬ʆ Ά (Stormy Life) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1998). Also see Gu Wei, “Shen ji zhuan xie lao Shanghai” Ӻ ઀ ઄ ᅝ Ч ʕ ऺ (Shen Ji: A Master Storyteller of Old Shanghai), Shanghai jinrong bao (Shanghai Financial News), September 25, 2000.

TRAVELS OF EILEEN CHANG

231

cultural production. Chang offers her interpretation of the design as follows: The cover is designed by Yan Ying. She borrowed a fashion painting from the late Qing, depicting a woman quietly playing dominoes. A wet nurse sits beside her, holding a child. This seems like an afterdinner scene in an ordinary family. But outside the railing, a disproportionate human figure suddenly emerges like a ghost. That is a modern person, If there is something in the picture that makes one feel uneasy, then that is exactly the kind of atmosphere I hoped to create.33

This adapted “fashion painting from the late Qing” was one of the illustrations in Wu Youru’s famed collection of drawings called Haishang baiyan t u ऺʕР᝙࿌ (One Hundred Beauties of Shanghai) [Plate 19], previously published in the famed Dianshizhai Pictorial . Chang’s rendition, through the creative hands of her friend Yan Ying, twisted the original illustration and instilled it with an entirely different set of meanings. While Wu’s sketch also juxtaposes images of women and domesticity against a rapidly changing social, political, and cultural atmosphere characteristic of the late nineteenth century, Chang’s rendition adds a surrealist twist to an already unsettling image.34 This surrealist twist is derived from the unique position that Chang’s writing occupied. On the one hand, she aimed to address a large urban audience, and therefore included some elements common to all popular literature in her works; on the other hand, Chang’s writing was meant to be a unique presence in the world of literature, like her clothing, often out of tune with her own time. Her writing often displayed an antagonistic attitude toward current cultural trends. It is often the mixture of heterogeneous visual elements that make her words and images so unsettling. In Chang’s cover image, the head of a voyeur leans over a window frame, surveying the scene, and by extension she is also viewing the reader/viewer of the cover. The voyeuristic image, intended to be read as a parody of the author’s presence, teases, traps, unsettles, and shocks

33 Eileen Chang, “You jijuhua tong duzhe shuo” Љ ౦ ͔ ༼ ψ ᜃ ‫ ږ‬ი (Several Things to Clarify with Readers), in Romances, Enlarged Edition, 1. 34 For a study of Wu Youru and the late Qing representation of changing times

and domestic cultures, see Christopher A. Reed, “Re /Collecting the Sources: Shanghai’s Dianshizhai Pictorial and Its Place in Historical Memories, 1884-1949,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 12. 2 (Fall 2000): 44-72.

232

EPILOGUE

both the traditional image and the viewer’s fantasies. Devoid of any facial features, the image prevents the reader from returning her gaze, making it difficult to focus on any one particular place on the cover. The circular process between the reader and the text is interrupted, and yet the reader will continue to look, out of curiosity, lingering on the tense contrast of the dark faceless figure and the late Qing domestic scene. Secrets are forever buried in the process of inverse reading. The cover design of Romances demonstrates this process, which is about secrets, the depth of one’s personal past, or an inner world buried for so long that much of it will never be revealed. The composition of these visual elements and the intersection of various perspectives highlight the unsettling nature of reality. Here the most meaningful departures take place once again on the textual level. After so many decades of questioning the truth-value of the autobiographical voice, Eileen Chang published a photo album in 1994, amidst an “Eileen Chang fever” that showed no sign of abating. This was Eileen Chang’s last work before her death one year later. This thin album consists of some rarely seen photographic images of her childhood and later years, as well as some more familiar images of her from the 1940s. Entitled Dui zhao ji ࿬ຖ৩, or A Chronicle of Contrasts , the album is the last item published by a member of the generation of writers who initially rose to fame some fifty years ago when Shanghai was under Japanese occupation. The album is precious since it serves, once again, to contextualize wartime history and political upheavals in the course of personal histories. 35 Needless to say, Eileen Chang’s fans from all corners of the worlds devoured the images and the words that accompanied them. Chang herself must have been fully aware of the revealing nature of her layered words. She used a minimal number of them to annotate the photographic images in A Chronicle of Contrasts. This explains the thinness of the album, which is comprised of only fifty-four pictures and a mere ten thousand words. Contrary to the belief that photography serves to record the past and acts as an imprint of personal memories, those blurred images from Chang’s private album are in fact even more deceptive than her intricate words—they serve to conceal rather than reveal.

35 See Duizhao ji: kan lao zhaoxiangbu ࿬ ຖ ৩ í ߡ Ч ຖ ߟ ᗎ (A Chronicle of Contrasts: Looking at the Old Photo Album) (Taipei: Huangguan chubanshe, 1994).

TRAVELS OF EILEEN CHANG

233

The more that Chang revealed herself to the public through either words or photographs, the more mysterious her image became. If, in A Chronicle of Contrasts, she manipulated her own image in any way, then it was by way of exploiting photography’s ability to counter memory, and not communicate it, as Roland Barthes famously argues in his Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography . One might suggest that this last work by Chang demonstrates her unwillingness to bring to light more than what had already been made public in her earlier writing, such as the segments of her childhood narrated in her autobiographical essays in Written on Water . This final, slender book has heightened the mystique surrounding Chang the growing legend. Before her death, Eileen Chang kept her own memories sealed and tucked away for one last time.

PLATES

Plate 1 “Celebrating the Return of Shanghai Concessions,” cover illustration, Literary Companion, August 1, 1943. Image courtesy of the Shanghai Library.

PLATES

235

Plate 2 “Chinese Figures,” cover illustration, Literary Companion, November 1, 1944. Image courtesy of the Shanghai Library.

236

PLATES

Plate 3 Eileen Chang (left) and Li Xianglan (Yamaguchi Yoshiko). In “A Gathering for Summer Cooling,” The Miscellany Monthly 15. 5 (August 1945): 71. Image courtesy of the Shanghai Library.

PLATES

237

Plate 4 Photos of Eileen Chang (bottom), Su Qing (upper right), and Wang Liling. In The Miscellany Monthly 13. 2 (May 1944): 91. Image courtesy of the Shanghai Library.

238

PLATES

Plate 5 Wen Xiang, “Gangbi yu kouhong” (Fountain Pens and Lipsticks), The Miscellany Monthly 15. 2 (May 1945): 71. The cartoon portrays Eileen Chang (upper left), Su Qing (upper right), and Pan Liudai, respectively. Image courtesy of the Shanghai Library.

PLATES

239

Plate 6 Front cover of Happy Home Monthly 9. 5 (October 1941), one of the last issues of the journal preceding the outbreak of the Pacific War. It features a still from Ernst Lubitsch’s film The Uncertain Feeling (United Artists, 1941). Image courtesy of the Shanghai Library.

240

PLATES

Plate 7 Back cover of Happy Home Monthly 9. 5 (October 1941), which features a commercial for Eddy Facial Cream. Image courtesy of the Shanghai Library.

PLATES

241

Plate 8 Front cover of the inaugural issue of Women’s Voices (May 1942), which features a flowers and birds painting by Wu Qingxia. Image courtesy of the East Asian Collection at the Hoover Institute.

242

PLATES

Plate 9 Front cover of Women’s Voices 1. 9 (January 1943), which features a figure painting by Chen Xiaocui. This is representative of a series of images of graceful maidens that occupy many covers of the journal. Image courtesy of the East Asian Collection at the Hoover Institute.

PLATES

243

Plate 10 Ding Song, “Zen kan rong xi” (How Can I Bear to Be Inside). In Women’s Voices 2. 1 (May 1943): 19. Image courtesy of the East Asian Collection at the Hoover Institute.

244

PLATES

Plate 11 An editorial preface promoted the female painters whose paintings adorned most covers of the journal. In Women’s Voices 1. 3 (July 1942): 1. Photos from left to right: Chen Xiaocui, Zhou Lianxia, and Wu Qingxia. Image courtesy of the East Asian Collection at the Hoover Institute.

PLATES

245

Plate 12 Cover of Written on Water (Shanghai: Zhongguo kexue gongsi, 1945). Chang’s best fried Yan Ying (Fatima) designed the cover. The female figure that is void of any facial features has a late-Qing style jacket on, whose design is reminiscent of the jacket that Chang designed and made for herself as seen in Plate 13. This faceless figure also appears on the cover design of Chang’s short story collection entitled Romances , also created by Yan Ying. See Plate 18.

246

PLATES

Plate 13 This 1944 photograph of Eileen Chang, featuring the jacket that she designed and made for herself, was done by an amateur photographer named Dong Shizhang.

PLATES

247

Plate 14 Eileen Chang’s sketch titled “Late Qing Fashion” accompanied her essay “A Chronicle of Changing Clothes” in the original 1945 edition of Written on Water . This is a visual testament to Eileen Chang’s conceptualization of historical transformations as represented in the everchanging shapes, lines, and colors of women’s clothes.

248

PLATES

Plate 15 Eileen Chang’s sketch entitled “1930s” also accompanied her essay “A Chronicle of Changing Clothes” in the original edition of Written on Water . This is another example of historical transformation as seen from the perspective of women’s clothes.

PLATES

249

Plate 16 The minimalist cover design of the original edition of Shi Jimei’s Phoenix Garden (Shanghai: Dazhong chubanshe, 1947).

250

PLATES

Plate 17 Front cover of the reprint edition of Shi Jimei’s Phoenix Garden (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1997). A portrait of Shi is set against a fragmented garden image. The subtitle reads Fiction Classics by Women Writers from the Republican Era .

PLATES

Plate 18 Front cover of the 1946 edition of Romances , designed by Yan Ying.

251

252

PLATES

Plate 19 This is an example of the late Qing domestic culture captured by Wu Youru in his One Hundred Beauties of Shanghai, circa 1890. Yan Ying cropped a center portion of this particular drawing for her design of the cover of the 1946 edition of Romances .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. PRIMARY SOURCES

1.1 Journals and newspaper supplements Chunqiu yuekan ‫( ̵ ̇ ߲ ݱ‬Spring and Autumn Monthly), edited by Chen Dieyi ௾ ራ н , Wen Zongshan ́ ‫ ׅ‬ʱ , and Shen Ji Ӻ ઀ , August 1943-March 1949. Dagongbao xiandai jiating fukan ʨ ˙ ే ୏ ̩ ࣁ ࣘ ౭ ̵ (Th e Modern Home Su pplement to Dagongbao ), edited by Xu Baiyi ࣝ Р ८ and Bian Qini ˧ մ ⿎ , October 1936-April 1937. Dajia yuekan ʨ ࣁ ̇ ̵ (Everybody Monthly), edited by Gong Zhifang ᜠ ˃ ̄ and Tang Yunjing ࢑ ෙ ૱ , April-July 1947. Dawanbao funü yu jiating fukan ʨ ૴ ే ੴ ʩ Ⴉ ࣁ ࣘ ਾ ̵ (The Women and Home Supplement to The Grand Evening News ), edited by Xu Baiyi, July 1939November 1941. Fengyu tan yuekan ࡘ ‫ ۋ‬ሾ ̇ ̵ (Chatter on Wind and Rain Monthly), edited by Liu Yusheng ‫ ۋ ގ‬Ά , April 1943-August 1945. Gujin banyuekan ͅ ˑ ̽ ̇ ̵ (Past and Present Biweekly), edited by Zhou Li’an ֟ ኲ ઞ , March 1942-October 1944. Jiankang jiating yuekan ਯ છ ࣁ ࣘ ̇ ̵ (Healthy Home Monthly), eidted by Lu Boyu ௿ ї Ц , Ding Fubao ʀ ၰ ۘ , Pan Yangyao ᇃ ή ూ , and Mei Fu ଋ ᖍ , and later by Xu Baiyi, April 1939-June 1944. Jiating yuekan ࣁ ࣘ ̇ ̵ (Hap py Home Monthly), edited by Xu Baiyi, January 1936October 1945. Jiating niankan ࣁ ࣘ ̇ ̵ (Home Annual), edited by Xu Baiyi, 1943-48. Kangli yuekan Σ ᚓ ̇ ̵ (Happy Couple Monthly), edited by Wu Haohao ѹ Ϧ Ϧ , June 1946-October 1948. Kuzhu yuekan ࠚ С ̇ ̵ (Bitter Bamboo Monthly), edited by Hu Lancheng ࠍ ᚱ Ͼ , Nove mber 1944-February 1945. Liangyou huabao ԯ ˩ ഐ ే (The Good Companion Pictorial), February 1926October 1945.

254

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Nüsheng yuekan ʩ ᑵ ̇ ̵ (Women’s Voices Monthly), edited by Zuo Junzhi ͣ ‫۝‬ ‫( ڥ‬Tamura T oshiko) and Guan Lu ᘕ ᛎ , May 1 942-July 1945. Shanghai shenghuo ʕ ऺ Ά ‫( ޥ‬Shanghai Guide), edited by Gu Lengguan ᛐ ѣ ᝳ and Yan Duhe ᘷ ጤ ᛝ , March 1937-December 1941. Shaonü yuekan ˲ ʩ ̇ ̵ (The Maiden Monthly), edited by Chen Dieyi ௾ ራ н and Wei Yin ࡔ ৏ , June 1946-June 1947. Shenbao yuekan jiating fukan Ό ే ̇ ̵ ࣁ ࣘ ਾ ̵ (The Home Supplement to Shanghai Monthly ), edited by Xu Baiyi, September 1941-October 1942. Shenbao yuekan Ό ే ̇ ̵ (Shanghai News Monthly), edited by Chen Binhe ௾ ણ 㐺 , January 1943-1945. Shishi xinbao shidai jiating fukan इ Ֆ ๘ ే इ ̩ ࣁ ࣘ ਾ ̵ (The Modern Hom e Supplement to The New Daily Times), edited by Xu Baiyi and Bian Qini, March-July 1937. The XXth Century, edited by Klaus Mehnert, October 1941-June 1945. Tiandi yuekan ˭ ϙ ̇ ̵ (Heaven and Earth Monthly), edited by Feng Heyi ෤ ֜ ᄭ (Su Qing ᙨ ‫) ی‬, Octo ber 1943-Ju ne 1945. Wansui banyuekan ໗ ๶ ̽ ̇ ̵ (Ten Thousand Years Biweekly), edited by Wei Yueyan υ ̇ ጝ , Chen Dongbai ௾ ‫ ز‬Ύ , and Wen Zaidao ́ ཛྷ ལ , Janu aryMay 1943. Wanxiang yuekan ໗ ඐ ̇ ̵ (The Phenomena Monthly), edited first by Chen Dieyi and later by Ke Ling ‫ ޅ‬᝞ , July 1941-Jun e 1945. Wenxie yuekan ́ փ ̇ ̵ (Literary Association Monthly), edited by the Shanghai branch of Sino-Japanese Cultural Association, November 1943-September 1944. Wenyou banyuekan ́ ˩ ̽ ̇ ̵ (Literary Companion Biweekly), edited by Zheng Wushan ቷ ѳ ʱ , May 1943-July 1945. Xiao tiandi yuekan ʮ ˭ ϙ ̇ ̵ (Small World Monthly), edited by Zhou Bangong ֟ ॗ ˙ , August 1944-May 1945. Xiaoshuo yuebao ʮ ი ̇ ే (The Fiction Monthly), edited by Gu Lengguan ᛐ ѣ ᝳ , October 1940-November 1944. Xingfu yuekan ‫ ל‬ၰ ̇ ̵ (Domestic Bliss Monthly), edited by Wang Bo Ӿ ٕ (Shen Ji) and Wang Benpu Ӿ ʹ ዹ , May 1946-March 1949. Zazhi yuekan ᕺ ბ ̇ ̵ (The Miscellany Monthly), edited by Wu Chengzhi ѹ ༻ ˃ , Wu Jiangfeng ѹ Е ๯ , and Fan Jugao ࠖ ൫ ਢ , August 1942-August 1945.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

255

Ziluolan yuekan ാ ᗘ ᚱ ̇ ̵ (The Violet Monthly), edited by Zhou Shoujuan ֟ ᇚ ᖚ , April 1943-December 1944.

1.2 Roundtable discussions and special issues in journals “Chuanqi jiping chahui ji” ෭ ֮ ූ ඄ ৔ ๡ ৩ (A Group Discussion of Romances), The Miscellany Monthly 13. 6 (Sep tember 1944): 150-5. “Cui Chengxi wudao zuotan” ઑ ‫ ؀‬ᑏ Ⴋ ᒵ ࣙ ሾ (A Roundtable Discussion of Sai Shoki’s Dance), The Miscellany Monthly 12. 2 (November 1943): 33-8. “Duzhe de fanxiang” ᜃ ‫ ˫ ڄ ږ‬ᛏ (Reader’s Responses to the Spe cial Issue on Women, Family, Marriage), The Miscellany Monthly 15. 1 (April 1945): 64-9. “Guanyu funü, jiating, hunyin zhu wenti” ᘕ ‫ ؠ‬ੴ ʩ ç ࣁ ࣘ ç ੹ ‫ ܪ‬ቂ ੕ ᖅ (On Women, Family, Marriage: Special Issue Continued), The Miscellany Monthly 15. 1 (April 1945): 52-63. “Guochan dianying bianju zuotan” ੢ ୕ྐ ᅬ ሆ ᄶ ࣙ ሾ (A Roundtable Discussion of Screenwriters for National Cinema), The Miscellany Monthly 12. 2 (Novem ber 1943): 72-7. “Manhua zuojia zuotanhui” ၃ ഐ ѕ ࣁ ࣙ ሾ ๡ (A Roundtable Discussion of Cartoo nists). The Miscellany Monthly 12. 3 (December 1943): 27-31. “Naliang hui ji” ঢ ଘ ๡ ৩ (A Gathering for Summer Cooling), The Miscellany Monthly 15. 5 (August 1945): 67-72. “Nü zuojia jutan” ʩ ѕ ࣁ ႞ ሾ (A Roundtable Discussion of Women Writers), The Miscellany Monthly 13. 1 (April 1944): 49-57. “Shafu an bitan” ଓ ˮ क ര ሾ (Written Discussions of the Case of a Hus band-Murderess), The Miscellany Monthly 15. 4 (July 1945): 98-108. “Su Qing Zhang Ailing duitan ji” ᙨ ‫ ی‬ઠ ื ߆ ࿬ ሾ ৩ (Su Qing and Eileen Chang Talking to Each Other), The Miscellany Monthly 14. 6 (March 1945): 78-84. “Tamen de yijian teji: Guanyu funü, jiating, hunyin zhu wenti” ϧ ࡭ ‫ ڄ‬ำ Գ ॐ ᎓ í ᘕ ‫ ؠ‬ੴ ʩ ç ࣁ ࣘ ç ੹ ‫ ܪ‬ቂ ੕ ᖅ (Their Opinions: Special Issue on Women, Family, Ma rriage), The Miscellany Monthly 15. 2 (May 1945): 73-82. “Teji: Funü, jiating, hunyin zhu wenti” ॐ ᎓ í ੴ ʩ ç ࣁ ࣘ ç ੹ ‫ ܪ‬ቂ ੕ ᖅ (Special Issue on Women, Family, Marriage), The Miscellany Monthly 14. 6 (March 1945): 78-90. “Teji: sanshi nian qian Shanghai tan” ॐ ᎓ í ʒ ʏ ϶ ‫ ۮ‬ʕ ऺ ᛴ (Special Issue on Shanghai of Thirty Years Ago), The Phenomena Monthly 4. 3 (September 1944): 8-45.

256

BIBLIOGRAPHY

“Tongsu wenxue yundong zhuanhao (shang)” ௢ ۞ ́ ዕ ཡ ੂ ઄ ༙ ă ʕ Ą (Special Issue on the Movement of Popular Literature, Part One), The Phenomena Monthly 2. 4 (October 1942): 130-56. “Tongsu wenxue yundong zhuanhao (xia)” ௢ ۞ ́ ዕ ཡ ੂ ઄ ༙ ă ʓ Ą (Special Issue on the Movement of Popular Literature, Part Two), The Phenomena Monthly 2. 5 (November 1942): 124-37. “Women gai xie shenme teji” Ӎ ࡭ ༳ ᅝ ߊ ᄩ ॐ ᎓ (Special Issue on What We Should Write), The Miscellany Monthly 13. 5 (August 1944): 4-13. “Wutai yishu zuotan” Ⴋ Ⴈ ᗟ ி ࣙ ሾ (A Roundtable Discussion on Performance Art), The Miscellany Monthly 12. 5 (February 1944): 4-17. “Zhanggu zuotan” ಆ ‫ ࣙ ݭ‬ሾ (A Roundtable Discussion of Anecdote-tellers), The Miscellany Monthly 14. 2 (November 1944): 74-80. “Zhiye funü teji” ᕀ ๣ ੴ ʩ ॐ ᎓ (Special Issue on Career Women), The Phenomena Monthly 4. 4 (October 1944): 8-44. “Zhongguo wenxue zhi xianzhuang: Huandu si zhounian jinian dingtanhui ” ˀ ੢ ́ ዕ ˃ ୏ ‫ ٶ‬í ᒾ ௲ ͗ ֟ ϶ ߺ ‫ ྦ ׭‬ሾ ๡ (Pre sent State of Chinese Lit era ture: A Symposium on the Fourth Anniversary of the Recovery of the City), The Miscellany Monthly 13. 2 (May 1944): 172-7.

1.3 Key literary texts Chang, Eileen (Zhang Ailing ઠ ื ߆ ). Chuanqi ෭ ֮ (Romances). Shanghai: Zazhishe, 1944. ______. Chuanqi zaiban ben ෭ ֮ ι ‫( ʹ ٳ‬Romances, Second Edition). Shanghai: Zazhi she, 1944. ______. Chuanqi zengding ben ෭ ֮ ᅍ ࠴ ʹ (Romances, Enlarged Edition). Shanghai: Shanhe tushu gongsi, 1946. ______. Liuyan ‫ ޟ‬Ե (Written on Water). Shanghai: Zhongguo kexue gongsi, 1945. ______. “Taitai wansui tiji” ˯ ˯ ໗ ๶ ᖅ ৩ (Preface to Long Live the Missus ). Dagon gbao, December 3, 1947. Chang, Eileen (Liang Jing ૼ ՚ ). Shiba chun ʏ ʉ ‫( ݱ‬Eighteen Springs). Shanghai: Yibao chubanshe, 1951. Chang, Eileen. Bansheng yuan ̽ Ά ሇ (Destined for Half a Lifetime). Taipei: Huangguan chu banshe, 1968.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

257

______. Honglou mengyan ߹ ᆧ ࿗ ᝤ (Nightmare in the Red Chamber). Taipei: Huangguan chubanshe, 1977. ______. Wangran ji ઻ ೸ ৩ (Disillusionment). Taipei: Huangguan chubanshe, 1983. ______. Yuyun ኜ ᘜ (The Lingering Cadence). Taipei: Huangguan chubanshe, 1987. ______. Xuji ᚮ ූ (Sequel). Taipei: Huangguan chubanshe, 1988. ______. Duizhao ji: kan lao zhaoxiangbu ࿬ ຖ ৩ í ߡ Ч ຖ ߟ ᗎ (A Chronicle of Contrasts: Looking at the Old Photo Album). Taipei: Huangguan chubanshe, 1994. ______. Zhang Ailing sanwen quanbian ઠ ื ߆ ಞ ́ η ሆ (A Complete Collection of Essays by Eileen Chang). Hangzhou: Zhejiang wenyi chubanshe, 1992. ______. “A Chronicle of Changing Clothes,” translated by Andrew F. Jones. posi tions: east asia cultures critique 11. 2 (Fall 2003): 427-441. ______. Written on Water: A Collection of Essays by Eileen Chang , translated by Andrew F. Jones, co-edited and introduced by Nicole Huang. New York: Columbia University Pre ss, forthcoming. Gu Lu ᘕ ᛎ . Taipingyang shang de gesheng ˯ ͦ ‫ ޜ‬ʕ ‫ ိ ڄ‬ᑵ (Songs over the Pacific). Shanghai: Shenghuo shudian, 1936. ______. Xin jiu shidai ๘ ᕄ इ ̩ (New and Old Eras). Shanghai: Guangming shuju, 1940. Han Bangqing ᓟ Չ ᅯ . Haishanghua liezhuan ऺ ʕ ‫ ګ‬λ ෭ (Histories of Flowers of Shanghai). Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1981. Pan Liudai ᇃ ‫ ގ‬ᓰ . Tuizhi furen zizhuan ਂ ᕀ ˮ ʆ б ෭ (An Autobiogra phy of a Divorcée). Shanghai, 1949. ______. Mingxing xiaozhuan ‫ ݶ ا‬ʮ ෭ (Biographies of Movie Stars). Hong Kong, 1953. ______. Furen zhi yan ੴ ʆ ˃ Ե (Women’s Words of Wisdom). Hong Kong: Xinqi chubanshe, 1956. Shi Jimei ‫ ݯ‬ᐡ ࠀ . Fengyi yuan ᄨ ᄭ ฏ (Fengyi Garden). Shanghai: Dazhong chu banshe, 1947. ______. Fengyi yuan (Fengyi Garden, Reprint Edition). Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1997. ______. “Wanxia de yuyun” ૴ ᓝ ‫ ڄ‬ኜ ᘜ (Traces of a Sunset). The Fiction Monthly 12 (September 1941): 107-116.

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INDEX

anti-Communist novels, 212-3 autobiographical, the, 39, 73, 77, 95, 132, 137-8, 159-72, 174, 184-9, 201, 205-6, 215, 224, 226, 229, 231-2 Azema, Jean-Pierre, 27 Bai, Wei, 77 Bai, Yang, 208 ‘balcony at dusk,’ 1, 24, 132-5 Bao, Tianxiao, 54-5 Barthes, Roland, 232 beauty myth, Chinese, 43-7 Bian, Qini, 67 Bing, Xin, 63 Burrin, Philippe, 27 Chang, Eileen, 1-5, 9, 16-7, 21-5, 369, 44-8, 50-3, 63-6, 72-83, 117-8, 122-58, 159, 162-3, 167-9, 171, 173-9, 184, 187, 190-1, 197, 201-2, 208-9, 211-21, 223-32; Bansheng yuan (Destined for Half a Lifetime), 212; “Chen xiang xie: di yi lu xiang” ( Aloewood Ashes: The First Incense Burning), 63, 122; Chuanqi (Romances), 21, 229-30; “Chuanqi zaiban de hua” (Preface to Romances, Second Edition ), 21, 135-6; “Daodi shi Shanghairen” (Shanghainese After All), 64-5; “Daolu yi mu” (Scenes from the Streets), 65, 150-1, 155; Duizhao ji (A Chronicle of Contrasts), 231-2; “Fengsuo” (Blockade), 22, 52-3, 209; “Fu hua lang rui” (Flowers at Sea), 215, 217-21, 224-5; “Geng yi ji” (A Chronicle of Changing Clothes), 117-8, 152-4, 157-8, 2012; “ Gongyu shenghuo jiqu”

(Interesting Moments in Apartment Life), 146-9; Honglou mengyan (Nightmare in the Red Chamber), 123; Jinsuo ji (Chronicle of Gilded Fetters), 151-2; “ Jingyu lu” (From the Ashes), 147, 156-7, 206, 209; Lianhuantao (Chain of Rings), 139, 176-7; Liuyan (Written on Water), 122-5, 140, 144, 155, 232; The Naked Earth , 212; “Nü zuojia jutan” (A Roundtable Discussion of Women Writers), 75, 78; “Qi duan qing chang” (Short on Dignity, Long on Emotion), 50-2; Qingcheng zhi lian (Romance from the Ruins), 44-8; The Rice-Sprout Song , 212; “Se jie” (Lust and Precepts), 215-7; Shiba chun (Eighteen Springs), 212; “Shuangsheng” (Duet), 136-7; “Siyu” (Whispers), 137-8, 140; Taitai wansui (Long Live the Missus), 133-4; “Tan nüren” (Talking about Women), 140-3; “Tan yinyue” (Talking about Music), 23-5; “Tongyan wuji” (Children Will Say Anything), 1389, 144, 161-2; “Wo kan Su Qing” (The Way I Look at Su Qing), 1, 4, 47, 79, 81-3; Xuji (Sequel), 145; “Zhongguo de riye” (Days and Nights of China), 21, 149-50; “ Ziji de wenzhang” (Writing of One’s Own), 139-40, 176-8 Chen, Danyan, 148n.33, 190-1; Shanghai de fenghua xueyue (The Sentimental Shanghai), 190 Chen, Dieyi, 57-62, 195 Chen, Gongbo, 165 Chen, Jiying, 212

INDEX Chen, Xiaocui, 19, 87-8, 117 Cheng, Xiaoqing, 59, 196 Cheng, Yuzhen, 19, 63, 196 cheongsam, see qipao Chow, Rey, 36-7 Chunqiu yuekan (Spring and Autumn Monthly), 62 cinema, wartime Shanghai, 8-11 clothes, 7-8, 38, 66, 72, 82, 99, 109, 118, 147, 151-8; also see fashion and qipao cohabitation, discourse of, 173-9 Cold War, politics, 213 collaboration, with the Japanese, 8-9, 27-8, 30-4, 86, 94, 96, 99, 102, 130, 165, 167-9, 208, 212, 216 Cultural Revolution, the, 100, 207 Diamond, Hanna, 27 Dianshizhai huabao (Dianshizhai Pictorial), 87, 230 diaspora, 214-5, 218, 221, 225 Ding, Ling, 43 Ding, Song, 106 details, feminine, 36-8 domestic fiction, 32, 39, 194, 202, 206 domesticity, 18-9, 35-40, 50,70-1, 81, 87, 89, 103, 110, 230; also see jiazheng Dongwu University, 63, 196 Durand, Yves, 27 Duus, Peter, 29 “Eileen Chang fever,” 214, 231 Ellis, Havelock, 180-2 essay, modern, 33, 80, 122-58; circles of essayists in occupied Shanghai, 130-1; fluidity, 123-5; generic transformations, 128-30; language of enigma, 139-44; liminality, 1329; relation to fiction, 127-8; Shanghai culture and, 129-30 ethnographies, 159, 163, 180, 182-5, 189 everyday life/daily life, 19, 23, 25, 349, 51, 66, 89-90, 107-10, 134, 14458, 175

273 Fang, Mei, 112, 119 fashion, 66, 70, 76, 93, 115-6, 118, 151-8 Fei, Mu, 204-5 feminism, Japanese, 96-7 Feng, Heyi, see Su, Qing Feng, Yuanjun, 43, 77 Fengyu tan yuekan (Chatter on Wind and Rain Monthly), 131, 165 Feuerwerker, Albert, 29 footbinding, see ‘natural foot’ movement Frank, Robert, 27 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 36n.13 Fu, Donghua, 14; also see Gone with the Wind Fu, Poshek, 30, 34

Gaslight, 187 Gildea, Robert, 30-1 Gone with the Wind, 4-5, 10-6, 18, 83, 85, 117, 198, 226 “Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere,” 7-8, 29, 73, 86, 89, 167 “Greater East Asian Film Sphere,” 8, 10n.15 “Greater East Asian Literature,” 7n.9 Gu, Lengguan, 61-2 Guan, Lu, 18, 34-5, 68, 75, 97-103, 110-1, 113-6, 131; “ Qingnian funü de quedian” (The Defects of Young Women), 114-5; Taipingyang shang de gesheng (Songs over the Pacific), 99; Xin jiu shidai (New and Old Eras), 99; “ Zenyang zuo yi ge xin funü” (How to Become a New Woman), 115-6 guixiu ti (boudoir style), 32, 40, 63, 70, 193-4, 196-200, 202, 203, 206 Gujin banyuekan (The Past and Present Biweekly), 33, 165 Gunn, Edward, 126 Guo, Jianying, 85 Hai shang hua (Flowers of Shanghai), 218, 221-4 Haishang huapai, see Shanghai huapai Han, Bangqing, see Hai shang hua He, Jiashui, 48-9 Henriot, Christian, 31

274 Hollywood, 4-5, 8-11, 72n.38, 85-6, 116, 187 home journals, 64, 66-71 Hong Kong, 123, 126, 139, 146-7, 149, 170-2, 206, 209, 211-6, 21820, 224-5 Hongloumeng (Dream of the Red Chamber), 122-3, 140, 221 hongyan boming (radiant face, early demise), 43-4, 192-3 Hongye Advertising and Printing Company, see Xu, Baiyi Hsia, C. T., 125-6 Hu, Feng, 168 Hu, Lancheng, 211-2 Hu, Shanyuan, 61 huangliang (desolation), 135-6 huaniao (flowers and birds), in paintings, 86 Hung, Chang-tai, 29-30 informal essays, 39, 51, 129 Jackson, Julian, 27 Jiankang jiating yuekan (Healthy Home Monthly), 68 Jiang, Caiping, 102, 113 Jiating niankan (Home Annual), 68 Jiating yuekan (Happy Home Monthly), 68, 85 jiazheng (the art of homemaking), 109-10 Kang, Youwei, 41 Ke, Ling, 6, 14-6, 58-60, 100, 228 Keats, John, 124 Lee, Leo Ou-fan, 3n.4, 53 leftism, Chinese, 6, 15, 55-8, 98-9, 106, 209 leftism, Japanese, 96-7 Li, Xianglan, 9-11, 72 Li, Yunbing, 107-8 Liang Desuo, see Liangyou huabao Liangyou huabao (The Good Companion Pictorial), 56n.12, 70n.36 Libailiu pai (Saturday School), 55 liminality, aesthetics of, 132-9 Ling, Shuhua, 63 Liu, Na’ou, 84 Liu, Yusheng, 131, 165

INDEX Lü, Fangshang, 175 Lu, Xun, 55, 126, 159-63; “Kuangren riji” (Dairy of a Madman), 159; “ Shang shi” (Mourning the Dead), 160-3 Lu, Yan, 59 Lu, Yin, 43 luanshi jiaren (beauty at a turbulent time), 4, 10, 12-4, 16, 44, 47, 80, 83 Mao, Dun, 43, 126, 128 May Fourth, 40-3, 60, 64, 70, 74, 901, 93-4, 98, 102, 110-1, 114, 116, 118, 126, 140, 143, 160-1 ‘memor abilia literature,’ 190-1 memories, 4, 6, 28, 138, 147, 151, 161-3, 170, 183, 185, 199, 201-6, 208, 221, 224-5, 231-2 memorial, of war, 31-2, 40, 206 middlebrow, 12, 14, 18-9, 35, 39, 41, 46, 64, 66, 88, 111, 160, 163, 169, 184, 210 Mian, Mian, 226-7 modeng (modern, trendy), 84, 110-1, 114-6 ‘modern girl,’ 85-6, 115 motherhood, 28, 42, 46, 104-10 Mu, Shiying, 84 Muel-Dreyfus, Francine, 27 Myers, Ramon H., 29 nation/nationhood/nationalism, 412, 89-90, 96-7, 103, 105-7, 211-3, 216-8 ‘natural foot’ movement, 41-2 ‘new knowledge,’ categorization of, 70-1, 103-10 ‘new modern woman,’ 110-1, 114-21 nostalgia, of ‘old Shanghai,’ 190-2, 214, 228-9 Nüsheng yuekan (Women’s Voices Monthly), 33, 68-9, 88-121 O’Hara, Scarlett, see Gone with the Wind Orphan Island Era, 3-4, 6-7, 31-2 Ory, Pascal, 27 Pan, Guangdan, 179-84; Xiaoqing de fenxi (An Analysis of Xiaoqing),

275

INDEX 181-2; Xing xinlixue (Havelock Ellis’ Psychology of Sex), 180, 182 Pan, Liudai, 18, 68, 75-7, 131, 163, 168-72, 174-5, 178-9, 184, 187-9, 210-1; Furen zhi yan (Women’s Words of Wisdom), 171; Mingxing xiaozhuan (Biographies of Movie Stars), 171; Tuizhi furen zizhuan (An Autobiography of a Di vorcée), 168, 184, 187-9 Paxton, Robert, 27 Peattie, Mark R., 29 Peschanski, Denis, 27 photography, 9, 27, 72-3, 75-6, 117, 119, 231-2 popular culture, as politically contested, 10, 15, 35, 54-61, 89 postwar, politics, 208-13 promotion of women writers and painters, 20, 54, 63, 70-7, 117, 145 public intellectuals, 35, 50, 54, 64, 71, 82-3, 89, 117, 119, 121, 172

qipao, 7, 107, 118 Ren, Bonian, 88 resistance, literary, 7-8, 17, 22, 26, 31-3, 59-61, Ri, Ko-ran, see Li, Xianglan roundtable talks, 73, 75-8, 132, 136-7 Rousso, Henry, 27 ruins, of war, 21, 39, 44-5, 48, 159, 193, 203-4 Satô, Toshiko, see Tamura, Toshiko self-promotion of women writers and painters, 6, 73, 78, 119, 145, 189 sexuality, female, 74, 131, 153, 163, 170, 172-7, 179-84, 187-9 Shanghai, dwellings, 2, 38-9, 146-51 Shanghai, history of colonialism, 1-4, 7-9, 30, 89 Shanghai huapai (Shanghai School of Fine Arts), 87 Shanghai, under Japanese occupation, 1, 4 Shen, Ji, 59, 62, 206, 229 Shi, Jimei, 12, 32-3, 38-9, 62-3, 70, 131, 190-207; “Ai de shengli” (The Triumph of Love), 200; “Di yi ge huanghun” (The First Dusk), 197; Fengyi yuan (Phoenix Garden),

192, 194, 201; “ Fengyi yuan” (Phoenix Garden), 203-4; “Guilai” (Returning), 199; Gui yue (Ghost Moon), 206; “Jialing jiang shang de qiutian” (The Autumn on the Jialing River), 199; “ Lan tianshi” (The Blue Angel), 200; “Mochou xiang” (Lane of No Sorrow), 206-7; “Nuanshi li de qiangwei” (Roses in the Hothouse), 197; “ Wanxia de yuyun” (Traces of a Sunset), 196; “Xiao San de chouchang” (The Melancholy of Xiao San), 200; “Yecao” (Wild Grass), 12, 198; “Yi ge luohua shijie de meng” (A Dream in the Season of Fallen Petals), 199; “Zhenzhu de shengri” (Pearl’s Birthday), 200 shinü (graceful maidens), in paintings, 86, 117 Shitou ji (Story of the Stone), see Hongloumeng Shu, Shi, 124 Shui, Jing, 125-6 Simmel, Georg, 155-6 star system, 72 Su, Qing, 1, 4-5, 18, 25-6, 34, 38-9, 43-4, 46-7, 72, 74-83, 117, 131, 137, 145, 163-9, 172, 174-9, 184-6, 190-1, 208, 226-8; depicted by Eileen Chang, 1, 4-5, 43-4, 47, 7483; Huanjin ji (Washing Brocade), 163-7, 208; Jiehun shinian (Ten Years of Married Life), 163-7, 208; “Jiehun shinian houji” (Postscript to Ten Years of Married Life), 256; “ Lun hongyan boming” (On Radiant Face, Early Demise), 43-4, 46-7; “ Lun nüzi jiaoyou” (On Women’s Association with Friends), 175-6; “ Nü zuojia jutan” (A Roundtable Discussion of Women Writers), 75, 78; “Shen nan yu nü” (Child-bearing: Boy or Girl), 164; “Tan nüren” (Talking about Women), 176; Xu jiehun shinian (Sequel to Ten Years of Married Life), 167, 186; Yinshi nannü (Food and Sex), 25 Su, Xueling, 63 Taishô Japan, 85, 95-6

276

INDEX

‘tale of two cities,’ 170-1, 214-6, 21820, 224-5 Tamura, Toshiko, 94-9 Tan, Weihan, 58 Tan, Zhengbi, 77 Tiandi yuekan (Heaven and Earth Monthly), 131, 165 Tompkins, Jane P., 36n.14 tong (suave and knowledgeable), 65 tongsu wenxue yundong (movement of popular literature), 60 travel, cultural, 5, 15, 17, 211-2, 2146, 218-20, 225-7 Veillon, Dominique, 27 Vichy regime, 26-8 Waltz, Kenneth, 27 Wang, David Der-wei, 126 Wang, Tongzhao, 59 Wanshi liufang (Eternity), 9 Wansui banyuekan (Ten Thousand Years Biweekly), 62, 195 Wanxiang yuekan (The Phenomena Monthly), 58-60, 71, 195 war, in representations, 1, 18-26, 289, 31-3, 40, 47-9, 50, 52, 58, 71, 132-4, 146-9, 151, 163, 184-5, 199-200, 202-6, 208-10 Wei, Hui, 226-8 Wei, Shaochang, 228-9 Weitz, Margaret Collins, 28 Wen, Xiang, 76 Wen, Ying, 105-6 Wenyou (Literary Companion), 7-8, 86, 169 womanhood, 28, 42-44, 46, 80, 91, 105-9 woman question, the, 41-2, 83 women, as symbols of collaboration, 7-10, 16 women, rural, 91-2, 108, 112 women’s housework, 107-10 women’s print culture, 5, 38, 40, 43, 52-4, 83, 89, 121, 208 women’s professions, 108, 112 Wu, Changshuo, 88 Wu, Chongshan, 61-2 Wu, Diaogong, 61-2 Wu, Fuhui, 56n.12, 127, 129-30 Wu, Qingxia, 19, 87-8, 117-9 Wu, Youru, 87, 230

Xiandai (Les Contemporains ), 57, 845, 115-6 xiaobao zuojia (tabloid writer), 169 Xiaocheng zhi chun (Spring in a Small Town), 204-5 xiaopin wen (minor writings), see informal essays Xiaoshuo yuebao (The Fiction Monthly), 58, 195 Xie, Bingying, 77 Xin wenyi (New Literature), 19, 59, 159, 160, 163, 177, 197 Xingfu yuekan (Domestic Bliss Monthly), 70, 206 Xinya, 69 xiuyang (self-cultivation), 119-20 Xu, Baiyi, 66-71, 85 Xxth Century, The, 152, 213 Yamaguchi, Yoshiko, see Li, Xianglan Yang, Shuhui, 131 Yao, Li, 210 Yao, Ming, 210 Ye, Lingfeng, 84 Ye, Su, 57-8 Yeh, Wen-hsin, 31 Yu, Qie, 58-9 Yuanyang hudie (Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies), 13, 20, 54-64, 712, 176-7, 191, 195-6

Zazhi yuekan (The Miscellany Monthly), 73-6, 165, 212 Zhang, Ailing, see Eileen Chang Zhang, Henshui, 55 Zhang, Jingsheng, 153, 173-4; “Aiqing dingze” (The Norms of Love), 173; “ Mei de shehui zuzhi fa” (The Rules of Organizing a Society of Beauty), 173 Zheng, Dingwen, 59 Zhou, Fohai, 130 Zhou, Lengqie, 61-2 Zhou, Li’an, 130 Zhou, Lianxia, 19, 87-88, 117-8 Zhou, Shoujuan, 55, 57, 122, 198-9 Zhou, Xuan, 202 Zhu, Pu, 130 Ziluolan yuekan (The Violet Monthly), 62-3, 71, 122, 198-9