Contemporary Chinese Fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua (Sinica Leidensia)

Contemporary Chinese Fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua

Sinica Leidensia Edited by

Barend J. ter Haar Maghiel van Crevel

VOLUME 102

Contemporary Chinese Fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua Coming of Age in Troubled Times

By

Hua LI

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2011

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Li, Hua, 1969– Contemporary Chinese fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua : coming of age in troubled times / by Hua Li. p. cm. — (Sinica Leidensia, ISSN 0169-9563 ; v. 102) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-20226-9 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Chinese fiction—20th century—History and criticism 2. Bildungsromans— History and criticism. 3. Su, Tong, 1963– Qi qie cheng qun. 4. Yu, Hua, 1960– Hu han yu xi yu. 5. Comparative literature—Chinese and English. 6. Comparative literature—English and Chinese. 7. Identity (Psychology) in literature. 8. Group identity in literature. 9. Youth in literature. I. Title. PL2443.L4325 2011 895.1’3099283’0904—dc22 2010053916

ISSN 0169-9563 ISBN 978-90-04-20226-9 Copyright 2011 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC 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 Koninklijke Brill NV 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.

In Memory of Grandfather Fengxiang and Aunt Guoxiang

CONTENTS Acknowledgments ..............................................................................

ix

Introduction ........................................................................................

1

Chapter One Bildungsroman/Chengzhang Xiaoshuo as a Literary Genre ................................................................................

13

Chapter Two The Changing Patterns of the Bildungsroman in Modern Chinese Literature ..................................................... Antecedents of the Bildungsroman: Zhuan in Pre-modern Chinese Literature ..................................................................... Bildungsroman in Modern Chinese Literature .........................

33 34 39

Chapter Three Fallen Youth: A Solitary Outcast ...................... Coming of Age in the Toon Street Series ................................. Role Models and Peer Community ............................................ A Failed Catcher in the Rye ........................................................ Sexuality, Violence and Death .................................................... A Solitary Hero on the Street ...................................................... The Boat to Redemption ...............................................................

75 94 102 110 114 120 122

Chapter Four Fallen Youth: A Trembling Loner ...................... A Degenerating and Helpless Parental Milieu ......................... Guanglin’s Self-sufficient Peer Community ............................. Sexuality .......................................................................................... Time and Death—the End of Adolescence .............................. After Cries in the Drizzle .............................................................

131 158 168 173 175 180

Chapter Five Tragic and Parodistic Bildungsroman ................. Farewell to Revolution .................................................................. Unfulfilled Bildung ........................................................................

187 188 195

Glossary ............................................................................................... Bibliography ........................................................................................ Index ....................................................................................................

207 215 225

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I have received valuable assistance and unstinting encouragement from my former mentors at the University of British Columbia in the development and completion of this research project. I am enormously grateful to Michael S. Duke for his unfailing support and guidance during my studies at the University of British Columbia; to Timothy Cheek for being a constant source of inspiration and encouragement; and to Jerry D. Schmidt for broadening my understanding of classical Chinese literature. I would also like to express my thanks to Bruce Fulton, John X. Cooper, Catherine Swatek, Alexander Woodside, and Alison Bailey for their advice and support. I also thank the Faculty of Graduate Studies at UBC and the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for their generous support through fellowships. Special thanks are due to Su Tong and Yu Hua for granting my request for interviews with them. I would also like to thank Allan H. Barr for his generosity in allowing me to refer to his English translation in manuscript form, and for his critical insights and comments at an early stage of this project. I am also obliged to Philip F. Williams for his longstanding help and encouragement during the revision of the manuscript. I would also like to express my appreciation to Ma Shanshuang for the calligraphy on the front cover. In addition, I wish to express my gratitude to Katelyn Chin and the other editors at Brill for their expert editorial assistance, as well as to the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and advice. Finally, I would like to thank my colleagues in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Montana State University for their support and encouragement during the later stages of this project. This book is fondly dedicated to the memory of my grandfather Bai Fengxiang and my aunt Li Guoxiang.

INTRODUCTION They experienced a unique coming of age. Exactly how the Cultural Revolution affected this generation is still unclear. —J. W. Esherick, P. G. Pickowicz, and A. G. Walder, The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History

The focus of this study is coming of age in troubled times as portrayed in contemporary Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo/Bildungsroman fiction. Selected works of two major Chinese writers—Su Tong (b. 1963) and Yu Hua (b. 1960)—are treated as cultural metaphors reflecting on the growth and future of Chinese youth in the abnormal era of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (hereafter the Cultural Revolution). This study discusses how this fiction’s images of youth deviate from the one promoted by Mao Zedong (1893–1976), in which Chinese youths are compared to “the sun at eight or nine in the morning” and the socialist new man.1 It will be argued here that the particular narratives by Su Tong and Yu Hua that I have selected for analysis form a body of tragic and parodistic Bildungsroman against both the earlier modern Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo, especially those written during the first seventeen years of the People’s Republic of China (hereafter PRC) as well as the traditional European Bildungsroman genre. The overall thesis and ensuing discussions about the tragic and parodistic nature of Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s chengzhang xiaoshuo will be illustrated from two comparative perspectives: the terrain of modern Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo written from the May Fourth era to contemporary times, and the theoretical framework of traditional European Bildungsroman. By anchoring the two authors’ chengzhang xiaoshuo in the terrain of modern Chinese coming-of-age stories, I argue that the coming-of-age narratives written from the May Fourth

1 Mao Zedong, “Talk at a Meeting with Chinese Students and Trainees in Moscow” (November 17, 1957), in English Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1976), 288. The full quotation is, “The world is yours, as well as ours, but in the final analysis, it is yours. You young people, full of vigor and vitality, are in the bloom of life like the sun at eight or nine in the morning. Our hope is placed in you . . . The world belongs to you. China’s future belongs to you.”

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era to 1966 betray a tendency toward a gradual victory of the collective spirit over individualistic self-cultivation, and of national salvation over enlightenment humanism. The young protagonists in these narratives fulfill their Bildung by merging their individuality with a mass movement, and find the meaning of their lives by devoting themselves to revolutionary and communist careers. In contrast, the coming-ofage narratives written by Su Tong and Yu Hua in the late 1980s, early 1990s, and the twenty-first century demonstrate a reverse tendency. By highlighting their young protagonists’ autonomy, subjectivity, and individuality during the Cultural Revolution, Su Tong and Yu Hua define themselves as being naturally opposed to the collectivism by which the Chinese Communist Party (hereafter CCP) seeks to implement its authoritarian social and political policies at the expense of human individuality. Close readings of Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s chengzhang xiaoshuo reveal how the old Maoist utopian vision has given way to an essentially pessimistic view of the future of Chinese young people coming of age in the late 1960s and 1970s. This dark perspective casts its shadow upon the optimistic image of the successors to the cause of proletarian revolution governed by the CCP. In both Su Tong’s North Side Story (Chengbei didai, 1994) and Yu Hua’s Cries in the Drizzle (Zai xiyu zhong huhan, 1991), with the Cultural Revolution as their historical background, teenagers—representing the hope of society—grow up in a morally degenerate and politically suppressed society. They are dissatisfied, restless and unable to find meaning in their lives. Despite being confronted with trials and ordeals that in another setting would have probably led them to maturity, their goals remain unclear and their lives mostly meaningless. They wait in vain for their future to arrive. Using Su Tong’s North Side Story and Yu Hua’s Cries in the Drizzle as a departure, I will also discuss and analyze the Bildungsroman elements in some of the two authors’ novellas, short stories, and betterknown full-length novels, such as Rice (Mi, 1991), My Life as Emperor (Wo de diwang shengya, 1992), Binu and the Great Wall (Binu, 2006), The Boat to Redemption (He’an, 2009), To Live (Huozhe, 1993), Chronicle of a Blood Merchant (Xu Sanguan maixue ji, 1996), and Brothers (Xiongdi, 2005–2006). Many of these works are not necessarily Bildungsroman in the strict sense of that term. However, they mostly do engage at some level with the coming-of-age structure. By discussing these works in the framework of Bildungsroman, I will attempt to show how the coming-of-age structure has expanded and changed

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in the two writers’ fictional oeuvre over their career, and reveal the connection between their fiction and their real-life coming-of-age experiences. By placing Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s coming-of-age fiction in the theoretical framework of traditional Bildungsroman as a literary genre, I argue that these coming-of-age narratives share a common quality as parodistic Bildungsroman with Western novels, such as Thomas Mann’s (1875–1955) The Magic Mountain. Bildungsroman is a German term that means “novel of formation,” “novel of initiation,” or “novel of education.”2 This type of narrative appears in nearly all major literary traditions. Scholars and critics such as Hegel, Dilthey, Lukacs and Bakhtin have all investigated this literary genre in their treatises. The traditional Bildungsroman follows its hero’s path from childhood to maturity, usually moving from an initial stage of youthful egoism and irresponsibility to a final harmonious integration with society. Yet with Su Tong and Yu Hua, the tradition is turned on its head, because the young protagonists in their stories never recognize their “identity and role in the world” or achieve maturity after experiencing various kinds of ordeal and spiritual crisis.3 In the present book, the term “parodistic Bildungsroman” and the connotation of parody resonate with those concepts as applied by both Martin Swales and W. H. Bruford in their analyses of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. In his book The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse, Swales registers the tragic and parodistic resonance of The Magic Mountain by questioning the process and ending of the protagonist Hans Castorp’s Bildung. Swales maintains that “Hans Castorp is and remains ‘mittelmässig,’ mediocre, or perhaps more accurately, undistinguished by any dominant characteristic, propensity, or quality” after his seven-year sojourn in an alpine sanatorium.4 Castorp’s development deviates from “the traditional sense [of Bildungsroman] in which . . . a novel hero’s development . . . is learning consistently and cumulatively from his experience to the point where he can then enact the values he has acquired.”5 In addition, Swales 2 For a brief introduction about the Bildungsroman as a literary genre, see M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literature Terms, 7th ed. (Toronto: Harcourt Brace College Publisher, 1999), 193. 3 Ibid. 4 Martin Swales, The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 119. 5 Ibid., 118.

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questions both the cloistered social world in which Castorp constructs his Bildung and the external or workaday world he finally enters at the end of his Bildung. He argues that “the ‘hermetic’ and sick world of the sanatorium” where Castorp has received his education in philosophy and other higher things in life “bears no relationship to the common realm of ordinary human encounters and interaction”—the educative environment in traditional Bildungsroman.6 Furthermore, the battlefield that Hans Castorp enters at the end of the novel is “a chaotic and violent confusion” that would not allow him to fulfill his “relationship with human society.”7 Castorp’s transformation into cannon fodder for the World War is truly tragic and parodistic compared to the traditional Bildungsroman, in which the young hero nearly always ends up in fine spirits and well prepared for whatever challenges the real social world might foist upon him. In his article “ ‘Bildung’ in The Magic Mountain,” W. H. Bruford emphasizes the parodistic implication of the novel by linking Castorp’s aestheticism to a sort of agreeable sickness and death. Bruford argues that The Magic Mountain parodies the traditional Bildungsroman “in that the hero comes to terms, in the course of it, not so much with life as with death, or at least with death as the ever-present shadow of life.”8 These tragic and parodistic elements, which Swales and Bruford identify in The Magic Mountain, are also prominent in Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s coming-of-age fiction. Therefore, I use the terms “parody” and “parodistic” in the same vein as Swales and Bruford do. In addition, chengzhang xiaoshuo is used as the Chinese counterpart to the German term Bildungsroman. In order to avoid repetition, the term “coming-of-age narrative” is also used to refer to Bildungsroman. In the European literary tradition, Bildungsroman normally refers to the full-length novel, but in the present context the terms chengzhang xiaoshuo and “coming-of-age narrative” are not confined to the fulllength novel, but also include the novella and the short story. To avoid confusion and in order to differentiate the lengths of the works chosen to be analyzed, when the full-length novel is discussed, the term Bildungsroman is used. Shorter fictional works in the Bildungsroman mode

6

Ibid., 124–125. Ibid., 124. 8 W. H. Bruford, “ ‘Bildung’ in The Magic Mountain,” in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, ed. Harold Bloom (New Havern: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986), 83. 7

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are referred to as “coming-of-age novellas,” “coming-of-age stories,” or “coming-of-age short stories.” The methodology of the present work involves a combination of close readings of original Chinese literary texts and literary analysis informed by scholarship on the Bildungsroman genre, recent Westernlanguage and Chinese-language scholarly works on Su Tong and Yu Hua, as well as drawing from psychological and sociological theories of adolescence. An important aspect of the present work is an examination of the historical and cultural contexts of both modern and contemporary China and Chinese literature. In addition, I draw Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s biographical information from the two authors’ autobiographical essays, interviews published in academic journals, and various scholars’ research articles. Those different sources cross-refer to each other, and jointly provide a reliable picture of each author’s real-life experience. The chief scholarly significance of studying Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s coming-of-age fiction is threefold. First, this study expands the boundaries of scholarship relating to the literary genre of Bildungsroman. To be sure, the Bildungsroman is a Western literary concept. While Chinese writers such as Su Tong and Yu Hua may not necessarily have been deeply influenced by the European tradition, their coming-ofage fiction bears many affinities with this literary genre. By referring these two Chinese authors’ fiction to the theoretical corpus of the Bildungsroman, I explore the interaction between the literary genre and individual Chinese literary works, and demonstrate how these Chinese narratives enrich the Bildungsroman literary genre by providing a body of tragic and parodistic chengzhang xiaoshuo. With their cultural and historical particularities, they enrich the Bildungsroman as a literary genre in particular and world literature in general. Second, the present study contributes to our understanding of the social history of the Cultural Revolution. The thematic content of the two authors’ coming-of-age fiction is analyzed, and the authors’ perceived views about the effects of the Cultural Revolution upon Chinese youth are evaluated. Readers of these narratives should focus not only on their young protagonists, but also on the world in which these young people have lived and found themselves alienated. These narratives provide a fresh perspective on human suffering in general, and in particular, on the suffering of the Chinese people through the man-made disaster of the Cultural Revolution. Third, this study provides a new perspective from which to read Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s fiction. Through the

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lens of Bildungsroman, I will reveal how the two authors have engaged with the coming-of-age structure or Bildungsroman elements in their stories at various career stages. Many insightful research papers and articles have been published on the writings of Su Tong and Yu Hua. However, most of them focus either on the authors’ so-called “avant-garde” stories written in the 1980s, or on Su Tong’s new historical novels such as My Life as Emperor and Empress Dowager Wu Zetian (Wu Zetian, 1993), his family sagas such as the Maple-Poplar Village Series (Fengyangshu cun xilie) and Rice, or the “women” series such as “Blush” (Hong fen, 1992) and “Embroidery” (Cixiu, 1993), along with Yu Hua’s more realistic full-length novels To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant.9 While these articles make various helpful and interesting assertions about the works of these two major Chinese writers, unfortunately, there remains no systematic and comprehensive analysis of Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s coming-of-age stories.

9 In her article “On Su Tong,” Wang Haiyan examines how Su Tong’s fiction uncovers dichotomies of narration versus lyricism, urban versus rural, fatalism versus defiance, and individual accounts versus group-based histories. See Wang Haiyan, “Su Tong lun” [On Su Tong], Anqing shifan xueyuan xuebao, 1994, no. 4:80–85. In “A Review at the End of the Century,” Zhang Yingzhong discusses Su Tong’s fiction of the Toon Street Series, Maple-Poplar Village Series, and his historical series, and argues that Su Tong is obsessed with “reflecting upon the past.” See Zhang Yingzhong, “Shiji mo de huimou” [A Review at the end of the century], Xiandai wenxue zazhi, 1994, no. 5:30–33. For a discussion of various themes in Su Yong’s stories, see Zhao Hongqin, “Wu ke taobi: Su Tong yu nanfang” [Nowhere to escape: Su Tong and the South], Zhejiang shida xuebao, 1994, no. 3:40–44; Huang Jinfu, “Chuzou yu fanhui: Su Tong xiaoshuo jianlun” [Leaving and returning: a brief discussion of Su Tong’s stories], Zhejiang shida xuebao, 1994, no. 3:45–47; and Wu Yiqin, “Su Tong xiaoshuo zhong de shengming yishi” [Implications of life in Su Tong’s stories], Jiangsu shehui kexue, 1995, no. 1:116–121. Literary criticism of Yu Hua’s full-length novels has mainly been undertaken by Chinese scholars and critics such as Chen Sihe, Wu Yiqin and others. Chen Sihe indicates that Yu Hua refashions or revives accounts of Chinese folk society in these novels. See Chen Sihe, “Yu Hua: you xianfeng xiezuo zhuanxiang minjian zhihou” [Yu Hua: after transition from avant-garde writing to narrative on folk society], Wenyi zhengming, 2000, no. 1:68–70; For his part, Wu Yiqin attempts a comparison of the writing style between Yu Hua’s early stories and his novel Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, stressing that the latter work marks Yu Hua’s farewell to “hypocritical works.” See Wu Yiqin, “Gaobie xuwei de xingshi” [Farewell to hypocritical form], Wenyi zhengming, 2000, no. 1:71–77. In their writings, the critics Yu Xian and Zhang Hong discuss one of the most prominent techniques in Yu Hua’s novels—namely repetition: Yu Xian, “Chongfu de shixue” [Poetic repetition], Dangdai zuojia pinglun, 1996, no. 4:12–15; Zhang Hong, “‘Xu Sanguan maixue ji’ de xushi wenti” [Questions on the narrative of Chronicle of a Blood Merchant], Dangdai zuojia pinglun, 1997, no. 2:19–23.

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Despite the neglect of literary critics, both Su Tong and Yu Hua think highly of their coming-of-age fiction and the influence of their childhood experiences on their writings. Though the two writers have drawn upon diverse writing styles and plot arrangements, their coming-of-age fiction all deals with the theme of an individual’s selfrealization and socialization. As both Su Tong and Yu Hua remarked in my interviews with them, their writings have been deeply influenced by their childhood experiences during the Cultural Revolution, and are replete with projections of sufferings they either witnessed or encountered.10 In an article titled “Drawing upon Childhood,” Su Tong states: I recall my occluded and lonely childhood with love-hate sentiments . . . Whether carried out of love or out of hatred, of all the baggage carried throughout my life as a writer, the memories of childhood have perhaps been the heaviest burden in one’s entire suite of luggage. No matter if these memories are grey or bright, we must carry them along and treasure them. We have no alternative . . . We are bound to employ childhood to record some of our most mature thoughts.11

In the preface to the Italian version of Cries in the Drizzle, Yu Hua emphasized that this is a book of resurrected memories: My experience is that writing can constantly evoke memory, and I believe these memories belong not merely to myself. They are possibly an image of an era, or a brand left by the world on a person’s spirit . . . Experience is always more stark and powerful than memory . . . Memory cannot restore the past. It only reminds us once in a while of what we had before.12

The dearth of scholarship on Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s coming-of-age fiction is the motive force behind the writing of this book. I hope that this book’s analysis of the two writers’ fiction with the coming-of-age theme will fill this void. More importantly, I hope to establish that Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s constant aim in their writings is to examine the existence of human beings whom history has tended to marginalize. While not necessarily aiming at overt political criticism, their

10 My interview with Yu Hua took place on 6 July 2010 in Beijing; my interview with Su Tong took place on 12 July 2010 in Shanghai. 11 Su Tong, “Tongnian shenghuo de liyong” [Drawing upon childhood], Shijie 4:163. 12 Yu Hua, “Wo yongyou liangge rensheng” [I have two lives], in Wo nengfou xiangxin ziji? [Can I believe in myself?] (Beijing: Renmin ribao chubanshe, 1998), 148.

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works seek to identify how individuals, especially the young, survived or failed to survive in the 1970s China. This book is structured in five chapters corresponding to the dual comparative frameworks of tragic and parodistic Bildungsroman. The first two chapters introduce the European Bildungsroman as a literary genre and review the history of modern Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo respectively. These lay a comparative foundation for Chapters Three and Four, which deal solely with Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s comingof-age narratives. The concluding chapter discusses the two authors’ fictional works from two comparative perspectives. The detailed layout of each chapter is elucidated in the following paragraphs. Chapter One introduces the Bildungsroman/chengzhang xiaoshuo as a literary genre. I make an analytical review of various Western critical perspectives on the nature of Bildungsroman as a literary genre, and emphasize its crucial tension between outwardness and inwardness. This is followed by a further discussion of the differences and overlap between autobiography, memoir, autobiographical fiction, and the Bildungsroman. Specifically, I have chosen to base my discussion on the definitions and theories employed in M. M. Bakhtin’s Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, Franco Moretti’s The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, Jerome Buckley’s Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding, and Martin Swales’s The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse. Then I flesh out the term chengzhang xiaoshuo—the Chinese counterpart of Bildungsroman—and outline its importance in modern and contemporary Chinese literature. More importantly, I formulate my own definition of Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo and my criteria of selecting works for discussion in this book. In Chapter Two, I begin with an examination of the Chinese literary tradition of autobiographical and biographical writings in premodern Chinese literature. I argue that classical Chinese biographies and autobiographies prepared the soil for the rise and efflorescence of the Bildungsroman form during the twentieth century. Next, I discuss the literary context of modern Chinese fiction from the May Fourth Movement in 1919 to the 1990s, exploring the changing patterns of the chengzhang xiaoshuo within different social discourses in modern China. In the process of reviewing the history of modern Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo, I argue that the fictional representation of youth from the May Fourth era to 1966 reveals a gradual withdrawal of individualistic subjectivity and a surfacing of a collectivist spirit.

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In contrast, chengzhang xiaoshuo written during the 1980s and 1990s herald a reversion to a more individualistic and less collectivistic spirit, returning to a greater emphasis on subjectivity overall. Chapter Three focuses on Su Tong. I unfold a thematic analysis of Su Tong’s chengzhang xiaoshuo embodied in his Toon Street Series (Xiangchunshu jie xilie) and his latest full-length novel The Boat to Redemption. The thematic analyses of these narratives are interwoven with relevant biographical material and literary viewpoints associated with Su Tong. The Toon Street Series includes the full-length novel North Side Story, and such short stories as “Memories of Mulberry Garden” (Sangyuan liunian, 1984), “Roller Skating Away” (Cheng hualunche yuanqu, 1991), “The Sad Dance” (Shangxin de wudao, 1991), and “An Afternoon Incident” (Wuhou gushi, 1991). Toon Street is not only a geographical setting for Su Tong’s stories, but also signifies a specific temporal space—1966–1976, the period of the Cultural Revolution. As Su Tong writes in one of his stories, “Toon Street is a hallmark of southern China; it is also a symbol of degeneration.”13 It represents the epitome of a spirit of hopelessness in early-to-mid 1970s China. The teenagers growing up in this street unreflectively demonstrate their autonomy, individuality and subjectivity amidst social and political chaos. None of the trials the young heroes experience can be used to develop their fortitude or move them upward in a trajectory of ascent. Instead, these experiences lead only to reversals, and even sometimes destruction. In addition, this chapter contains some discussion of Su Tong’s better-known works, such as Rice, My Life as Emperor, and Binu and the Great Wall, along with highlighting some Bildungsroman elements in these narratives. These sections help flesh out how the coming-of-age structure developed, expanded and changed in Su Tong’s other fictional works over his career. Chapter Four deals with Yu Hua’s full-length novels, Cries in the Drizzle and Brothers, and four short stories entitled “On the Road at Eighteen” (Shibasui chumen yuanxing, 1986), “The April Third Incident” (Siyue sanri shijian, 1986), “Timid as a Mouse” (Wo danxiao ru shu, 1994), and “I Have No Name of My Own” (Wo meiyou ziji de mingzi, 1994). I argue that in these narratives Yu Hua focuses more on the psychological development of the teenage characters; overall,

13 Su Tong, Nanfang de duoluo [The degeneration of the South] (Taibei: Yuanliu chuban gongsi, 1992), 118.

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these works constitute a haunting history of fear, restlessness, and daydreaming. Yu Hua presents a philosophical reflection on youth and their maturity in a time of trouble. Maturity is no longer perceived as an acquisition, but as a loss. I also interlard biographical material and literary viewpoints of Yu Hua into my analysis of his fiction. This helps demonstrate the connection between Yu Hua’s real-life comingof-age experiences and his fiction. This chapter also contains some brief discussion of Yu Hua’s more famous novels such as To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, indicating how these novels resonate with the structure of his coming-of-age narratives. In the final and concluding Chapter Five, Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s fictional works are discussed from two comparative perspectives. I draw connections and reveal contrasts between these two Chinese writers’ works and earlier modern Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo, as well as the European Bildungsroman tradition, and explain exactly how Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s chengzhang xiaoshuo are tragic and parodistic. The negative outcomes of the youthful adventures presented in Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s chengzhang xiaoshuo provide an alternative perspective to flesh out the disastrous effects of the Cultural Revolution on the Chinese people, especially the young. Over the past three decades, numerous books have been written to recount the Chinese people’s sufferings during the Cultural Revolution in such formats as the memoir, oral history, and fiction. These works include Feng Jicai’s Voices from the Whirlwind: An Oral History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Rae Yang’s Spider Eaters: A Memoir, and Zhang Xianliang’s Half of Man Is Woman (Nanren de yiban shi nüren, 1985). In academia, some Chinese historians have asserted that “the Cultural Revolution has had a riveting impact on the fledgling field of contemporary Chinese studies.”14 For example, Anita Chan completed a substantial treatise on the Red Guards in Children of Mao: Personality Development and Political Activism in the Red Guard Generation as early as 1985.15 More recent studies such as Roderick MacFarquhar’s and Michael Schoenhals’ Mao’s Last Revolution and Joseph W. Esherick’s, Paul G.

14 Joseph W. Esherick, Paul G. Pickowicz and Andrew G. Walder, The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006), I. The essays in this volume reflect a new era of research by scholars who have immersed themselves in the flood of new source materials from the Cultural Revolution. 15 Anita Chan, Children of Mao: Personality Development and Political Activism in the Red Guard Generation (London: Macmillan, 1985).

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Pickowicz’s and Andrew G. Walder’s The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History have undertaken more systematic and comprehensive examinations of this historical event.16 As keen social observers and creative writers, Su Tong and Yu Hua have chosen a specific literary genre— the Bildungsroman—to visualize the tragic coming-of-age experiences of Chinese adolescents in a time of tremendous social upheaval. Their coming-of-age stories compel us to consider the cultural, educational and psychological consequences of the Cultural Revolution upon the writers’ own peers as well as upon later generations.

16 Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006).

CHAPTER ONE

BILDUNGSROMAN/CHENGZHANG XIAOSHUO AS A LITERARY GENRE When discussing post-Mao fiction, especially the experimental writings by Yu Hua and Su Tong from the late 1980s, critics in both China and US have noticed the “youth consciousness” or “youth mentality” embodied in these writers’ narratives.1 This “youth mentality” is understood as a response to a spirit of “pervasive restlessness” in contemporary China, whereby “the entire society slips out of paternalistic protection and unity, the sense of family is disappearing, and people are obliged to secure a position of their own.”2 This restlessness is intensified by the marketized economy and a related growth of insensitivity toward cultural values within society. Yu Hua’s first nationally renowned short story, “On the Road at Eighteen,” reflects this youth mentality and has been cogently interpreted as a “miniature of the Bildungsroman.”3 In similar fashion, all of Su Tong’s narratives in the Toon Street Series deal with various coming-of-age experiences within his generation. This youth mentality and the re-emergence of Chinese fiction dealing with a young hero’s coming-of-age experience in the 1980s highlight a literary genre that will be the focus of this book—the Bildungsroman or chengzhang xiaoshuo. In this study, I will draw upon Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s full-length novels North Side Story and Cries in the Drizzle and some of their coming-of-age short narratives as a point of departure for systematically exploring how the two authors have exploited the conventional 1 Chinese critics Wang Zheng and Xiao Hua are probably the first to discuss the “youth mentality” or “youth consciousness.” Their analyses and arguments have been frequently cited by other critics and scholars. For detailed discussions, see Wang Zheng and Xiao Hua, “Hubu de qingnian yishi: Yu Su Tong youguan de huo wuguan de” [The complementary youth consciousness: Things relevant or irrelevant to Su Tong], Dushu [Reading] (July/August 1989): 102–107; Xiaobing Tang, “Residual Modernism: Narratives of the Self in Contemporary Chinese Fiction,” Modern Chinese Literature 7, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 12–13; Rong Cai, “The Lonely Traveler Revisited in Yu Hua’s Fiction,” Modern Chinese Literature 10, no.1/2 (Spring/Fall 1998): 178. 2 Wang and Xiao, “Hubu de qingnian yishi: Yu Su Tong youguan de huo wuguan de,” 103–104. 3 Tang, “Residual Modernism: Narratives of the Self in Contemporary Chinese Fiction,” 12.

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genre of Bildungsroman to visualize and conceptualize their personal real-life coming-of-age experiences from the Cultural Revolution. I will also explore how the generic structure of the Bildungsroman has been developed and transformed during the two authors’ careers by discussing and analyzing their other narratives. Analysis of Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s works within the context of the theoretical corpus of the Bildungsroman/chengzhang xiaoshuo is necessary not only because the Bildungsroman framework is indispensable to an understanding of Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s work, but also because the “ ‘Chineseness’ of these texts is historicized and becomes relational to the outside world” when they are placed in comparative perspective.4 The interaction between a literary genre and an individual literary work that fits within the genre is one of the major concerns in this study. When Martin Swales discusses the German Bildungsroman, he points out that an understanding of the concept of genre is requisite to “any understanding of literary texts,” and that the vitality of any genre lies in the interaction between general “expectation” and specific practice, between theory and its “individuated realization in an actual work.”5 The genre provides a certain “expectation” for the individual novels, and in turn, these novels “vivify” that “expectation” by means of their “creative engagement with it.”6 No matter how much or to what degree the actual work has fulfilled a reader’s expectations of it, the specific literary work will help to illuminate the genre’s features. The genre serves as a “structuring principle within the palpable stuff of an individual literary creation.”7 However, when we study an individual work through the lens of one specific literary genre, the first question we confront is the applicability of this genre to the work under discussion, especially when the individual work is in a different socio-historical setting from where the genre originally emerged. These are the questions need to be answered before this study can proceed forward: Can we apply the generic framework of the Bildungsroman, which emerged in European middle-class culture in the nineteenth-century, to the fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua written in 4 Yingjin Zhang, “Introduction: Engaging Chinese Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies,” in China in a Polycentric World: Essays in Chinese Comparative Literature, ed. Yingjin Zhang (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 7. 5 Martin Swales, The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 10–12. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid.

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the PRC during the 1980s and 1990s? How can we justify the retroactive applicability of the term chengzhang xiaoshuo, which had not been extensively used by critics until the 1990s, to Chinese literary works from the early twentieth century? In addition, how relevant are the respective authors’ personal coming-of-age experiences to their fiction? These questions will be addressed and clarified as this chapter traces the history of Bildungsroman and its Chinese counterpart chengzhang xiaoshuo. I will first explore the origin and development of the Bildungsroman as a literary genre, review its principal thematic concerns, and respond to some crucial questions that have been raised in the writings of such scholars as M. M. Bakhtin, Martin Swale, Franco Moretti, Jerome Buckley, Jeffrey Sammons, and Fritz Martini. Next, I will flesh out the term chengzhang xiaoshuo and outline its importance in modern and contemporary Chinese literature. Before looking into the emergence of the genre Bildungsroman in nineteenth-century Europe, it is necessary to understand the dialectical relation between literary genre and social reality. P. N. Medvedev and M. M. Bakhtin have argued that “genre appraises reality and reality clarifies genre.”8 A literary genre is the conceptualization or visualization of some aspects of reality, and the creation of new genres is more of a response to “social changes in real social life” than the mere “result of purely mechanical processes or the revival of neglected devices.”9 Social changes bring about new views of experience, and result in a broadening array of genres in literature as well as oral discourse. Once a new literary genre arises, it can provide the reader with a new lens with which to observe some aspects of reality, and can “become common in spheres remote from [its] origin.”10 An understanding of this dialectical relation between literary genre and social reality helps explain the emergence of both European Bildungsroman novels in the nineteenth-century and Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo in the twentieth-century. The emergence of Bildungsroman novels was a response to modernity in Europe at the turn of the eighteenth century. In his study of this

8 P. N. Medvedev and M. M. Bakhtin, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, trans. Albert J. Wehrle (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 136. 9 Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 277. 10 Ibid.

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literary genre, Franco Moretti calls Bildungsroman the “symbolic form” of modernity.11 In traditional society, a youth was usually considered merely biologically distinct from the adult; generational differences in patterns of cognition were generally ignored. Young people were expected simply to imitate their parents’ lifestyles and career path. This is a “pre-scribed” approach to the life stage of youth in which there is no culture or subculture to distinguish and emphasize the worth of being young.12 However, at the turn of the eighteenth century, Europe’s industrial revolution brought major social changes to traditional European society, the countryside was increasingly being abandoned for the city, and the world of work was changing at an incredible and incessant pace. Modern young people were thus facing an uncertain exploration of societal space and a seemingly unlimited potentiality for self-transformation through apprenticeship, travel, or adventure. This was in sharp contrast with the “colorless and uneventful socialization of the old youth” prior to the great changes wrought by the industrial revolution. Under the new social and economic circumstances, the life stage of youth became “a specific image of modernity” because of its attributes of mobility and inner restlessness. The great narrative of the Bildungsroman thus came into being to correspond to the “symbolic centrality” of the life stage of youth in modernity. Among the characteristics of the modern life stage of youth, the Bildungsroman abstracts a symbolic life stage of youth that is epitomized by the attributes of mobility and interiority.13 We will see in my later discussion, a narrative in the Bildungsroman genre always develops around the tension between mobility (outwardness) and interiority (inwardness), between socialization and individuality. Youth is a period of life that is full of contradictory developments— “individuality and socialization, autonomy and normality, interiority and objectification.”14 In his introduction to Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding, Jerome Buckley calls the season of youth “the space between.”15 This notion was inspired by John Keats’ words: “The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature 11 Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987), 5. 12 Ibid., 4. 13 Ibid., 4–5. 14 Ibid., 16. 15 Jerome Hamilton Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), vii.

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imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted.”16 The space between childhood and adulthood is far from happy; young people are easily “bruised and wounded” when they encounter reality. “The happy season of youth,” argues Buckley, is merely “an illusion of those who have lost it.”17 Bildungsroman novels first appeared in Germany in the last third of the eighteenth century. They were “principally concerned with the spiritual and psychological development of the young protagonist.”18 Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship was pivotal in the development of this genre in Germany. Dozens of monographs and hundreds of articles deal with the development and meaning of the type of novel that uses Goethe’s work as its model. Even though Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship was written as early as 1795, the term Bildungsroman was not coined until the 1810s by a then obscure professor of rhetoric in Dorpat, Germany: Karl von Morgenstern.19 Morgenstern’s invention of the term Bildungsroman was a theoretical response to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Morgenstern was the first scholar to define the Bildungsroman as a genre, and explains what the term means in this comment on Goethe’s work: It will justly bear the name Bildungsroman firstly and primarily on account of its thematic material, because it portrays the Bildung [formation/education/ acculturation] of the hero in its beginning and growth to a certain stage of completeness; and also secondly because it is by virtue of this portrayal that it furthers the reader’s Bildung to a much greater extent than any other kind of novel.20

Morgenstern thus linked the word Bildung to both the hero and the reader. Martini further points out that Morgenstern’s creation of the term resulted from his defense of “the novel as a moral means of

16 John Keats, The Poem of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 102–103. 17 Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding, vii. 18 James Hardin, “An Introduction,” in Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman, ed. James Hardin (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), ix. 19 Fritz Martini, “Bildungsroman—Term and Theory,” in Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman, 1–25. 20 Lothar Kohn, Entwicklungs—und Bildungsroman (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1969), 5.

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education, as opposed to the conception of the novel as mere entertainment, pleasure, fantasy, and as an escape from reality.”21 Though Morgenstern was the first scholar to introduce the term Bildungsroman in a formal and systematic manner, this kind of novel had already been analyzed by the critic Friedrich von Blanckenburg in his “Essay on the Novel” as early as 1774. The source of this advance in theoretical understanding of the novel theory lay in Blanckenburg’s appreciation of Christoph Martin Wieland’s Agathon (1767), and “the way in which it overtly (and thematically) transforms the traditional novel genre by investing it with a new psychological and intellectual seriousness.”22 For Blanckenburg, Wieland’s principal achievement resided in his ability to get inside a character to portray the complexity of human potential. Through interaction with the outside world, this complexity of human potential yields the tangible process of human growth and change. Although Blanckenburg did not use the term Bildungsroman, he revealed a clear understanding of such a novel’s fundamental features when he developed his theory of the novel of inwardness. Blanckenburg argued that a novel should be evaluated “on the basis of the extent to which it portrays the inner soul, the inner history of the person portrayed.”23 However, it was above all Wilhelm Dilthey who brought the term Bildungsroman into general usage in 1870. Dilthey derived his definition of the Bildungsroman from his analysis of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship: A regulated development within the life of the individual is observed; each of its stages has its own intrinsic value, and is at the same time the basis for a higher stage. The dissonances and conflicts of life appear as the necessary growth points through which the individual must pass on his way to maturity and harmony.24

In Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (Poetry and Experience/1906), Dilthey identifies the theme of the Bildungsroman as the history of a young man

21

Martini, “Bildungsroman—Term and Theory,” 24. Swales, The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse, 13. 23 Martini, “Bildungsroman—Term and Theory,” 21. 24 Wilhelm Dilthey, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung: Lessing, Goethe, Novalis, Hölderlin (Leipzig & Bern: Teubner, 1913), 394. English translation is quoted from Swales, The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse, 3. 22

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Who enters into life in a blissful state of ignorance, seeks related souls, experiences friendship and love, struggles with the hard realities of the world and thus armed with a variety of experiences, matures, finds himself and his mission in the world.25

There are some limitations in Dilthey’s definition of this genre. For example, it is questionable whether the “fulfillment and harmony” to which Dilthey refers should be the “necessary goal of the Bildungsroman.”26 Despite the narrowness of Dilthey’s gloss for the Bildungsroman, it remains the most frequently cited definition of this genre. In the wake of Dilthey’s contribution, the term Bildungsroman has been applied ever more widely in literary scholarship. In Germany, the early Bildungsroman soon generated several noticeable subtypes. For instance, the Entwicklungsroman or “novel of development” chronicles a young person’s overall socialization and maturation in the gradual transformation into an adult; the Erziehungsroman or “pedagogical novel” depicts a youth’s training and formal education; and the Kunstlerroman or “artist novel” recounts the early formative years of an artist.27 Some scholars who have been cautious in applying the term Bildungsroman have attempted to distinguish it from these designations of subtypes or subcategories. For instance, Melitta Gerhard has attempted to make Bildungsroman more precise by categorizing it as a subgenre of the Entwicklungsroman. According to Gerhard, the Entwicklungsroman is the more general term, embracing those novels that treat the protagonist’s maturation through his confrontation with the world. Gerhard suggests that the Bildungsroman is a specific sort of Entwicklungsroman that flourished during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.28 On the other hand, Martin Swales prefers Bildungsroman over Erziehungsroman and Entwicklungsroman because of the Bildungsroman’s cultural and philosophical features. The Erziehungsroman deals with the educational process in a specific and limited way—“a certain set of values to be acquired, of lessons to be learned.”29 However, in a remarkable fusion of theory and practice, the Bildungsroman reveals

25 26 27 28 29

Hardin, “An Introduction,” xiv. Swales, “Introduction,” in The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse, 3. Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding, 13. Hardin, “An Introduction,” xvi. Swales, The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse, 14.

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the growth of the young protagonist by focusing on the character’s inner life and psychological development. The word Bildung connotes the cultural “values by which a man lives.”30 Compared with Bildungsroman, the term Entwicklungsroman is fairly neutral and bears less “emotional and intellectual” flavor than does Bildungsroman.31 In recent decades, many literary critics and scholars have doubted not only whether a given individual novel is a Bildungsroman, but also whether or not the genre itself is as “important and prevalent” as many earlier critics had assumed. In his article entitled “The Apprenticeship of the Reader: The Bildungsroman of the ‘Age of Goethe,’ ” Dennis F. Mahoney enumerates several scholars’ arguments. For example, upon examining various nineteenth century German novels, Jeffrey Sammons concludes that the Bildungsroman is a “phantom genre.” Harmut Steinecke points out that “German novelists and theoreticians tried to find compromises between Wilhelm Meister and the Western European novel of society” before Dilthey brought the term Bildungsroman into general usage in 1870. Only after 1870 did novels of the Wilhelm Meister tradition become viewed as “typically German.” Furthermore, scholars such as Hans Vaget have proposed the term “novel of socialization” to delineate “the contents and objectives of the novels in question and [link] them to developments within other European literature.”32 In spite of the lack of consensus between scholars on the connotations of the term Bildungsroman, there is nonetheless one area of agreement, namely that the interaction of outward experience and inward reflection is the main concern of the Bildungsroman as a novelistic genre. With this consensus in mind, I shall thus turn to a brief discussion of such aspects of outwardness (plot) and inwardness (theme) as humanism, discursiveness, and educational value. Jerome Buckley summarizes the principal elements of the plot of the Bildungsroman as follows: “Childhood, the conflict of generations, provinciality, the larger society, self-education, alienation, ordeal by love, the search for a vocation and a philosophy of life.”33 The child responds to these “experiences that might alter the entire direction of

30

Ibid. Ibid. 32 Dennis F. Mahoney, “The Apprenticeship of the Reader: The Bildungsroman of the ‘Age of Goethe,’ ” in Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman, 100. 33 Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding, 18. 31

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his growing mind and eventually influence for better or for worse his whole maturity.”34 Among the narrative elements, we need to pay special attention to the absence of fatherhood, setting out on a journey, the tension between potentiality and actuality, and the accommodation between the young protagonist and the social world. The role that fatherhood plays in the Bildungsroman is noteworthy. The growing child in many nineteenth-century English novels is often orphaned, fatherless, or at least alienated from his father.35 “The loss of the father, either by death or alienation, usually symbolizes or parallels a loss of faith in the hero’s home and family and leads inevitably to the search for a substitute parent or creed.”36 Therefore, “the defection of the father becomes accordingly the principal motive force in the assertion of the youth’s independence.”37 Setting out on a journey is another key element in the plot of the Bildungsroman. According to Buckley, “The journey from home is in some degree the flight from provinciality” to a larger society, as well as the flight from the bonds imposed by the parental generation, with whom the protagonist has usually been in conflict.”38 This sort of provincial protagonist often initially enters the city in a spirit of bewilderment and credulity. Buckley accentuates the double role that the city plays in the young man’s life: “It is both the agent of liberation and a source of corruption . . . The city, which seems to promise infinite variety and newness, all too often brings a disenchantment more alarming and decisive than any dissatisfaction with the narrowness of provincial life.”39 Besides the narrative elements of fatherhood and setting out on the journey, the tension between “potentiality and actuality” is also central to the growth of an individual hero in a Bildungsroman novel. On the one hand, the Bildungsroman explores “the sheer complexity of individual potentiality”; on the other hand, it recognizes that “practical reality—marriage, family, career—is a necessary dimension of the hero’s self-realization.”40 This tension becomes part of the ordeal with which the youth has to grapple in order to achieve maturity. At the 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

Ibid., 19. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 20. Ibid. Swales, The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse, 29.

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end of most Bildungsroman narratives, the young protagonist achieves a reasonable accommodation between the competing priorities of the individual and society. This is especially common in the English novel of adolescence, in which there is always “a certain practical accommodation between the hero and the social world around him.”41 “Accommodation” does not mean resolving the tension between the individual and society, but rather “learn[ing] to live with it, and even transform[ing] it into a tool for survival.”42 In other words, the protagonist “realizes his deepest interiority in the outside world,” and recognizes “the discrepancy between the interiority and the world.”43 In the end, the protagonist finally makes peace with his reality. In his article, “The Bildungsroman for Nonspecialists,” Jeffrey Sammons emphasizes the “evolutionary change within the self ”: Bildung is not merely the accumulation of experience, not merely maturation in the form of fictional biography. There must be a sense of evolutionary change within the self, a teleology of individuality, even if the novel, as many do, comes to doubt or deny the possibility of achieving a gratifying result.44

The concern of the Bildungsroman is the growth process itself, not any particular goal that adulthood may make possible. “It does not matter whether the process of Bildung succeeds or fails, whether the protagonist achieves an accommodation with life and society or not.”45 In this sense, it allows the novel to preclude any simple sense of finality, of “over and done with.”46 Not surprisingly, many Bildungsroman narratives remain open-ended. The Bildungsroman is a noticeably subjective genre focusing on the protagonist’s inner life and psychological development. The term Bildung “involves a belief in inwardness as the source of human distinction.”47 In 1923, Thomas Mann commented on the German reverence for Bildung:

41

Ibid., 34. Morreti, The Way of the World, 10. 43 George Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature (Bambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press, 1971), 136. 44 Jeffrey L. Sammons, “The Bildungsroman for Nonspecialists: An Attempt at a Clarification,” in Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman, 41. 45 Ibid. 46 Swales, The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse, 34. 47 Ibid., 151. 42

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The finest characteristic of the typical German, the best-known and also the most flattering to his self-esteem, is his inwardness. It is no accident that it was the Germans who gave to the world the intellectually stimulating and very humane literary form which we call the Bildungsroman. Western Europe has its novel of social criticism, to which the Germans regard this other type as their own special counterpart: it is at the same time an autobiography, a confession. The inwardness, the “Bildung” of a German implies introspectiveness; an individualistic cultural conscience; consideration for the careful tending, the shaping, deepening and perfecting of one’s own personality or, in religious terms, for the salvation and justification of one’s own life.48

Bildungsroman novels demonstrate “an intense and sustained concern for the growth of an individual in all his experiential complexity and potentiality.”49 And “it is precisely this interest in the inner life and processes of the individual that confers poetic seriousness.”50 The Bildungsroman was born of the humanistic ideal of late eighteenth-century Germany. According to Sammons, “the concept of Bildung is intensely bourgeois; it carries with it many assumptions about the autonomy and relative integrity of the self, its potential self-creative energies, its relative range of opinions within material, social, even psychological determinants.”51 Therefore, the Bildungsroman is closely related to “the early bourgeois, humanistic concept of the shaping of the individual self from its innate potentialities through acculturation and social experience to the threshold of maturity.”52 It is a novel form with “a concern for the whole man unfolding organically in all his complexity and richness.”53 Closely related to the inwardness of the Bildungsroman is its intellectual flavor. Novels such as Wilhelm Meister and David Copperfield not only present the growth of a young protagonist, but also explore the “nature and the limitation of human consciousness.”54 They reveal “the protagonist’s capacity for self-reflection . . . [which] is part of the whole living process in which he is embedded.”55 This self-reflective

48

Quoted by Swales, The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse, 159. Swales, The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse, 19. 50 Ibid. 51 Sammons, “The Bildungsroman for Nonspecialists: An Attempt at a Clarification,” 42. 52 Ibid, 41. 53 Swales, The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse, 14. 54 Ibid., 35. 55 Ibid., 36. 49

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discursiveness, preoccupied with the development of mind and soul, in turn, has an educational impact upon the reader. Says Lukacs: This form has been called the “novel of education”—rightly, because its action has to be a conscious, controlled process aimed at a certain goal: the development of qualities in men which would never blossom without the active intervention of other men and circumstances; whilst the goal thus attained is in itself formative and encouraging to others—is itself a means of education.56

It is not only essential for the protagonist of the Bildungsroman to reflect throughout his ordeals and trials, but also crucial for the reader to reflect. Even though novels written in the tradition of Wilhelm Meister were numerous and important in nineteenth-century Germany, the Bildungsroman was by no means the only kind of novel to come out of the country in that period of time. Nor should it be regarded as a narrowly German literary practice. We find this style of novel in English, French, and other European literature from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, in such works as Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and David Copperfield, Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, and Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. One could also explore the influence of the Bildungsroman on the genres of biography, autobiography, memoir, and the biographical or autobiographical novel. M. H. Abrams has tried to distinguish these literary genres by emphasizing the nuances of the contents in his Glossary of Literary Terms: Late in the seventeenth century, John Dryden defined biography neatly as “the history of particular men’s lives.” The term now connotes a relatively full account of a particular person’s life, involving the attempt to set forth character, temperament, and milieu, as well as the subject’s activities and experiences . . . Autobiography is a biography written by the subject about himself or herself. It is to be distinguished from the memoir, in which the emphasis is not on the author’s developing self but on the people and events that the author has known or witnessed, and also from the private diary or journal, which is a day-to-day record of the

56 Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, 135.

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events in one’s life, generally written for personal use and satisfaction, with little or no thought of publication.57

It is sometimes difficult to draw a sharp line between autobiography and the autobiographical novel. Buckley has tried to distinguish one from the other by means of the differing approaches to narration adopted in the autobiography versus the autobiographical novel. He argues that the autobiographer is typically “the older man, indulging in fond retrospect, often more than a little sentimental in his view of his youth, recalling what it pleases him to remember.”58 The autobiographer is pretty much limited by his own point of view of his own experience, and has to be very self-conscious “through modesty, through fear of unwanted self-exposure,” and owing to fear of being criticized as “egotistical.”59 Compared with the autobiographer, the autobiographical novelist has a distinct advantage in being able to freely “conceal or reveal what he will of his past by assigning to his hero some of his own acts and feelings and inventing as many others as he chooses to complete a dramatic characterization.”60 In contrast to the relatively senior autobiographer recalling his memorable past, the “autobiographical novelist is usually a younger man, nearer in time to his initiation, self-protectively more ironic, still mindful of the growing pains of adolescence, reproducing as accurately as possible the turbulence of the space between childhood and early manhood.”61 Meanwhile, he must keep the fiction independent of himself as an author.62 From this review, we can see that biography, autobiography, memoir, diary, and biographical or autobiographical novels share common thematic concerns with the Bildungsroman. One could even label them as Bildungsroman when they are profoundly engaged in the exploration of values, ideas, and the hero’s growth process, inwardness, subjectivity, and philosophical traits. However, in Bakhtin’s article, “The Bildungsroman and its Significance in the History of Realism (Toward a Historical Typology of the Novel),” the Russian critic identifies the fundamental differences

57 58 59 60 61 62

Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 22. Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding, 25–26. Ibid. Ibid., 26. Ibid. Ibid.

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between the Bildungsroman and other related genres, particularly the biographical novel, the travel novel, and the novel of ordeal. The differences revolve around the “dynamic unity” versus the “static unity” of the hero’s image.63 The biographical novel focuses either on “deeds, feats, merits, and creative accomplishments” or “on the structure of the hero’s destiny,” while “the hero himself remains essentially unchanged.”64 As for the travel novel, Bakhtin indicates that it emphasizes “a purely spatial and static conception of the world’s diversity” with the “absence of historical time.” The hero is just “a point moving in space” and “has no essential distinguishing characteristics.”65 Similarly, in the novel of ordeal, the hero remains “complete and unchanging” throughout the novel, and his relatively static qualities are merely being “tested and verified,” instead of being developed or shaped. In sum, Bakhtin registers the static and constant nature of the hero— “ready-made and unchanging”—in the biographical novel, the travel novel, and the novel of ordeal. In sharp contrast, Bakhtin accentuates the dynamic and changing nature of the hero in the Bildungsroman. Here, “the changes in the hero himself ” and his personal evolution over genuine national-historical time acquire significance in the plot. The Bildungsroman reveals “the assimilation of real historical time and the assimilation of historical man that takes place in that time.”66 In other words, it is the interaction between ourwardness and inwardness that defines the genre. The Bildungsroman has also attracted the attention of feminist writers and critics in the twentieth century. The genre has been called “the most salient form for literature influenced by neo-feminism”67 and “the most popular form of feminist fiction.”68 Feminist critics have explored a number of novels that deal with a woman’s search for selfidentity and values. In these narratives, during the heroine’s quest for “self-knowledge and self-realization,” not only does she encounter

63 M. M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 10–59. 64 Ibid., 17. 65 Ibid., 10–11. 66 Ibid., 19. 67 Ellen Morgan, “Humanbecoming: Form and Focus in the Neo-Feminist Novel,” in Image of Women in Fiction: Feminist Perspectives, ed. Susan Koppelman Cornillon (Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1972), 183–85. 68 Barbara A. White, Growing Up Female: Adolescent Girlhood in American Fiction (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985), 195.

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outward difficulties such as “an uncomprehending husband [or] economic dependence”; she also struggles with “the elusiveness of the total self ” and “human cognition.”69 The critics analyze these narratives in the light of both Bildungsroman criticism and feminist theories. For example, in The Voyage In, a collection of essays on “fiction of female development” complied in 1983, Dilthey’s definition of the Bildungsroman is accused of being sexist because women have often not been afforded the same opportunities as men, such as leaving the countryside for the city, severing family ties, or playing an active role in society. Citing a number of English and American novels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the authors of The Voyage In set forth a definition of “the fiction of female development . . . tak[ing] into consideration specifically female psychological and sociological theories.”70 James Hardin concludes that “in effect, a form of female Bildungsroman is constructed that roughly parallels the general thematic and structure of the ‘male’ variety.”71 This outline of the development of the Bildungsroman genre reveals both the formal characteristics and thematic concerns of the genre. More importantly, it indicates that the emergence of the narratives of Bildungsroman genre is a response to the historical condition of modernity in nineteenth-century European society. This revelation will help us understand the emergence of Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo in early twentieth-century China.72 As in Europe, the appearance of Chinese Bildungsroman narratives in the early twentieth century is the Chinese writers’ response to the rise of a new identity of youth as a key stage of life as well as Chinese intellectuals’ vision of rejuvenating an old Chinese civilization so as to build a newly modernizing nation-state. The “youth mentality” or “youth consciousness” detected by critics in the narratives of Su Tong, Yu Hua and their contemporary writers has long been manifested in the stories written by authors such as Ding Ling (1904–1986) and Yu Dafu (1896–1945) as early as in the 1920s.

69

Swales, The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse, 165. Hardin, “An Introduction,” xvii. 71 Ibid. 72 Some research articles have discussed the youthful images in the narratives written in early twentieth century, especially the lonely young travelers. See Rong Cai, “The Lonely Traveler Revisited in Yu Hua’s Fiction.” Also see Leo Ou-fan Lee, “The Solitary Traveler: Images of the Self in Modern Chinese Literature,” in Expressions of Self in Chinese Literature, eds. Robert E. Hegel and Richard C. Hessney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 282–307. 70

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The emergence of the Chinese Bildungsroman paralleled the emergence of the May Fourth generation. The term youth was endowed with strong historical and political implications when Liang Qichao (1873–1929) eulogized the young and christened China “a young nation-state” in his essay “Ode to Young China,” (Shaonian Zhongguo shuo, 1900), thereby attempting to insert China into a “global image of a modern world.”73 Chinese youth discourse was instrumental to the implementation of all kinds of new “political projects to modernize China,” particularly in the wake of the May Fourth movement of 1919.74 Youth discourse finds its embodiment in young people with identities as “modern student,” “new youth,” and “revolutionary youth” in different historical periods.75 Celebrated cultural figures such as Lu Xun (1881–1936), Hu Shi (1891–1962) and Guo Moruo (1892–1978) all belonged to this new generation of youth-oriented Chinese. With the launch of the journal Qingnian zazhi (Youth Magazine) by Chen Duxiu (1879–1942) in September 1915 (renamed Xin qingnian [New Youth] the following year), the typical identity of Chinese youths changed from one of “modern student” in the Western-style new schools to that of enlightened “new youth.” This journal became a base for theoretical developments in new youth discourse. While retaining its political symbolism, the term youth took on additional and diverse cultural and intellectual dimensions: “independence, dynamism, and even aggressiveness, and urging a radical revolt against various aspects of the Chinese tradition.”76 Under these socio-historical circumstances, Chinese writers of the May Fourth generation conceptualized and visualized youth-oriented social change in their creative writing. They produced a corpus of fiction that fits smoothly into the genre of Bildungsroman. A detailed discussion of various characteristics and patterns of development in Chinese Bil-

73

Xiaobing Tang, Global Space and the National Discourse of Modernity: the Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 37. “Shaonian zhongguo shuo” was originally published on Feb. 10, 1900 in Qingyi bao (The China discussion). For more about Liang Qichao’s thoughts, see Joseph R. Levenson’s Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and the Mind of Modern China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959). 74 For detailed discussion of the formation of the youth discourse in the early twentieth-century, see Mingwei Song, “Long Live Youth: National Rejuvenation and the Chinese Bildungsroman, 1900–1958” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2005), 10. 75 Ibid., 26–54. 76 Lin Yu-sheng, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Antitraditionalism in the May Fourth Era (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979), 65.

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dungsroman from the May Fourth era down to contemporary times will be presented in Chapter Two. As a literary genre, the term Bildungsroman was introduced to Chinese readers a few years later than the Bildungsroman novel, a romantic version of this genre—Goethe’s The Sorrow of Young Werther, was first translated into Chinese by Guo Moruo (1892–1978) in 1922. The genre was formally introduced in the summer of 1943, when the poet and scholar Feng Zhi’s translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship appeared. In his preface to the translation, Feng Zhi rendered the terms Bildungsroman and Entwicklungsroman as xiuyang xiaoshuo (novel of cultivation) and fazhan xiaoshuo (novel of development) respectively, offering Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship as an example.77 Similarly, in December 1979, Liu Banjiu translated the term Bildungsroman as jiaoyu xiaoshuo (novel of education) in his preface to his translation of Green Henry.78 There is no reliable record indicating who first used the term chengzhang xiaoshuo to refer to the Bildungsroman. The word chengzhang literally means “to form and grow,” which closely matches the connotations of the German term Bildung. The literature and film critic Dai Jinhua and the fiction writer Cao Wenxuan were said to be the first to use chengzhang xiaoshuo publicly in a seminar on Cao’s story, “Red Tile” (Hongwa), sometime between 1997 and 1999.79 However, as early as 1993, the literary critic Li Yang had already used the term to describe the Mao-era novel The Song of Youth in his book Struggling Against Predestination.80 Since the late 1990s, this term has been used extensively by Chinese literary critics. For example, in A Textbook for Contemporary Chinese Literary History (Zhongguo dangdai wenxueshi

77 This preface was written in the summer of 1943, and revised in 1984. Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, Weilian Maisite de xuexi shidai [Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship], trans. Feng Zhi and Yao Kekun (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1988). 78 Gottfried Keller, Lü yi hengli [Green Henry], trans. Liu Banjiu (Bejing: Renmin chubanshe, 1980). 79 In the preface to Sang Di’s Kanshangqu hen chou [It seems ugly] (Beijing: Dazhong wenyi chubanshe, 1999), Cao Wenxuan pointed out that it was time for literary critics to use the term chengzhang xiaoshuo as a literary genre. Also see Xu Meixia, “Lun dangdai chengzhang xiaoshuo de neihan yu ge’an” [The connotation and case study of contemporary Chinese Bildungsroman] (Master’s thesis, Xiamen University, 2003). The author wrote that in an interview, Sang Di told the author that Cao Wenxuan and Dai Jinhua were the first people to use the term chengzhang xiaoshuo. 80 Li Yang, Kangzheng suming zhi lu [Struggling against predestination] (Changchun: Shidai wenyi chubanshe, 1993).

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jiaocheng), Chen Sihe refers to Wang Meng’s “Newcomer in the Organization Department” (Zuzhibu xinlai de nianqingren) as a chengzhang xiaoshuo.81 In this treatise, the term chengzhang xiaoshuo is used to refer to Chinese Bildungsroman in order to remain consistent with current Chinese academic usage of the term. Although the term chengzhang xiaoshuo has been widely utilized in China only since the 1990s, the tardiness of this term’s acceptance in China does not prevent us from using it retroactively in reference to Chinese fiction written in the early twentieth century. After all, the term chengzhang xiaoshuo represents a theoretical response to comingof-age narratives by several generations of Chinese writers throughout the twentieth-century. There is bound to be a time lag between the emergence of a specific type of fiction and the development of a generic term to characterize this type of fiction. This is evident in the creation of the term of Bildungsroman in Europe. As my previous discussion shows, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship was written as early as 1795, but, as a theoretical response to this novel, the term Bildungsroman was not coined until the 1810s by Karl von Morgenstern, and it was only brought into general usage in the West by Wilhelm Dilthey in 1870. As a specific literary genre, the chengzhang xiaoshuo has been recognized and studied by Chinese writers and literary critics only since the 1990s. A few master’s theses and PhD dissertations have been written to explore the development of Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo and to attempt to fill the theoretical void within this genre for modern Chinese literature. For example, in Mingwei Song’s 2005 PhD dissertation “Long Live Youth: National Rejuvenation and the Chinese Bildungsroman, 1900–1958,” he conducts an historical study of “the evolution of the youth discourse together with its political, ethical, and cultural effects” by “look[ing] into the figural formation of youth as represented in the Bildungsroman” from 1900 to 1958.82 Similarly, Fan Guobin “elaborates the narrative forms of [Chinese] Bildungsroman from 1949 to 1976” in his PhD dissertation “The Formation of the Subject: A Study of the Contemporary Bildungsroman,” which was published in

81

Chen Sihe, Zhongguo dangdai wenxueshi jiaocheng [A textbook for contemporary Chinese literary history] (Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 2001). 82 Song, “Long Live Youth: National Rejuvenation and the Chinese Bildungsroman, 1900–1958.” 5.

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book form in 2003.83 That same year, Sun Jing’s master’s thesis posits that the development of the modern Chinese Bildungsroman amounts to “historic proof of the nation’s modernization . . . [and] the abstract symbol of national development.”84 In another master’s thesis in 2002, Tian Guangwen argues that puzzlement is the main theme of coming-of-age narratives written in the 1990s.85 In these scholarly works, each author develops his own definition of the chengzhang xiaoshuo. These definitions tend to focus mostly on the formal elements of the genre while neglecting the most significant concern of most writers of actual Bildungsroman: complex inwardness. In this study, I define chengzhang xiaoshuo as the Chinese counterpart of the European Bildungsroman. It is a specific author’s visualization of his own or his contemporaries’ coming-of-age experience in its local socio-historical setting in order to provide some complex internal reflections on social reality. Chengzhang xiaoshuo is an organic unity of form and theme, and a dynamic interaction between its aspects of outward experience and inward reflection. Its aspect of outward experience is revealed by means of principal elements of the plot: childhood, inter-generational conflict, setting out on a journey (in either symbolic or physical form), ordeal by love, and the search for a vocation and a philosophy of life. Its aspect of inward reflection deals mostly with individual subjectivity along with emotional and cognitive maturation. The genre’s thematic tension is largely between individuality and socialization: on the one hand, the chengzhang xiaoshuo explores the complexity of individual potentiality; on the other hand, it recognizes practical realities such as marriage, family, and career as a necessary dimension of the young hero’s self-realization. In essence, chengzhang xiaoshuo principally concerns itself with the spiritual and psychological development of the

83

Fan Guobin, “Zhuti zhi shengcheng—dangdai chengzhang xiaoshuo zhuti yanjiu” [The formation of the subject: a study of contemporary Bildungsroman] (PhD diss., Nanjing University, 2002). It was published in book form with a slightly different title in 2003, see Fan Guobin, Zhutide shengzhang: 50 nian chengzhang xiaoshuo yanjiu [The formation of the subject: a study of the 50 years of Bildungsroman] (Beijing: Zhongguo xiju chubanshe, 2003). 84 Sun Jing, “Zhongguo xiandai chengzhang xiaoshuo de xushixue yanjiu” [The study of narratology of contemporary Chinese Bildungsroman] (Master’s thesis, Qingdao University, 2002). 85 Tian Guangwen, “Kunhuo de zhangwang: xinchao chengzhang xiaoshuo lun” [The puzzled look: on the new wave of Bildungsroman] (Master’s thesis, Shangdong Normal University, 2002).

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young protagonist, and discloses the dynamic and malleable nature of the young hero. The major author-based foci of this book are the chengzhang xiaoshuo written by Su Tong and Yu Hua. However, before analyzing the two authors’ coming-of-age narratives, I will examine the history of modern and contemporary Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo and detect the changing pattern of Chinese Bildungsroman in different historical periods.

CHAPTER TWO

THE CHANGING PATTERNS OF THE BILDUNGSROMAN IN MODERN CHINESE LITERATURE Though the Bildungsroman is a literary genre that originated in the West, some crucial attributes of this genre can be observed in premodern Chinese biography—especially the genre’s tendencies for selfexpression, self-reflection, and self-consciousness. The genre’s emphasis upon individuality and subjectivity are also explored in the writings of various May Fourth literati during the first half of the twentieth century. Since then, the tension between a young protagonist’s individuality and his socialization has become one of the recurrent themes in modern and contemporary Chinese literature. This chapter begins with an examination of biographical and autobiographical writing in pre-modern Chinese literature, and continues with an investigation of the changing patterns of chengzhang xiaoshuo during two periods: from the May Fourth era to 1966, and from the 1980s to the early years of the twenty-first century. My analysis will demonstrate that changing narrative patterns in modern Chinese coming-of-age narratives reflect the way the maturation of Chinese youth is entangled with their contemporary history, as well as the psychological impact of the tension between their assertion of an autonomous self and their participation in the collective and revolutionary cause. I argue that the trajectory of the Chinese Bildungsroman from the May Fourth era to 1966 reveals the process by which individuality and subjectivity gradually become subordinate to the discourse of revolution and collectivity. During this period, the social integration of Chinese youth is designed to meet the needs of the particular historical period, and Chinese youth go through phases as modern students, subsequently as progressive new youth, and finally as tamed revolutionary youth.1 However, the coming-of-age fiction written after the 1980s (the post-Mao era) see

1

Mingwei Song, “Long Live Youth: National Rejuvenation and the Chinese Bildungsroman, 1900–1958” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2005). In his study, Mingwei Song detects Chinese youth of that time grow from “modern student,” to “new youth,” and finally to “revolutionary youth.”

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a gradual revival of individuality and subjectivity, and a marginalization of revolution and collectivity. Youth are no longer viewed as a force that will necessarily rejuvenate and modernize China. Instead, youth become associated with marginality and dysfunction. The image of fallen youth is especially prominent in the coming-of-age fiction written by Su Tong and Yu Hua, and will be examined in detail in Chapter Three and Four. The present chapter will provide a historical background for the ensuing discussions of Bildungsroman fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua, as well as a backdrop against which the two authors’ works are shown to be both tragic and parodistic. Antecedents of the Bildungsroman: Zhuan in Pre-modern Chinese Literature When we look back through China’s literary tradition, we cannot find a truly novelistic form of Bildungsroman until early in the twentieth century. However, certain traits of Bildungsroman such as introspection and self-consciousness (including self-reflection and didactic self-examination) are prominent in many traditional Chinese literary genres, such as poetry, prose, personal correspondence, and the novel. Poetry (shi), the dominant literary genre in pre-modern China, is one source of this introspective quality, which is especially noticeable in many Tang (618–907) Buddhist poems. Later, Northern Song (960–1127) poetry introduced more intellectualized and philosophical qualities. Ouyang Xiu (1007–1072), Wang Anshi (1021–1086) and other early Northern Song poets incorporated an increasing amount of narrative material in order to foreground philosophical issues more effectively. Later, Su Shi (1037–1101) and Huang Tingjian (1045–1105) made introspective intellectualism one of the dominant features in their writing. In pre-modern China, the literary forms closest to the Bildungsroman were biography and autobiography. What we would recognize today as biography went under a variety of different generic terms, including zhuan (biographies), xu (prefaces), muzhiming (tomb inscriptions), ji (records), zhi (notices), lei (dirges), and nianpu (annalistic biographies).2 2 Pei-Yi Wu, The Confucian’s Progress: Autobiographical Writings in Traditional China (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990). This is a pathbreaking

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Among these genres, the zhuan most resembles that of biography. Zhuan was a category first used by Sima Qian (145–86 BC) for recording the biographies in the Shiji (Records of the Historian), the first comprehensive history of China from the ancient past of the mythical Yellow Emperor (Huangdi) up to the Western Han dynasty (202 BCE–8 ACE).3 The zhuan form was adopted by subsequent historians to compile dynastic histories. From the very beginning, the zhuan was closely associated with historiography. It was the “main vehicle of historiography” with the “didactic function of the world.”4 Zhuan historiographers usually shunned personal observation and first-hand knowledge. Despite writing about subjects with which they were familiar, for the most part they relied heavily on archival materials and second-hand accounts. Any information based on their personal observation and knowledge would be included as an appendix to the zhuan and introduced by remarks such as “historians generally say” or “in appraisal we say.” Biographers in pre-modern China tended to maintain the “convention of the impartial, invisible, and unobtrusive narrator.”5 The zhuan was considered a branch of history instead of literature or belles-lettres. Before the Song dynasty (960–1279), this genre was not included among the writings of literary critics and belles-lettres anthologists. For instance, Lu Ji (261–303) made no reference to the zhuan in his pioneer treatise, Wen fu (Rhyme prose on literature); nor did Xiao Tong (501–531) include the zhuan among the thirty-seven genres he listed in Wenxuan (Anthology of literature)—the earliest extant multi-genre anthology of Chinese literature.6 The zhuan typically focuses upon the historical aspects of a man’s life and the documented features of his career rather than on the inner and reflective self. In so doing, the zhuan does not attempt to trace the ongoing intellectual and spiritual development of its biographical subject.

study of autobiographical writings in traditional China. In the book, Pei-yi Wu examines the ecology of biography and autobiography in pre-modern China. 3 Sima Qian (145–86 BC), Records of the Grand Historian of China (translated from the Shih chi of Ssu-ma Ch’ien), trans. Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961). 4 Pei-Yi Wu, The Confucian’s Progress: Autobiographical Writings in Traditional China, 4. 5 Ibid., 5. 6 Ibid.

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Attention to the differences between autobiography and biography in pre-modern Chinese literature has long been neglected. The major subgenres of Chinese autobiography for the most part imitate biography by adding zi (self ) to a title of the biographical subgenre. Pei-Yi Wu identifies Tao Qian’s (362–427) “Biography of Master Five Willows” as China’s first “self-written biography,” or autobiography.7 Before the end of thirteenth century, autobiographical authors strictly followed the zhuan biographical convention of the “impartial, invisible and unobtrusive narrator” and “recorded the external events, usually public and official, but seldom tried to probe inner stirrings or disclose complex motives.”8 The early Chinese autobiography’s subservience to history provided the author with no adequate vehicle for self-expression. Since the end of the thirteenth century, however, the biographical constraints on Chinese autobiography loosened. Breakthroughs occurred in such areas as introspective and confessional accounts. Zen Buddhist accounts of enlightenment constitute the beginning of full-blown Chinese autobiographical expression, adding new spiritual fervor to self-written narratives of the long and arduous search for fundamental personal transformation. The next three centuries, from the entirety of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) up through the early decades of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), witnessed the emergence of many Neo-Confucian autobiographical writings, in which authors reflected at length upon the nature of their lives and the cultivation of their learning. Some of these writings were in the form of travel journals, in which authors not only depicted the external landscapes through which they wandered, but also explored their own nature. Here, travel was a metaphor for self-reflection—a journey inward and a peregrination of the soul. One critic posits the influence of the Wang Yangming School of Neo-Confucianism as the main cause of the rise of interest in selfreflection, self-examination, and most importantly, humanity. Certain Neo-Confucians “examined their consciences and confessed their misdeeds with a depth of anguish and remorse unthinkable in classical Confucianism”;9 hence, the autobiographical writings in this period

7 8 9

Ibid., 15. Ibid., xi. Ibid., xii.

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can be called “spiritual autobiography.”10 Examples can be found in the writings of some Neo-Confucian and Buddhist thinkers. Deng Huoqu’s “The Record of a Quest in the South” (Nanxun lu) describes his frantic and ultimately fruitless wanderings in search of enlightenment;11 Hu Zhi’s “A Record of Learning through Difficulties” (Kunxue ji) relates his gradual awakening to the full significance of the concept of the innate knowledge of good (liangzhi).12 De Qing, one of the prominent Buddhist thinkers in the late Ming dynasty, draws upon the nianpu (annalistic biography) form to recount his childhood and later path to enlightenment.13 However, the influence of the Wang Yangming School cannot fully explain the general intellectual climate of self-consciousness, which was revealed not only in autobiographical writings, but also in fiction, drama, and other literary genres. The economic and social conditions of the late Ming dynasty had a powerful impact on the new perception of self. The historian Cynthia Brokaw points out: The commercial boom of the late sixteenth century created new economic opportunities and encouraged social mobility, providing a natural context for a reevaluation of the powers of the individual and his or her role within society. The increased participation of peasants in handicraft industries, the rise of merchants to positions of social prestige and political influence, the opening of new educational opportunities through the publication of popular educational literature—these changes might well have led thoughtful observers to reflect on both the greater effectiveness and the heavier responsibility now attached to individual effort. Great opportunities for advancement increased the individual’s sense of control over destiny, but also intensified personal pressures to succeed in a context where of course not everyone could succeed.14

So we can propose that the proliferation of autobiography in the late Ming dynasty might also be seen in part as a response to the new

10

Ibid., 127. Deng Huoqu (1498–1570), Nanxun lu [The record of a quest in the south], Ca, 1599. 12 Hu Zhi (1517–1585), “Kunxue ji” [A record of learning through difficulties], in Mingru xue’an [Philosophical records of Ming Confucians] (Taibei: Shijie shuju, 1965), 221–224. 13 De Qing (1546–1623), Zuben Hanshan dashi nianpu shuzhu [Unabridged and annotated annalistic biography of Master Hanshan], ed. Fu Zheng (Suzhou: Honghua she, 1934). 14 Cynthia Brokaw, review of The Confucian’s Progress: Autobiographical Writings in Traditional China, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 53, no.1 (June 1993): 182–183. 11

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economic, social, and intellectual demands placed on individuals to demonstrate their worth in a time of intense change.15 During the seventeenth century, further progress was made in autobiographical writing. A few autobiographers focused on an imaginative portrayal of the individual by borrowing literary techniques and even lifting entire episodes from fiction. This kind of autobiographical writing has been described by Pei-yi Wu as “self-invented.”16 For example, the autobiographical writings of Wang Jie and Mao Qiling no longer imitated earlier historiographical models, but were instead heavily influenced by popular fiction of the Ming.17 After 1680, some three and a half decades after the Ming-Qing transition, experimentation with forms of autobiography largely ceased as autobiographical writings reverted to their earlier historiographical conventions. Some critics attribute this retreat to the fading of the Wang Yangming School, but surely there are other reasons. By the early Qing dynasty, writers already had more literary genres at their disposal for self-expression and psychological exploration—especially popular literary forms such as vernacular fiction and drama; they were not limited to autobiography. For example, literary critics have praised A Dream of Red Mansions as a “supreme work of psychological realism,” emphasizing the novel’s skill at entering directly into a character’s consciousness.18 In this sense, A Dream of Red Mansions can be read as a Bildungsroman novel in pre-modern Chinese literature with its in-depth exploration of young men’s and women’s psychological and spiritual development, their increasingly acute recognition of themselves and the outside world, and their social integration within a declining elite family. Yet it was not until the early twentieth century that Chinese readers encountered autobiography and Bildungsroman of a different type—a variety that had been influenced by Western models.

15

Ibid., 183. Wu, The Confucian’s Progress: Autobiographical Writings in Traditional China, xii. 17 Wang Jie (1603?–1682?), “Sanrong zhuiren guang zixu” [Expanded self-account of the useless man Sannong], in Lidai zixu zhuan wenchao [A historical survey of Chinese autobiography], ed. Guo Dengfeng (Taibei: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1965), 1:32–67. Mao Qiling (1623–1716), “Ziwei muzhiming” [Self-written tomb notice and inscription], in Mao Xihe xiansheng quanji [Complete works of Master Mao Xihe], 35: II: Ia–20b. 1761. 18 C. T. Hsia, The Classic Chinese Novel: A Critical Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968), 246; Kirk A. Denton, The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998), 33. 16

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From the above review of autobiographical writings in pre-modern China, we can see that the form of autobiography shifted over time from historiography to self-expression. By the early Qing dynasty, autobiography had already acquired some of the features found in the modern Bildungsroman. The Bildungsroman specifically deals with the protagonist’s transitional period from childhood to adulthood, while biography and autobiography in general purport to be factual accounts of a person’s complete life story. However, the “spiritual” autobiographical writings in the Ming dynasty, as in the Bildungsroman, only record the protagonist’s path to enlightenment, though not necessarily during the period of youth. Such autobiographies as the travel journals of the Neo-Confucians and the nianpu of the Buddhist thinkers provide full narratives both of events and of inner spiritual development. The inwardness and intellectual flavor of these autobiographical writings form the foundation for the study of self-expression in early twentieth-century China. Bildungsroman in Modern Chinese Literature As we saw in Chapter One, the emergence of Bildungsroman novels was a literary response to modernity in Europe at the turn of the eighteenth century. Europe’s industrial revolution brought major social changes to traditional European society, and young people were thus facing an uncertain exploration of societal space and a seemingly unlimited potentiality. The life stage of youth was not considered merely biologically distinct from adulthood, but became a specific image of modernity because of its attributes of mobility and inner restlessness. Youth itself became infused with qualities of dynamism upon which a modernizing society was increasingly dependent. Similarly, the emergence of Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo in the early twentieth century was also the outcome of great social changes and the formation of a youth-centered discourse. Moreover, literary influences from European Romanticism and the Japanese I-novel—along with the vernacular (baihua) language movement—also contributed to the emergence of narratives of the Bildungsroman variety in early twentieth-century China. I will now turn to an analysis of the aforementioned four factors: the formation of a youth-centered discourse; literary influences from European Romanticism and the Japanese I-novel; the promotion of vernacular language in place of the traditional classical literary

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idiom; and the tremendous cultural and socio-political changes that took place during this period. The formation of a youth-centered discourse is a crucial factor in the emergence of Bildungsroman novels. As early as the Self-strengthening Movement during the 1870s, the Chinese government dispatched over a hundred youtong (schoolboys) to the United States for formal study, in the understanding that they would eventually take up posts at the Qing court after their graduation and return to China. Such overseas study projects in the late nineteenth century served as an initial attempt to provide Chinese youth with an up-to-date education of high international standard, as well as a prelude to the formation of a Chinese youth discourse.19 Meanwhile, the very term “youth” itself became infused with weighty historical and political implications upon the publication of Liang Qichao’s (1873–1929) essay “Ode to Young China” (Shaonian Zhongguo shuo, 1900). In this essay, Liang challenged the pessimistic image of China as a fading and backwardlooking civilization, instead eulogizing Chinese youth and anointing China “a young nation-state” that fit neatly within the “global image of a modern world.”20 Ever since that time, a youth-centered discourse has been instrumental in various kinds of political and cultural endeavors to modernize China, helping to foster such up-to-date identities as the “modern student,” “new youth,” and “revolutionary youth” at various junctures during the first half of the twentieth century.21 Young people in China often gained a new identity as modern students through the spread of the country’s new Western-style schools, as well as in tandem with the steep upsurge in study-abroad programs beginning in the late Qing and extending into the Repub-

19 Song, “Long Live Youth: National Rejuvenation and the Chinese Bildungsroman, 1900–1958,” 9–14. Song identifies the English autobiography of Yung Wing (1828– 1912), the one who first proposed the overseas study program, as the first narrative to record the psychological development of a modern Chinese youth. Yung’s My Life in China and America (1909) traces his development from an ignorant peasant boy to an educated and westernized social reformer. 20 Xiaobing Tang, Global Space and the National Discourse of Modernity: the Historical Thinking of Liang Qichao (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 37. “Shaonian zhongguo shuo” was originally published on Feb. 10, 1900 in Qingyi bao (The China discussion). For more about Liang Qichao’s thoughts, see Joseph R. Levenson’s Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and the Mind of Modern China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959). 21 Song, “Long Live Youth: National Rejuvenation and the Chinese Bildungsroman, 1900–1958,” 26–54.

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lican Era (1912–1949). This new identity of Chinese youth echoes Liang Qichao’s call for a type of xinmin (new citizen) to help build up the Young China of his forward-looking vision. Such renowned cultural reformers as Lu Xun (1881–1936), Hu Shi (1891–1962), and Guo Moruo (1892–1978) hailed from this new generation of youthoriented Chinese intellectuals. Meanwhile, new students were also being mobilized by relatively radical social reformers to serve as a driving force of “revolutionary action,” as exemplified by the martyrdom of Zou Rong (1885–1905). Zou’s impassioned advocacy of revolution in his manifesto Revolutionary Army, followed by his untimely death in a Qing prison, turned him into an influential symbol of youthful revolutionary fervor.22 Other modern students went on to participate in the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 and support the Republic that supplanted the old dynastic regime. Subsequently disillusioned by the many setbacks encountered by the Republic in its early decades, many Chinese youth would eventually gravitate to more radical and insurrectionist movements such as communism. With the launch of the journal Qingnian zazhi (Youth Magazine) by Chen Duxiu (1879–1942) in September 1915 (renamed Xin qingnian [New Youth] the following year), the typical identity of Chinese youth changed from that of the “modern student” to “enlightened new youth.” This journal became a sort of headquarters for the development of a new-youth discourse. While retaining its political symbolism, the term “youth” took on additional socio-cultural dimensions: “independence, dynamism, and even aggressiveness, along with a radical revolt against various aspects of the Chinese tradition.”23 Such terms as “science,” “democracy,” and “enlightenment” frequently appeared in the journal’s articles. The journal New Youth and the New Culture Movement led by the journal’s editors Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu were indispensable to the development of the Chinese Bildungsroman. Not only did the young Chinese men and women edified by this movement become the writers, readers, and protagonists of the chengzhang xiaoshuo narratives; Hu Shi’s and Chen Duxiu’s advocacy of “new literature” also set forth

22

Ibid., 33–34. Lin, The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Antitraditionalism in the May Fourth Era, 65. 23

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the linguistic and stylistic parameters for the emergence of Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo. When we examine twentieth-century Chinese literature, we first encounter its most prominent linguistic feature—the use of baihua (vernacular language) in writing. Even though it is well known that baihua was not widely used in writing until 1917—the year when Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu launched the New Culture Movement—the vernacular had already starting making inroads on the classical literary idiom several decades previously. “The written form of northern baihua, called baihuawen, had become a well-established and sophisticated language by the middle of the [nineteenth] century, principally because it was used in novels, drama, and storytellers’ written narratives . . . challenging the previous ‘monopoly’ of wenyan [classical Chinese].”24 Written forms of baihua were adopted in journalism after the 1870s and were later applied in the revolutionary press and in journals for women.25 However, it was Hu Shi who was instrumental in leading a serious and concerted effort in 1917 to promote the use of writing in the vernacular among intellectuals. Hu Shi believed that the use of the vernacular was instrumental in disseminating new ideas to ordinary people, as opposed to continuing to focus upon the tiny elite of Chinese intellectuals who were able to read and write classical Chinese. The use of vernacular language in creative writing thus became one of the most prominent linguistic features in modern Chinese literature, thereby paving way for the rise of Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo. As we have seen, the early part of the twentieth century was a transitional period in China. Politically, the imperial dynastic regime perished and the Republic of China was established in its place. Culturally, under the influence of the journal New Youth, many Chinese intellectuals embraced a new spirit of rethinking traditional Chinese values and customs in light of modern Western ideas. Psychologically, Chinese intellectuals tended to place more emphasis on their role as independent thinkers and the conscience of society than was 24 Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova, “The Origin of Modern Chinese Literature,” in Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era, ed. Merle Goldman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 19–20. 25 For detail see Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova’s article “The Origin of Modern Chinese Literature,” in Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era, 17–35. In this article, Dolezelova-Velingerova traces the development of the use of vernacular in Chinese literature from the late Qing to May Fourth era.

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the case among their forbears. With the launching of the May Fourth Movement in 1919, such currents in modern thought as individualism, anti-traditionalism, and nationalism further captured the imaginations of young Chinese men and women. Broad cross-sections of Chinese youth tried to slough off the heavy burden of the Confucian tradition and absorb Western culture in its stead, though their antitraditionalism was not necessarily thoroughgoing or consistent.26 The May Fourth era was a time of the awakening of the individual. The self-image of May Fourth youth was marked by an intense awareness of the individual’s role in society and sense of social responsibility in society. During this period, Western influence upon China should not be underestimated. May Fourth intellectuals were enthusiastic about learning from the West, including Westernized powers in Asia such as Japan and Russia. Numerous Western philosophical and literary works were translated from Japanese or rendered directly from English and other European languages. These translations ranged from fiction in the tradition of European Realism, Romanticism, and Expressionism to non-fiction such as Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis, Marxism, and Nietzschean philosophy. The tendency of a focus on subjective sentiment in modern Chinese literature is partially of Chinese origin; however, the inspiration for its modern quality is derived from the West. The fictional representation of self and subjectivity are seen as an integral part of Chinese literary modernity. The sentimental, humane, subjective, and confessional tone of most early May Fourth writing is often associated with European Romanticism, Expressionism, Japanese Naturalism and I-novels. Michael Duke has remarked on the subjective and confessional tone so common in May Fourth literature: The concept of literature as spontaneous self-expression—consonant as it seemed with the venerable Chinese concept of shi yan zhi—led to an outpouring of autobiographical and confessional literature notable for its stress on spontaneity, intensity, subjectivity of personal emotions, and celebration of the individual. Both the individual psyche and the world of nature were explored as aspects of a passionate search for Truth, Goodness, and Beauty which were believed to culminate in the spiritual ecstasy of romantic love extolled as the height of joy and suffering,

26 Yu-sheng Lin repeatedly points out in The Crisis of Chinese Consciousness: Radical Antitraditionalism in the May Fourth Era that although Chinese intellectuals often rebelled against their Confucian heritage, they were also part of it.

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In his study of Chinese Romanticism in the first half of the twentieth century, Leo Ou-fan Lee points out that many aspects of European Romanticism were transformed in China. According to Lee, the Chinese literary scene harbored two dominant modes of writing that had been influenced by the Western romantic legacy: Wertherian (passive-sentimental) and Promethean (dynamic-heroic).28 This dynamic, dual legacy of nineteenth-century European Romanticism helps to “distinguish the [May Fourth era] romantic tendency inspired by the West from the sentimental strains in traditional Chinese literature.” The romantic trend in early twentieth-century China “enveloped the youth of the entire country” in spite of the fact that there was “not a conscious Romantic Movement” during that period.29 Aside from this relatively direct influence from the West, Chinese literature also looked to Japan in modern times. Japan contributed a great deal to modern Chinese literature by serving as a major channel both for Western influences as well as for hybrid forms such as Japanese naturalist fiction. Because of its humiliating defeat in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), China was forced to accept the fact that Japan was no longer its faithful cultural disciple; it had become an advanced industrializing country soon after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Especially after Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), many Chinese were genuinely impressed with Japan’s remarkable modernization. Beginning in 1896, the Qing government dispatched many Chinese students to study in Japan in the hope that China could modernize itself by following Japan’s path. Many May Fourth writers were deeply influenced by Japanese naturalism, “the most important pivot in the history of modern Japanese

27 Michael S. Duke, Blooming and Contending (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 183. 28 Leo Ou-fan Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 280. Lee argues that the Wertherian man is full of tender emotions: “gentle and tearful love, nostalgia, and a pervasive melancholy.” He attains his strength from his inner life—“the nuances of his emotion, the mysteries of his unconscious self, or the subjective world of imaginary passion.” Therefore he is also called a passive romanticist. In contrast, the Promethean man is enthusiastic, passionate, and dominant. He actively embraces life instead of escaping from it. He attains his strength from outside of life and society, not from his inner life. However, it doesn’t necessarily mean he is less emotional and less sensitive. 29 Ibid., 294.

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fiction”; this Asian variety of naturalism had been present in “the conclusion to Meiji (1868–1912) literature,” and “served as the foundation of Japanese literature since the Taisho era [1912–1926].”30 However, Japanese naturalism had been directly influenced by French naturalism. Around 1900, Zola’s voluminous novels were being widely circulated among young Japanese literary aspirants. However, in assimilating French naturalism, Japanese writers altered the meaning of the word nature. For them, it became “the principle of inward reflection and the subjective expression of human nature in isolation from objective realities. Included in this subjective vision of reality were the Japanese romantic traits of self-confession and lyrical expression. What resulted was a unique form of Japanese naturalism.”31 The most famous type of Japanese naturalism was watakushi-shōsetsu (shishōsetsu) or the I-novel, which is characterized by “a Rousseauesque morality of unrestrained self-revelation, intensive lyricism, and occasional self-pity, and by a sentimental search for the so-called kindai jiga (modern self ).”32 The I-novel appeared with the publication of Shimazaki Tōson’s (1872–1943) Hakai (Broken commandment) in 1906 and prevailed through the next two decades, precisely when the influx of Chinese students studying in Japan peaked. The literary trend exerted noticeable influence upon Chinese writers then in Japan and soon was manifested in the publication of Yu Dafu’s (1896–1945) semi-autobiographical story “Sinking” (Chenlun, 1921). Many Chinese intellectuals and writers started to translate Japanese novels and naturalistic writings, introducing them to Chinese readers. These writers include Liang Qichao, Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967), and Lu Xun, who later became members of such literary societies as the Literary Research Association and the Creation Society. For example, Lu Xun translated a study of Japanese naturalism by Katayama Koson (1878–1933).33 His younger brother Zhou Zuoren played “a vital role in introducing major trends and figures in contemporary Japanese literature to Chinese writers and intellectuals throughout the May Fourth period.”34 30

Nakamura Mitsuo, Meiji bungakushi [History of Meiji literature] (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1963), 184. 31 Ching-mao Cheng, “The Impact of Japanese Literary Trends on Modern Chinese Writers,” in Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era, 78. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 79. 34 Christopher T. Keaveney, The Subversive Self in Modern Chinese Literature: The Creation Society’s Reinvention of the Japanese Shishosetsu (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 3.

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The efforts of Zhou and his contemporary intellectuals familiarized Chinese readers “with the achievements of the contemporary Japanese literary world,” helping lay the groundwork for Chinese readers’ subsequent acceptance of indigenous “Creation Society experimentation with self-referential fiction.”35 Though Chinese self-referential fiction from the Creation Society had been inspired by Japanese shishōsetsu, there was a fundamental difference between this Japanese literary genre and its Chinese variation. As one critic observes, the protagonists in Japanese shishōsetsu are “effectively cut off from larger social concerns,” but “Yu Dafu and other Creation Society writers emphasize the connection of the protagonist to his peers, his family, and ultimately to his homeland.”36 In other words, the Chinese counterpart of shishōsetsu is developed around the tension between individual experience and issues in the broader society. This mode of self-expression spread beyond the Creation Society to the entire May Fourth generation writers, and even “proved to be a touchstone for self-referential writing by Chinese writers in the post-Mao era.”37 Bildungsroman is a literary genre that portrays the maturation of a young person with a particular focus on psychological and intellectual development. Youth and subjectivity are thus two indispensable elements in Bildungsroman. When we study the Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo, we must begin with these two elements. From my previous discussion we can see that both youth and subjectivity were closely related to the history of the era. From the beginning of the formation of Chinese youth discourse, it was entangled with the country’s larger fate. The development of youth discourse was considered to be the main trope of Chinese modernity, and the assertion of selfhood and subjectivity were entangled in the larger discourse of modernity.38 Meanwhile, European Romanticism and the Japanese I-novel provided 35

Ibid. Ibid., 27. 37 Ibid., 1. 38 In his study of the Chinese Bildungsroman from 1900 and 1958, Mingwei Song argues that “youth” is a “representative agency in the historical complex of Chinese modernization” to “rejuvenate and modernize China.” See Song, “Long Live Youth: National Rejuvenation and the Chinese Bildungsroman, 1900–1958,” 2–7; Kirk Denton, in his study of Hu Feng’s literary theory and Lu Ling’s fictional practice, contends that the tension between “an autonomous individual” and “participating in historical transformation” has been a “general epistemological problem that haunted modern Chinese intellectuals” since the formative stage of Chinese modernization in the late 36

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the May Fourth generation an autonomous model of self, but the “values [of individualism and subjectivism] were appropriated primarily for iconoclastic purposes.”39 Therefore, various forms of literary writing in the vernacular (baihua) proliferated, attending to the “internal self ” (neixin) and exhibiting a flavor of iconoclasm and nationalism. In this socio-political environment, the chengzhang xiaoshuo/Bildungsroman was a symbolic form of modernity; was mainly written in the form of diary and autobiography; and was largely focused on the awakening of self-consciousness combined with cultural anti-traditionalism and political nationalism. The Bildungsroman novel maintains a balance between inwardness and outwardness—the individuality and social integration. For Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo, this tension is expressed between the individual and history, “ego autonomy and selftranscendence.”40 The following investigation of the changing patterns of the Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo will reveal how coming-of-age narratives in different historical periods of the twentieth century— the May Fourth era, the 1930s and 1940s, the seventeen years after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, and the 1980s and 1990s—offer fictional representations of young intellectuals’ participation in China’s historical transformation, their vacillation between “assert[ing] the psychic reality of individuals and join[ing] selflessly with the inexorable movement of Nation and History.”41 My review of the changing patterns of modern Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo is succinct and does not pretend to be exhaustive in portraying the characteristics of the Chinese coming-of-age narratives in the twentieth century. The emergence of stories by Ding Ling, Yu Dafu, Lu Yin (1898– 1934), and Bing Xin (1900–1999) can be regarded as the beginning of the Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo. These works can also be categorized as “self-referential” fiction that “came about in an intellectual

Qing and the May Fourth era. See Denton, The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling, 18. 39 Kirk A. Denton, “General Introduction” to Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945, ed. Kirk A. Denton (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 44. 40 Denton, The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling, 22. 41 Ibid., 23.

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environment which valued individuality and subjectivity.”42 Merle Goldman characterizes the literature written in this period as follows: Many works are stories of youth trapped in and rebelling against traditional society. Some of them may have been autobiographical, but they are also biographies of their generation. The frustrations and dreams are also the frustrations and dreams of an entire generation’s search for meaning and purpose in a China these writers described as prostrate, morally bankrupt, politically disjointed, oppressed by warlords and bureaucrats, and humiliated by foreign powers . . . They are filled with their excitement and enthusiasm for revolution and subsequent disillusionment when it was not realized, their vacillation in time of violent struggle, their desperate pursuit of personal happiness, and their emotional and mental agitation as they broke from Confucian morality. Theirs was a mixed and contradictory picture, but a true picture of their times and of the circles in which they lived.43

Ding Ling’s “Miss Sophie’s Diary” (Shafei nüshi de riji, 1928) and Yu Dafu’s “Sinking” are works with characteristics described by Goldman, and both are novellas written in the Bildungsroman mode. Bildungsroman as a literary genre conventionally involves full-length novels. Therefore, the term coming-of-age novella is applied to distinguish them from full-length Chinese Bildungsroman, such as Schoolmaster Ni Huan-chih and Children of the Rich. An analysis of Ding Ling’s and Yu Dafu’s novellas indicate that the chengzhang xiaoshuo in the May Fourth era is marked by the exploration of selfhood, self-confessional and decadent sentiments, an iconoclastic and nationalistic spirit, and self-narrative form. Both Ding Ling and Yu Dafu reveal the sensibilities of their generation, and both are obsessed with the uncertainties and search for self-definition that characterize youth’s first encounters with the world. In this process, they must first face their own identities. A semi-autobiographical story in third-person narrative, “Sinking” was first published in 1921. The protagonist—a poor, lonely and frustrated Chinese student in Japan—is caught between nightly masturbation and daily self-loathing, and between patriotism and self-pity. He finally drowns himself in the sea. “Miss Sophie’s Diary” was first published in 1928 in the prominent journal Xiaoshuo yuebao (Short Stories Monthly). The narrator-protagonist is a sick, bed-ridden female

42 Keaveney, The Subversive Self in Modern Chinese Literature: The Creation Society’s Reinvention of the Japanese Shishosetsu, 5. 43 Goldman, ed., Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era, 4.

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student who has left her South China hometown and sojourns in Beijing to search for love and self-identity. Both stories received enthusiastic reviews upon publication and have since become two of the most frequently analyzed and anthologized works of May Fourth fiction. Both Yu Dafu and Ding Ling can be linked to what Leo Ou-fan Lee has called the “romantic generation of modern Chinese writers.”44 Their stories contain obvious semi-autobiographical allusions focused on love and sex. The protagonists are all alienated and sensitive young men and women—modern students. In some important ways, Yu Dafu and Ding Ling stand apart from other writers. Their characters’ tough moral self-questioning, their search for self-identity, and their sense of being caught in contradictory situations qualify their stories as chengzhang xiaoshuo and resonate with their counterparts in European literature that had been written more than a hundred years earlier. These young Chinese intellectuals’ anti-traditionalism and nationalism thus bring a fresh flavor to the traditional Bildungsroman. Both “Sinking” and “Miss Sophie’s Diary” contain narrative and plot elements that are frequently encountered in conventional Bildungsroman. The protagonists in both stories leave their homes for unfamiliar metropolitan areas. Sophie in “Miss Sophie’s Diary” leaves her countryside hometown for school in Beijing. The young man in “Sinking” departs China and heads to Japan as a study-abroad student. The conflicts with the older generation in conventional Bildungsroman are replaced with few and attenuated family connections between the protagonists and their parents in the two stories. Both protagonists experience ordeals of love, sexuality, and other complications. Their individuality and subjectivity are developed during the process of these ordeals, in which they undergo intense introspection and a quest for personal identity and fulfillment. More importantly, their personal growth is closely connected with the social turmoil of the time. The young man in “Sinking” is mired in poverty and excessive guilt about his sexuality, and feels insecure and isolated.45 The protagonist’s

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Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers, 81–110. Some critics emphasize the irony revealed in Yu Dafu’s story. For example, Michael Egan argues that the objective and distanced tone of the narrator serves “as an irony” to “undercut the hero’s sentimental view of himself,” and emphasize “the basic absurdity of his self-image.” See Michael Egan, “Yu Dafu and the Transition to Modern Chinese Literature,” in Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era, 312. Kirk Denton argues from a contrasting standpoint that we should put our feet in the shoes of Yu Dafu’s contemporary readers, who were not likely to detect the ironic 45

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sexual hang-ups can be partially explained in the framework of the Confucian ethics that had conditioned the author’s upbringing.46 This feeling is intensified by the fact that he is in a foreign country where many people regard him as a member of an inferior nationality. Yu Dafu himself explains: “Sinking” describes the psychology of a sick youth. It can be called an anatomy of hypochondria. It also describes as a broad theme the suffering of modern man—that is, sexual need and the clash between soul and flesh . . . In several places I have also mentioned the discrimination of Japanese nationalism against our Chinese students there. But for fear of it being regarded as propaganda, when writing I did not dare to exert my efforts and merely put in a few sketchy touches.47

Hence, this self-destructive young student’s repeated confessions and painful self-scrutiny are colored by nationalistic indignation. If the young man’s ordeals and introspection in “Sinking” are brought on by excessive guilt about sexuality and ethno-nationalistic humiliation, then Sophie’s sufferings and self-questioning derive mainly from her struggles with tuberculosis and her feelings of romantic attraction to the opposite sex. The technique of diary narration facilitates the revelation of the protagonist’s self-questioning.48 Just as tuberculosis plays a crucial role in Hans Castorp’s Bildung in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain—elevating him to a higher spiritual and intellectual level, the disease similarly alters Sophie’s path. It prevents her from living a normal life, dislocates the practical routines of her life, and isolates her from others, even though a few friends continue to visit her regularly. In this sense, Sophie can be regarded as the representative of the “new woman” of the May Fourth Era who breaks away from “the traditional social structure and conventional codes of behavior, away from the

tone of the narrator and thus separated the narrator from the author—even though Yu Dafu’s real life was quite different from the vision of himself projected in his stories. See Kirk A. Denton, “The Distant Shore: Nationalism in Yu Dafu’s ‘Sinking,’” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 14 (December 1992): 117. 46 C. T. Hsia tries to explain the protagonist’s excessive guilt about sexuality in the framework of the Confucian ethics that had conditioned the author’s upbringing. “Even when engaged in casual amorous pursuits, Yu Dafu or his fictional alter ego always suffers from the acute awareness of his truancy as son, husband, and father.” See C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 1917–1957 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 109. 47 Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers, 111. 48 Yi-tsi Mei Feuerwerker, Ding Ling’s Fiction: Ideology and Narrative in Modern Chinese Literature (Cambridge: Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 45.

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institutionalized restrictions of marriage, a regular job, or school.”49 This isolation forces thoughtfulness upon Sophie. Meanwhile, Sophie feels herself to be caught in constant contradictions that leave her in a state of enduring unease. This restless turmoil is intensified by the contradiction of being in love with a man whom she simultaneously despises at another level. If isolation from the outside world and family provide her with time and space, and if the uncertainty caused by contradictory experiences provide her an impetus for introspection, then her experience of love and her ambivalence toward sexuality provide concrete material for her ruminations.50 She indulges in the daily struggle of not knowing whether to love or not to love. From the above analyses we can see that a faraway urban environment plays a double role for both Sophie and the young male protagonist in “Sinking.” The unfamiliar city is both an agent of liberation and a source of corruption in these two stories, whose protagonists go through stages of attraction and repulsion in their reactions to their new environment for schooling. Early twentieth-century China was experiencing fundamental social, cultural, and political changes, and the protagonists, like other Chinese intellectuals of their day, were caught in a dilemma. On the one hand, traditional Chinese ethical codes conditioned their maturation into adulthood; on the other hand, Western knowledge, thought, and value systems also affected their life and thinking. The big city brings disillusionment, making it more alarming than any dissatisfaction they might have had with the narrowness of life in the country. Eventually, neither protagonist achieves reconciliation with life and society—the social integration prominent in conventional Bildungsroman. Instead, self-scrutiny leads both to despair, and even self-annihilation in the case of the male student in Japan. Prospects for social integration for either the young man or the young woman dwindle to near zero on account of the social and psychological turmoil that swirls around the troubled protagonists. In this sense, both stories are tragic and parodistic Bildungsroman. In the 1920s and 1930s, political conflicts between the Guomindang (hereafter GMD) and the CCP galvanized numerous literati of the May 49

Feuerwerker, Ding Ling’s Fiction, 28. Feuerwerker further points out that Sophie’s “love experience is not so much an excuse for subjective effusions as an occasion for tough moral self-questioning.” See Feuerwerker, Ding Ling’s Fiction, 19. 50

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Fourth generation to approach their writing from a more politicized angle. Chiang Kai-shek’s (1887–1975) bloody suppression of the CCP in Shanghai in 1927 forced the CCP underground and split the GMD into the left wing in Wuhan and the right wing in Shanghai. In addition, the GMD’s relatively passive response to Japanese intrusions in Northeast China in the early 1930s disappointed many May Fourth writers. Many of them became CCP members or CCP sympathizers under their acknowledged leader Lu Xun, who nonetheless never joined the CCP and feuded bitterly with Party heavyweight Zhou Yang (1908–1989) during the last years of his life. If the May Fourth era was a time of pursuing individual liberation, then the decade following the split of the GMD and the CCP became an era of pursuing social liberation. The concerns of Chinese intellectuals mostly switched an emphasis on the value of the individual to the exploration of the whole society’s future. In this political and social situation, the writing of many May Fourth literati took a left turn, and sought the point of intersection between the individual and society. This turn is often characterized by literary historians as a shift from Literary Revolution to Revolutionary Literature.51 The focus of their writings was no longer “their own personal experience and individual vision”; they were more concerned with “ideological and programmatic themes.”52 The narratives of individuals and individual consciousness prominent in the May Fourth era were replaced by “panoramic treatments of class consciousness and great social and economic forces.”53 Under this generally leftist literary climate, the chengzhang xiaoshuo also witnessed a shift in a leftist direction. The changes are reflected in subject matter, thematic concerns, narrative patterns and styles. The chengzhang xiaoshuo by leftist writers during the decade following 1928 usually focus on the way young protagonists find meaningful paths for their future and devote themselves to the revolution, pursuing a moral transformation from selfish ignorance to revolutionary enlightenment. Before 1928, May Fourth writers usually portrayed frustrated young characters who broke the bonds of traditional cul-

51 Leo Ou-fan Lee explains the change in the framework of romanticism. He concludes that the “shift from Literary Revolution to Revolutionary Literature is epitomized by the dynamizing view of Byron—a progression from sentiment to force, from love to revolution, from Werther to Prometheus.” See Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers, 292. 52 Goldman, ed., Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era, 2–3. 53 Ibid.

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ture in the May Fourth era, whereas afterwards their characters turned to social reform or out-and-out revolution. The intense awareness of the significance of the self in the early May Fourth era increasingly gave way to class-consciousness and a sense of collectivity. This shift is identified by critics as the starting point of “a gradual victory of the discourse of collectivism over the self.”54 In addition to the formulaic thematic framework in these narratives, the sprouting of an anti-“bourgeois” or pro-“proletarian” identity could also be perceived among characters. In her study of the theme of coming-of-age in 1930’s left-wing urban stories, Li Mei points out that such stories emphasize the transformation and fusion of intellectual and proletarian identities. There were two patterns of transformation. On the one hand, as in the character of Jin Xiaomei in “Dawn” (Shu, 1933), the subject of the transformation is the worker who gradually masters revolutionary knowledge under the consciousness-raising guidance of progressive intellectuals. On the other hand, as illustrated by Meilin in “Shanghai in the Spring of 1930” (Yijiu sanling nian chun shanghai, 1930), the subject of the transformation is the intellectual who undergoes a metamorphosis into a proletarian by means of guidance from a politically astute “worker mentor.” These two patterns bring to light the requirement that youth must experience a transformation of identity in their awakening along the path of growth they have followed. In this way, young intellectuals wind up proletarianized, while workers and farmers become intellectualized.55 In fictional portrayals of identity shifts, Chinese young people ceased being enlightened new youth and became progressive and revolutionary youth. Protagonists sprang up to embody these new ambitions, as exemplified in Ye Shengtao’s (1894–1988) Schoolmaster Ni Huanchih (Ni Huanzhi, 1928), Mao Dun’s (1896–1981) Rainbow (Hong, 1930), Ding Ling’s Weihu (Weihu, 1930) and “Shanghai in the Spring of 1930,” Ba Jin’s (1904–2005) Family ( Jia, 1931) and Wang Xiyan’s (1914–1999) “Dawn.” These narratives unfold a variety of thematic foci, often including elements of societal inequities, political injustice, and labor-management conflict. Nevertheless, most of the works are mediocre with respect to 54 Denton, The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling, 5. 55 Li Mei, “Lun sanshi niandai zuoyi dushi xiaoshuo zhong de chengzhang zhuti” [On the theme of growth in the 1930s’ left-wing urban stories], Yancheng shifan xueyuan xuebao, 1994, no. 4:47–49.

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literary merit, falling into the well-worn “revolution plus love” formula in which the characters’ personal well-being is now subservient to the responsibility of saving society as a whole.56 As one critic observed, “The actual representation of characters’ minds in leftist literature was for the most part formulaic and superficial. It is not so much that leftist writers denied their characters a psychic life, but that the minds portrayed were flat, unambiguous, and transparently clear.”57 The flatness and simplicity of characterization are also evident in the leftist chengzhang xiaoshuo narratives. In spite of their artistic weakness, it is still worth discussing their thematic significance through a brief review of Ye Shengtao’s Schoolmaster Ni Huan-chih. Ye Shengtao’s (Ye Shaojun) Schoolmaster Ni Huan-chih was completed and serialized in the Education Magazine, vol. 20, issues 1–12, in 1928. It was then published by Shanghai Commercial Press in book form in August 1929 and reprinted in thirteen editions by Kaiming Bookstore from 1930 to 1949.58 The book narrates the path of a young Chinese educator, Ni Huanzhi, from 1916 to 1927. In Schoolmaster Ni Huan-chih, various contradictions within the individual as portrayed in “Miss Sophie’s Diary” and “Sinking” are mainly replaced by portrayals of contradictions within society through three aspects—the pedagogical, the romantic, and the political. These contradictions lead to frustration and disillusion. The novel not only incorporates the author Ye Shengtao’s educational philosophy; it also reveals how historical events of the time shaped the lives and careers of May Fourth youth. Ni Huanzhi represents a typical middle-class intellectual who attends a new Western-style school, becomes awakened to the May Fourth spirit, is later disillusioned by the gap between societal reality and his ideals, and on his deathbed finds renewed hope in revolution and the youth of days to come. Ni Huanzhi is a transitional figure, bridging the gap between May Fourth new youth and revolutionary youth.

56 Jianmei Liu has done a thoughtful and thorough study on modern Chinese stories written within the thematic framework of revolution plus love in her book Revolution Plus Love (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003). She examines the changing patterns of these formulaic writings in different historical periods in modern China, from the 1930s to the contemporary. 57 Denton, The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling, 13–14. 58 He Xifan, “Ye Shengtao de jiaoyu qingjie yu Ni Huanzhi de xinling bianqian” [Ye Shengtao’s educational concern and Ni Huanzhi’s spiritual journey], Xihua shifan daxue xuebao, 2005, no. 2:65.

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Schoolmaster Ni Huan-chih was one of the earliest full-length novels dealing with the Bildung of young Chinese intellectuals. It contains the typical narrative elements of the conventional Bildungsroman, and maintains a good balance between the young protagonist’s individuality and socialization. More importantly, the development of the protagonist Ni Huanzhi’s personality and his recognition of himself and society intersect with societal developments throughout the story. In other words, his individuality and subjectivity are developed through his social integration, specifically his participation in educational reform and political movements. Setting out on a journey is one of the important plot elements in a Bildungsroman novel. In this narrative, the protagonist sets on two journeys. Covered in the first eighteen chapter of the novel, the first journey is from his home village to another rural village to realize his educational ideals in an experimental school. The second journey in the remaining twelve chapters is to metropolitan Shanghai to fulfill his political aspirations. The protagonist Ni Huanzhi has two goals: to establish a school in his hometown to enhance the local people’s quality of life, and to have an ideal family in which his wife is both his lover at home and a comrade in the world of politics. Unfortunately, harsh reality shatters both of his ideals. Feeling depressed and dispirited, he hurries from his hometown to Shanghai, where various revolutionary movements are in full swing. Swept up in the mighty torrent of revolution, Ni Huanzhi vacillates between his disillusion with the status quo and the determination to meld his personal ideals to collective goals. Inspired and enlightened by the martyrdom of his revolutionary friend Wang Leshan, he finally recognizes that only through revolution can an individual ideal be realized. He dies from an illness soon thereafter. Ni Huanzhi’s life journey is a collision between his own individuality and his society’s historical dynamism—a frustrating encounter between his youthful idealism and the harsh status quo. A series of historical and political events—the 1911 Revolution, the May Fourth Movement in 1919, the May Thirtieth Movement in 1925, and Chiang Kai-shek’s purge of Communists after the split between the GMD and CCP in 1927—form the backdrop of Ni Huanzhi’s Bildung. The termination of the imperial examination system gives Ni Huanzhi a chance to enter a new Western-style school. The Xinhai Revolution initially brings him new feelings about the surrounding world as if a new and violent strength has been poured into him, but he is soon

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disappointed, finding that no significant changes have taken place in his hometown. His early choice of a career as a schoolteacher is a pragmatic solution for earning a living rather than some sort of ideal vocation. However, deep within he harbors ample idealism and drive to achieve an unusual change to the status quo. His friend Jin Shubo subsequently invites him to teach in an experimental school, the principal of which shares his educational vision. Thereupon, Ni Huanzhi immediately throws himself headlong into pedagogy, applying new methods in his teaching and engaging in small farm initiatives and other experimental projects. For Ni Huanzhi, education is not only a tool to transmit practical knowledge and prepare students for a future vocation, but is also a means to build student character and help them develop themselves as well-rounded individuals. Intellectually, Ni Huanzhi is nurtured by the new ideas promulgated in Chen Duxiu’s and Hu Shi’s New Youth. This journal is a major motif in the novel, and also the window through which Ni Huanzhi and his colleagues see the outside world and assimilate new knowledge and progressive thought. Although they are not direct participants in the May Fourth Movement in Beijing, Ni Huanzhi and his colleagues in the countryside are inspired to strive to do something to echo the movement in their own town. Ni Huanzhi’s enthusiasm for education is further fueled by his romance with Jin Peizhang, an independentminded and intelligent Normal School co-ed. Yet at the same time, Ni Huanzhi agonizes constantly over the bleak and difficult reality around him, and is plagued by his own youthful sentimentalism. After marrying Peizhang, Ni Huanzhi’s disappointment and disillusion are aggravated by his wife’s regression from her previous standing as a progressive and idealistic teacher to her present state as a narrowminded and self-absorbed housewife. At this low ebb in his morale, Ni Huanzhi goes to Shanghai to teach at a women’s school with the support of a recommendation from his close friend, the revolutionary Wang Leshan. It is in Shanghai where Ni Huanzhi most fervently throws himself into organized political activities and witnesses peaks in the brutality of historical reality. He is present at the May Thirtieth Movement, a significant anti-imperialist movement mobilized and organized by the CCP with factory workers as the main participants. By engaging in such political activism, he gradually develops a genuine sympathy for factory workers. Two years later, Chiang Kai-shek’s violent purge of Communists on strike in Shanghai stuns him and fills him with disillusionment, yet at the same time he is encouraged

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by Wang Leshan’s sacrifice of his life in the struggle, as well as the latter’s revolutionary Communist ideology. Ni Huanzhi sees the hope of China in that country’s youth, even though he is disillusioned and distressed by harsh realities and his own failure to reform society. This hope is evident during a bout of introspection on his deathbed: Not yet thirty-five, nothing successfully accomplished, how can I just die like this? Oh, let me die, let me die! Feeble energies, a vacillating mind, ineffectual, completely ineffectual! Every single thing I’ve hoped for has come within my grasp, and every time I have let the opportunity be lost; if I lived for another thirty years it would still be just the same! No, people like me are useless, every single one of us! Success is not a prize that we deserve to get; one day there will be people who are quite different from us—let them get it!59

This monologue reveals Ni Huanzhi’s disillusionment with himself and his compatriots, but meanwhile he entrusts his hope to the revolutionary youth of the future—youngsters who would eventually follow in the footsteps of Wang Leshan. Ye Shengtao reinforces the reasonability of Ni Huanzhi’s hopes for China’s future by depicting his widow Peizhang’s belated return to enlightened social engagement. Near the end of the novel, Peizhang reflects on the period of regressive retreat from social activism she had gone through: “I shut myself up at home as soon as I had a child. But there’s no point in brooding on past mistakes . . . Years ago Huan-chih said he wanted to go out into the world and stretch his wings, and now I am burning with the same desire that he had!” With “the courage that comes to a soldier about to depart on a long campaign,” she determines to work not only for herself and her family, but also for society as a whole.60 Though Peizhang’s change of heart seems too sudden to be wholly credible and the reader is hardly prepared to accept it at face value, it nevertheless reveals the author’s effort to confirm the soundness of Ni Huanzhi’s hope for a better future and to allow his social activism to continue through his widow’s renewed efforts. Ni Huanzhi’s journey from the countryside to the city and from activism within his school out to the broader society parallels his intellectual journey from idealism to disillusionment and finally on to revolution—even though he has no chance to achieve his revolutionary goals. 59 Ye Shengtao, Schoolmaster Ni Huan-chih, 2nd ed. trans. A. C. Barnes (Beijing: Foreign Language Press, 1978), 327. 60 Ibid., 333.

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Aside from Ni Huanzhi, there are other fictional characters whose life story showcases the various outcomes encountered by activists in the May Fourth generation. In his article “On Reading Ni Huanzhi,” Mao Dun (1896–1981) enumerates the outcomes of these May Fourth participants ten years after the heyday of the movement: The “heroes” who rose with the great May Fourth tide have passed through numerous metamorphoses. One need not dwell on the many who rose and ebbed with the tide of the May Fourth; even the outcomes of the prominent “pillars” of that time give one much food for thought. Some died from an illness, while others sacrificed their lives for the cause; some retired, while others degenerated; some turned reactionary, while others stagnated. Each in his respective manner revealed his true colors before Mr. History.61

These “heroes” can find their fictional counterparts in Schoolmaster Ni Huan-chih: Ni Huanzhi dies from an illness. Jin Shubo degenerates; he begins by embracing his ideal as enthusiastically as Ni Huanzhi, but ends up living an idle, gentrified life in the countryside, mocking Huanzhi’s idealism and naïvety with snobbish condescension. Jiang Bingru stagnates; as a returned student from Japan, this strong supporter and comrade of Ni Huanzhi ardently take up a career in educational reform in his hometown, but later compromises with the status quo, becoming part of the local elite. In contrast, Wang Leshan sacrifices his life for the revolutionary cause. Wang Leshan is one of the earliest Chinese fictional representations of a revolutionary intellectual who becomes a “martyr” for the Communist revolution. In spite of their disparate paths after the May Fourth Movement, we can see one common tendency among these four friends: a gradual withering of individualism and a steady increase of a collectivist orientation. As observed by one critic, in Ni Huanzhi’s alter ego the concern for selfhood and subjectivity decreases, and the concern for national “salvation” and regime change increases.62 Ni Huanzhi’s life and intellectual journey involve a frustrating process of subordinating

61 Mao Dun, “On Reading Ni Huanzhi” in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945, ed. Kirk A. Denton (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 289–290. 62 Wolfgang Kubin, “German Melancholy and Chinese Restlessness: Ye Shengtao’s Novel Ni Huanzhi,” Journal of Tsinghua University (Philosophy and Social Science) 17 (February 2002): 77.

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his personal convictions and ideals to the regimented political activities of a revolutionist. In the 1930s, Chinese leftist writers’ chengzhang xiaoshuo were usually concerned with the tension between what they viewed as “Historical Inevitability”—the Revolution’s immanent destruction of capitalism and “feudalism” once and for all—versus an ever-suspect individualism. Meanwhile, a group of politically unaffiliated writers were writing coming-of-age narratives on a variety of themes related to young middle-class urbanites’ experiences or the rhythms of life in traditional Chinese village society. These diversified themes are evident in the works of the neo-perceptionists and the nativists (or nativesoil writers). Influenced by various Western modernists and Japanese Neo-perceptionists School, leading Chinese neo-perceptionists such as Shi Zhecun (1905–2003), Liu Na’ou (1905–1940), and Mu Shiying (1912–1940) brought unusual descriptive imagery and elaborate psychological analysis into their fiction. Their works set out to explore urban experiences and “modern city culture—the erotic female body, urban exoticism, and the bourgeois lifestyle.”63 Though neoperceptionist fiction also touched upon the motif of revolution at times, it was usually portrayed as more chaotically dramatic than genuinely meaningful, “as just another scene of urban exoticism,” or else it was “used to reflect modernity and Shanghai urban culture” to “satisfy the modern reader.”64 In contrast with these writers’ enthusiasm for urban life, another group of writers was more concerned with the gradual disappearance of conventional Chinese rural society and traditional Chinese values, and hence wrote stories about their native land. Some literary critics have dubbed them the nativists. Shen Congwen (1902–1988), who often referred to himself as a villager or ruralite, was the most eminent representative of this school. In his relatively lyrical narrative style, he often emphasized, the “elegant, healthy, and natural” aspects of rural life in the upland border region of west Hunan,” in contrast with what he saw as the decay of values across the political spectrum in urban China.65 Congwen’s Autobiography (Congwen zizhuan) and the short

63 64 65

Liu, Revolution Plus Love, 151. Ibid., 151–152. Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers, 207.

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story “Xiaoxiao” (Xiaoxiao) can also be read as chengzhang xiaoshuo, even though they differ markedly from those written by the left-wing writers of his day.66 The Lugouqiao Emergency (also called July Seventh Incident and the Marco Polo Bridge Incident) on 7 July 1937 triggered the eight-year Sino-Japanese War and turned a new page in modern Chinese history. In the wake of the unconditional surrender of the Japanese army on 15 August 1945, the civil war between the GMD and the CCP eventually broke out in 1946 and lasted until 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek withdrew his GMD government and military to the island of Taiwan. During these wars, literature was often assumed to shoulder part of the responsibility for “saving” the country. The aesthetic concerns of the country’s writers commonly yielded to the perceived need for regimentation in line with the revolutionary or anti-imperialist struggle at hand. According to one commentator, “During the Sino-Japanese War, romanticism died a natural death in the occupied area and was replaced by the resurgence of more traditionally influenced drama, essays, and anti-romantic narrative literature.”67 With Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” (1942) as a watershed, the May Fourth era’s legacy of enlightenment humanism and romantic individualism completely eroded, giving way to a more combative era’s insistence upon national salvation and revolutionary collectivism. Under such socio-historical circumstances, fiction dealing with the intellectual development and emotional growth of young people became scarce. Still, Bildungsroman fiction of excellent quality were occasionally still written, such as Lu Ling’s (1923–1994) full-length novel, Children of the Rich (Caizhu de ernümen). In terms of artistic value and intellectual depth, the second volume of this two-volume novel still stands as one of the finest Bildungsroman narratives ever written by a Chinese left-wing writer. With its complex and ponderous syntax, the novel deviates from traditional Chinese vernacular mod-

66 Consistent with his loyalty to traditional Chinese values and appreciation of life in traditional agricultural society, Shen Congwen’s ultimate goal was to manifest the “power of innocence and spontaneity,” and in so doing, to demonstrate that “the moral codes of a community should not be predicated on pre-established grounds but should evolve as a result of the harmonious association of things in their phenomenal state.” Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction, 1917–1957, 201; Lee, The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers, 244. 67 Duke, Blooming and Contending: Chinese Literature in the Post-Mao Era, 184.

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els, having taken its stylistic cues instead from Chinese translations of such Western writers as Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Lu Ling’s adoption of a Western narrative style helped this novel to present what a critic has termed the “problematic self.”68 Written between 1945 and 1948, Children of the Rich recounts the decline of a wealthy elite family in Suzhou, with particular attention to the fate of younger family members from the early 1930s to the mid 1940s. The subject matter of this novel was inspired by Lu Ling’s personal observations of the ups and downs of his maternal uncle’s family, along with memories of his own youth.69 Hence, Lu Ling’s work represents not only certain intellectual currents of the time, but also significant historical and social changes. Unlike other contemporary left-wing writers who generally emphasized the dramatic transformation of the protagonist from a “bourgeois” intellectual to a revolutionary, Lu Ling turned inward to disclose the rich inner life of dejected young intellectuals in a chaotic society. The novel has sometimes been criticized as excessively intellectual, and has often been read by critics as a work “about consciousness”—and as a fictional elaboration of Hu Feng’s ideas about subjectivism.70 In Volume Two of the novel, the young protagonist Jiang Chunzu continues to experience the kind of spiritual crisis of Chinese intellectuals that Ni Huanzhi experienced in Schoolmaster Ni Huan-chih. Jiang Chunzu is infused with the May Fourth spirit of enlightenment humanism and has been nurtured by ideas in the progressive journal New Youth, but the harsh status quo makes him gradually awaken to the apparent powerlessness of enlightenment humanist values in this social context. Neither Ni Huanzhi nor Chunzu can envision a way of bringing about social change through the spirit of enlightenment humanism. Volume 1 of Lu Ling’s novel is a panoramic presentation of the gradual decline of a wealthy family with a particular focus on the family’s two older sons, Jiang Weizu and Jiang Shaozu. This volume depicts a particularly wrenching transition in family fortunes that resonates with Lu Ling’s own family background. He captures the decline of not merely a lone family, but of an entire complex social ethos. Volume 2, strongly influenced by Romain Rolland’s (1866–1944) 68

Ibid., 160. Denton, The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling, 122–123. 70 Ibid., 185. 69

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Jean Christophe, focuses solely on the quest for understanding and fulfillment of the youngest son Jiang Chunzu, and is written in the narrative pattern of Bildungsroman, exploring the protagonist’s complex inner life and his interactions with the outside world. The following discussion will focus on Volume 2, which is marked by a plethora of psychological description and internal monologue, and animated by a concern for the whole man unfolding organically in all his complexity and richness.71 In Children of the Rich, Volume 2, the protagonist Chunzu follows an opposite path from that of the young protagonist in Schoolmaster Ni Huan-chih. Ni Huanzhi’s Bildung is accomplished through his journeys from a small world to a big world—first from his home village to another village to attempt to achieve his educational ideals, then from the countryside to the city, where he dies after some participation in leftist political movements. On the other hand, Chunzu leaves his hometown for larger cities, then withdraws to the countryside to engage in educational reform, and finally returns to his home to die. Both of Ni Huanzhi’s and Chunzu’s journeys are accompanied by frustrations and disillusionment. The young Chunzu is forced to leave home alone and sets out on an uncertain journey as a war refugee. On this lonely expedition, he sees the world outside of his family and witnesses the sort of large-scale human suffering characteristic of wartime. Through his acquaintance with people from all walks of life, he witnesses bloody slaughters and brutal persecution in addition to experiencing warm friendships. With these bitter but valuable experiences, he returns to his home. So far, the story fits the traditional pattern of Bildungsroman very well. A young man sets out on a lonely journey; he experiences the outside world, acquiring a certain set of values, learning lessons, evolving and growing; finally, he returns home, completing a full cycle of activity in an individual’s life. However, Lu Ling does not stop there. He goes much further with the tension between the development of Chunzu’s individuality and socialization. After Chunzu returns to his hometown at the rear of the war-zone, he draws upon his musical talent to contribute to the production of anti-Japanese leafletting. However, clique struggles and the failure of a love affair, push him again into a mire of disillusion and depression. Chunzu withdraws further to the countryside, searching for salvation. He accepts a teaching position at his friend’s school. Yet 71

Ibid., 167.

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the simple life in the countryside does not help to relieve his depression. The suffocating atmosphere in the school and bitterness from his failed love affair impel him to flee back to Chongqing to join his family there. The painful struggle of his soul induces severe health problems, and eventually leads to his untimely death. One critic sees Chunzu’s intellectual self as problematic and “split in two directions: inward to the mind and outward to the world.”72 However, I do not see it as problematic. On the contrary, the revelation of the protagonist Chunzu’s inwardness and outwardness reveals two important aspects of the protagonist’s Bildung—development of his individuality and socialization, the combination of which help make the novel a successful Bildungsroman narrative. In his preface to Children of the Rich, Hu Feng extols Lu Ling’s concern for the inwardness of the protagonist by pointing out that Lu Ling does not simply record historical events, but reveals the disturbance of the individual soul under certain historical circumstances.73 Chunzu experiences many of the hardships that a typical Bildungsroman protagonist undergoes: generational conflict, provinciality, the struggle to find one’s place in society, alienation, ordeal by love, and the search for a vocation. Influenced by various personalities and forces, Chunzu gradually and painfully comes to understand himself and his role in the revolution and the anti-Japanese war, and works out his own salvation by melting himself into a collective career. Yet in the face of a family and society torn apart by the gunpowder of war, his experiences undermine the development of a mature character. He cannot attain strength and integrity through this self-examination, and eventually fails to reconcile himself with society.

72 Denton, The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling, 185, 189, 23. By “inward to the mind,” Denton refers to Chunzu’s desperate effort to form a “subject apart from the oppressive forces of society,” or in Leo Ou-fan Lee’s romanticism framework, Chunzu’s “Faustian-Promethean” tendency to “optimistically [wage] a solitary battle against society.” By “outward to the world,” Denton highlights Chunzu’s action of “join[ing] with the people” as a token of “participat[ing] creatively in the movement of History,” after this “introverted Wertherian” hero is overwhelmed by his pessimism and “desires to terminate his isolation by fusing with a larger whole.” Denton argues that Chunzu’s psychic dilemma and problematic self are still unsolved today, and they may explain the post-Mao literature’s obsession with self and subjectivity. 73 Hu Feng, preface to Lu Ling’s Caizhu de ernümen [Children of the rich] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chuban she, 1985).

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From the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to the eruption of the Cultural Revolution, Chinese literature in mainland China was highly politicized. Upon the canonization of Mao Zedong’s 1942 “Yan’an talks” as holy writ in the PRC, Mao-era PRC literature was shaped to meet the CCP’s political demands for conformity. Politicized writings on revolution and collectivism won a complete victory over the May Fourth legacy of enlightenment humanism and romantic subjectivism. Borrowed from Soviet Russia, the prescribed PRC writing style was so-called “socialist realism,” which later developed into a combination of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism (with the latter being in fact by far the dominant mode). The central figure of a literary work—the new hero—was expected to be a model Maoist figure in a typical circumstance. The dominant conflicts were between social classes as defined by Marxist-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought; the key contradictions were between public and individual benefits.74 Workers, peasants, and soldiers became the nominal masters of history and the protagonists of most narratives, while intellectual topics were marginalized. The quantity and quality of chengzhang xiaoshuo declined. Yang Mo’s The Song of Youth (Qingchun zhige, 1958) can be counted as representative of the chengzhang xiaoshuo during this period.75 Even though this novel adopted the somewhat dated theme of the formation of a female Party intellectual who hailed from a rural landlord family, it has continued to be published, reprinted, and highly rated because the author skillfully fuses the individual growth and maturity of her protagonist into the collective struggle.76 The novel betrays the author’s conscious effort to conform to the political and ideological “correctness” of China under Maoism. Another reason for its popularity at publication was that the theme of the story complied with contemporary literary criteria: revolutionary realism, revolutionary romance, and the protagonist’s ultimate goal of becoming a determined revolutionist. Yang Mo thus echoed leftist writers preceding her—writers who “belittle the decadent experiences of the bourgeois 74 For detail, see Hong Zicheng, Dangdai zhongguo wenxue gaiguan [General review of contemporary Chinese literature] (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1998); Hong Zicheng, A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature, trans. Michael M. Day (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009). 75 Yang Mo, Qingchun zhi ge [The song of youth] (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1958). 76 Sun Jing, “Zhongguo xiandai chengzhang xiaoshuo de xushixue yanjiu,” 23–24.

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individual and . . . emphasize the happy ending of the revolution led by the proletarian collective.”77 Through the protagonist Lin Daojing’s transformation in The Song of Youth, readers see how the Chinese intellectual’s autonomy is gradually undermined, and how the May Fourth new youth is completely transformed into a determined revolutionary youth. It is also apparent how the May Fourth legacy of enlightenment humanism and romantic subjectivism is finally subjected to revolution and collectivism. Through Lin Daojing, The Song of Youth presents the image of a typical female revolutionary intellectual in the 1930s. The plot contains all the main elements of a typical Bildungsroman—conflict with one’s parents’ generation, alienation, flight from provinciality, entrance into society, education, the ordeal of love, and finally, the finding of one’s place within society. In many Western Bildungsroman fiction, the father is absent; in this story, the relationship between Daojing and her father is problematic. She has double class identities, since half of her genes are from the exploiting class of her father, a rural landlord, and half are from the exploited class of her mother, a maid under the employ of the landlord. Being the daughter of the working-class mother and living in the exploitative landlord family are the source of her suffering, and finally lead her to flee her rural family. Originally an innocent and helpless young girl, Daojing thus takes the first step towards maturity by herself. To some degree, her journey from home is a flight from provinciality. Now she faces a broader world in which she will experience all kinds of ordeals and finally achieve her salvation, her self-realization. Swales has repeatedly emphasized that “when portraying the hero, the Bildungsroman operates with a tension between a concern for the sheer complexity of individual potentiality on the one hand and a recognition on the other that practical reality—marriage, family, and career—is a necessary dimension of the hero’s self-realization.”78 In The Song of Youth, the development of Daojing’s individual potentiality is accompanied by the realization of her practical quests for love, family, and career. More importantly, her love interests and family life are oriented toward her career, whose ultimate goal is national salvation. Furthermore, as the critic Li Yang observes, every single evolutionary change in Daojing’s life takes place with the help of men:

77 78

Liu, Revolution Plus Love, 91. Swales, The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse, 29.

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first, the May Fourth intellectual Yu Yongze, then the revolutionaries Lu Jiachuan and Jiang Hua.79 Therefore, it is men who incarnate the forces of history within this novel. Lin Daojing’s relationships with the three symbolize the tension between the individual and history. Yu Yongze, a typical May Fourth young intellectual nurtured by both traditional Chinese and Western literature and thought, opens a window for Daojing to the outside world. His erudition quenches Daojing’s thirst for knowledge. His advocacy of individualist values, freedom, and happiness awakens Daojing as an independent human being. His romantic love transforms Daojing from a girl into a woman. These influences symbolize the first stage of Daojing’s self-realization as an individual: her severance from her rural landlord family to pursue her individual freedom and happiness. Yu Yongze takes her to Beijing, the center of new culture and thought that will arouse her yearning for social change. At this point, Yu Yongze has fulfilled his mission. Another man will take over the duty to guide Daojing further toward the goal of mental maturity: commitment to Communist ideology. The city seems to promise infinite variety and newness. For Daojing, Beijing brings her into a new world where she becomes acquainted with revolutionaries, including Communist Party member Lu Jiachuan. Under Lu Jiachuan’s guidance, Daojing reads progressive books, mainly on Marxist theory, and becomes actively involved in the urban student movement. She gradually discovers what revolution is and why it is necessary to change society. Each of Daojing’s growing stages sees a negation of the previous stage by “overcoming” her earlier “wrong” and “problematic consciousness.”80 After becoming acquainted with Lu Jiachuan, Daojing begins to despise the middle-class sentiments and habits of her first savior, Yu Yongze, who indulges in family happiness, appreciates traditional Chinese culture, and stands aloof from political activities. From Daojing’s new perspective, Yu Yongze is out of date and has become a barrier on her progressive path. Her love for Yu Yongze gradually and secretly shifts to Lu Jiachuan, a real revolutionary. If Yu Yongze helped Daojing achieve self-realization as an individual human being, then Lu Jiachuan now encourages her to transcend

79 Li Yang, Kangzheng suming zhilu [Struggling against predestination] (Changchun: Shidai wenyi chubanshe, 1993). 80 Song, “Long Live Youth: National Rejuvenation and the Chinese Bildungsroman, 1900–1958,” 272.

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individualism to merge with collectivity. He nurtures such political awareness by explaining Marxist theory to her. Lu Jiachuan’s mission is thus successfully fulfilled. Conveniently for the novel’s plot, Lu Jiachuan is soon arrested by the GMD and subsequently executed. A third man, Jiang Hua, enters Daojing’s life and takes over Lu Jiachuan’s mission to guide Daojing further toward being a fullfledged revolutionary. His guidance leads Daojing to find a perfect accommodation with both life and society. In the end, her individual potentiality is fully developed. She has become a self-confident, independent, and mature woman. In home and family life, Daojing finds her haven in Jiang Hua’s love, and the two become a revolutionary couple. In terms of career, Daojing is now a determined revolutionary and a leader in the student movement. It might be true, as Jianmei Liu argues, that “[Daojing] tries to leave room to preserve residues of sexual love, personal happiness, and the individual desire under the cloak of sublimation,” but it is also obvious that at the final stage of her growth, Daojing has fused her individuality into the revolutionary collectivity.81 Individualist romanticism overtly withdraws from her life. With her sexuality, individuality and self-determination submitting to revolution, collectivity and collective commitment, the salvation and justification of her own life are achieved. Lin Daojing thus completes her Bildung—transformation from a sentimental female student, to a progressive youth, to a revolutionary youth, and finally to a tamed communist youth. This reflects a typical trajectory of many Chinese youth in the first half of the twentieth century. The chaos of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 left an almost empty page in the history of Chinese literature. After Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, China suddenly found itself able to wake up from the protracted nightmare, and PRC intellectuals started to reflect on this disastrous and traumatizing history by writing memoirs and fiction. In their writings, they recalled their catastrophic and devastating experiences during the Cultural Revolution. These works were labeled “Scar Literature” and “Reflective Literature.” Examples include Lu Xinhua’s “The Wounded” (Shanghen, 1978), Dai Houying’s Man, oh, Man (Ren a ren, 1980), Zhang Xianliang’s Body and Soul (Ling yu rou, 1981), and Yu Luojin’s A Chinese Winter’s Tale (Yige dongtian de tonghua, 1980). The most noteworthy trait of these narratives is the revival of 81

Liu, Revolution Plus Love, 188.

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the theme of love, which “for those writers represents the banner of humanism, a way to save society, and a tentative vision of the lost ‘self.’”82 Even though these narratives touch upon the growth and formation of youth, their main concern is to present the disastrous effects of the Cultural Revolution upon Chinese people, and to reflect intellectually on those failures. In this study, these narratives will thus not be treated as typical coming-of-age narratives or Bildungsroman. Since the mid-1980s, alongside a general resurgence of interest in self and subjectivity, some young Chinese writers started to write narratives that explored seriously the theme of young people’s individuality and socialization, either during the Cultural Revolution or in the contemporary reform period that followed. Examples included Yu Hua’s novel Cries in the Drizzle and his short stories (for example, “Timid as a Mouse,” and “The April Third Incident”); Su Tong’s North Side Story and the Toon Street Series; and Liu Sola’s “You Have No Choice” (Ni biewu xuanze, 1985). Critics of the 1980s labeled these three writers “avant-garde,” and many of their early works applied innovative diction and literary techniques by way of influence from foreign writers such as Franz Kafka (1883–1924) and Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986). Yet even so, the works cited above could still be read as chengzhang xiaoshuo. The significance of these narratives lay in the fact that these writers reflected on the growth and future of Chinese youth in ways that deviated from the utopian vision perpetuated by Mao Zedong’s version of the “new socialist man.” In terms of narrative, they completely rejected the formula of revolutionary-realism-plus-revolutionaryromance, which had been popularized among left-wing writers since the early 1930s and had reached its peak in the Mao era. In the 1990s, more coming-of-age narratives emerged, and writers revealed profound intellectual concerns as they explored the growth and maturation of the individual. However, these narratives were written mainly by women, and included Lin Bai’s One Person’s War (Yige ren de zhanzheng, 1993) and Chen Ran’s Private Life (Siren shenghuo, 1996). Unlike May Fourth era women writers whose female protagonists struggled against patriarchal suppression, women writers in the 1990s were more interested in revealing their personal feelings as women. In their narratives, men such as fathers, brothers, husbands or lovers were often either absent or else insignificant.

82

Ibid., 24.

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In One Person’s War, Lin Bai emphasizes the loneliness and isolation of a girl as an individual. The growth of Duomi, the protagonist, is a process of searching for her identity. Duomi is a sensitive girl with literary talent. Her father is absent. Her connection with her mother is tenuous. She is destined to be an orphan and lives on her own. Her room is full of mirrors through which she confirms her existence. As a small girl, Duomi still has some attachment to her mother. However, after her first experience of sexual self-gratification at the age of eight, she becomes aware of her identity as a woman and starts to explore the outside world. She cuts loose from her mother. In her own words, she starts to “randomly pick up scenes (suiyi tiaoxuan fengjing).”83 Thanks to the literary talent she subsequently cultivates, she has an opportunity to flee her hometown and move to the city. As she seeks a vocation, her world grows larger and larger. She becomes a poet, an editor, and a screenwriter. She also experiences an ordeal of love, a necessary part of her growth. After all these experiences, Duomi chooses to withdraw into her own private world. It seems her journey of youth—her search for love and vocation—legitimizes her solitude. However, in this process she affirms her value as an independent entity. Duomi calls herself an “escapist.” Her philosophy of life is to “run off ” when facing a problem. This escape is presented positively, showing her confidence in her own existence and her don’t-care attitude about the outside world. At the end of the story, she obtains inner peace by living on her own; this is Duomi’s way of accommodating to life and society. In the late 1990s, some women writers born in the 1970s began to publish narratives about the lives of contemporary young people. Many of these narratives were modeled on their own experiences and became best-sellers. They included such works as Wei Hui’s Shanghai Baby (Shanghai baobei, 1999), Mianmian’s Candy (Tang, 2000), and Flower on the Other Side (Bi’an hua, 2003) by the so-called internet writer Anny Baby. Yet even though these narratives are closely related to contemporary urban young people’s lives, my study does not include them in the category of the Bildungsroman. The writers are more interested in disclosing the state of their lives than in exploring the process of growing up; they “neither identify with heavily loaded

83 Lin Bai, Yige ren de zhanzheng [One person’s war] (Beijing: Beijing shiyue wenyi chubanshe, 2004), 53.

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sense of nationalism nor care to pursue the autonomy of literature.”84 As literary critics have repeatedly pointed out, “Bildung is not merely the accumulation of experience, not merely maturation in the form of fictional biography.” It does not matter whether the process of Bildung succeeds or fails, whether or not the protagonist achieves reconciliation with life and society; what matters is that “there must be a sense of evolutionary change within the self.”85 In these narratives by young women writers, readers can hardly detect any intellectual concern for the process of change in the self. Therefore, this study prefers to treat these works as social and cultural phenomena rather than as Bildungsroman. From this review of the changing patterns of the chengzhang xiaoshuo in twentieth-century Chinese literature, we can see that the different concerns of Bildungsroman narratives in different historical periods reveal Chinese intellectuals’ response to and reflection on China’s social and political vicissitudes. In the modern Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo written before 1966, the term youth was full of cultural and political connotations, and young people have often been the chosen agents to rejuvenate and modernize China, at least theoretically. These narratives also display a tendency for individuality and subjectivity to yield gradually to collectivity and revolution. By contrast, the narratives written in the post-Mao era see a resurgence of selfhood, individuality, subjectivity, and a withdrawal of the concern for national salvation and collectivity. As Li Zehou points out, the tension between enlightenment humanism and national salvation has haunted Chinese modernity since the May Fourth era,86 but “in literary theory and fictional practice, these two discourses were never so at odds…[as] in the post-Mao period, when intellectuals were searching for alternatives to Maoist collectivism.”87 In the post-Mao Chinese Bildungsroman, “youth” is no longer the hero who will save and modernize China. Among modern and contemporary Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo, my study will give special attention to coming-of-age narratives of Su Tong and Yu Hua, and will analyze their works in the next two 84

Liu, Revolution Plus Love, 25. Sammons, “The Bildungsroman for Nonspecialists: An Attempt at a Clarification,” in Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman, 41. 86 Li Zehou, Zhongguo xiandai sixiang shilun [Essays on the history of modern Chinese thought] (Beijing: Dongfang chubanshe, 1987). 87 Denton, The Problematic of Self in Modern Chinese Literature: Hu Feng and Lu Ling, 5. 85

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chapters. There are two major reasons for choosing these two authors in particular. First, as indicated in the Introduction, coming-of-age narratives are prominent in the oeuvre of each of these two writers, yet they have not been systematically and comprehensively studied by literary critics. My study intends to fill the void in scholarly studies of this topic, not only among Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s works, but also with respect to the Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo as a literary genre. Second, Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s coming-of-age narratives that are set in the period from 1966 to 1976 make a substantial contribution to the study of the cultural history of the Maoist Cultural Revolution. Unprecedented upheavals in modern Chinese history began in June 1966 with the sudden advent of the Red Guard Movement, known for the extremist actions of students in the destruction of the Four Olds, and for armed factional struggles. The radical movement lasted about two years and was followed by “harsh military repression and campaigns of political persecution.”88 This was the first and most dramatic phase of the Cultural Revolution. The period from the formation of revolutionary committees in 1968 to the death of Lin Biao (1907– 1971) was the middle phase of the Cultural Revolution; this involved more mass violence and fierce factional struggles among the CCP’s high ranking officials.89 Finally, during the period after Lin Biao’s mysterious plane crash and before Mao Zedong’s death in the autumn of 1976, Mao established his absolute authority over the CCP and relied on his “Gang of Four” to further consolidate his power.90 While scholars have paid great attention to the Red Guard Movement and the political struggles of the Cultural Revolution, not much has been written about the kinds of social issues that are reflected in fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua. “Scar Literature” and “Sent-down Urban Youth Literature” written in the 1980s and 1990s focus “on the most visible protagonist: student red guards, [sent-down urban youth], worker rebels, and mass organizations engaged in factional

88 Esherick, Pickowicz, and Walder, eds., The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History, 1. 89 Ibid., 21. See detail of mass killing in Yang Su, “Mass Killing in the Cultural Revolution: A Study of Three Provinces,” and Jiangsui He, “The Death of a Landlord: Moral Predicament in Rural China, 1968–1969,” in The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History, 96–152. 90 For the detail, see MacFarquhar, and Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution. In the book, the authors chronicle China’s Cultural Revolution.

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struggles.”91 However, the characters in Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s narratives do not become noticeably involved in the Red Guard Movement and in drastic political struggles, either because of their tender age or their low and marginalized social status. By downplaying drastic political theatrics in favor of the characters’ private lives, Su Tong and Yu Hua effectively reveal the suffering of marginalized people or people from the bottom rungs of society, especially one of the most vulnerable groups—teenagers in a time of trouble. In the process, they explore more specific and deep rooted social issues caused by social and political chaos, such as dysfunctionality in many schools, the abnormal psychological development of many adolescents, troubled relations between numerous parents and children, juvenile delinquency, and other problems related to youth culture in China in the 1970s. The selection of Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s works for discussion of the Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo is based on the criterion of the traditional Bildungsroman as a literary genre established in Chapter One: the plot revolves around the tensions between “individuality and socialization, autonomy and normality, interiority and objectification,” and the development of the narrative leads to the formation and development of the Chinese young man or woman with a focus on the exploration of his or her spiritual and psychological turbulence.92 Each of these two authors has consciously experimented with a variety of established genres at various stages of his writing career. In their discussions of Yu Hua’s early experimental short stories and novellas from 1986 to 1989, critics have used terms related to genre in describing Yu Hua’s appropriation of conventional genres, such as “parodic subversion,” “generic parody,”93 “revisions of stories drawn from the traditional vernacular tradition,”94 and “a conscious exploitation of generic elements of the fantastic and tropes of the zhiguai.”95 Yu Hua’s “Mistakes by the Riverside” (Hebian de cuowu, 1988) can be read as a parody of the detective story; “A Classical Romance” (Gudian

91 Esherick, Pickowicz, and Walder, eds., The Chinese Cultural Revolution as History, 3. 92 Morreti, The Way of the World, 16. 93 Yiheng Zhao, “Yu Hua: Fiction as Subversion,” World Literature Today 65, no. 3 (Summer 1991): 415–420. 94 Andrew F. Jones, “The Violence of the Text: Reading Yu Hua and Shi Zhicun,” Positions 2, no. 3 (1994): 579. 95 Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg, “Haunted Fiction: Modern Chinese Literature and the Supernatural,” International Fiction Review 32 (2005): 25.

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aiqing, 1988) is an inversion of the talent-meets-beauty narrative; and “Blood and Plum Blossoms” (Xianxue meihua, 1989) parodies martial arts fiction. For Su Tong, it is evident that he has adapted the genres of the historical novel and the family saga in such narratives as My Life as Emperor, Empress Dowager Wu Zetian, Maple-Poplar Village Series, and Rice. When Su Tong and Yu Hua wrote about the coming-of-age of Chinese youth during the Cultural Revolution, they adapted the genre of Bildungsroman/chengzhang xiaoshuo to visualize a given part of their reality—their childhood and adolescent experiences. Moreover, they have consistently exploited elements and tropes of the Bildungsroman genre throughout their careers in order to explore the inner world of young Chinese people in a time of political and social turmoil. In doing this, they have embarked upon a specific kind of creative activity that embodies a specific sense of experience and vision, while serving as a bridge between each author’s personal coming-of-age experience and his fictional world.

CHAPTER THREE

FALLEN YOUTH: A SOLITARY OUTCAST

Figure 1. Su Tong in Shanghai, July 2010 (Courtesy of the author)

While J. D. Salinger lived a reclusive life in his New Hampshire home in the 1980s, a poor young Chinese man who was living in obscurity and yet thirsty for literary fame and success was painstakingly writing a series of short stories in a cramped apartment in Nanjing. Influenced by Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Nine Stories (1953), this young man would later become one of the most prolific and renowned writers in contemporary China. His name was Su Tong. Enchanted and inspired by Salinger’s teenage colloquial speech and sentimental adolescent perspective, Su Tong wrote his Toon Street

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Series fiction. This includes ten coming-of-age short stories, (“Memories of Mulberry Garden,” “An Afternoon Incident,” “The Sad Dance,” “Roller Skating Away,” and others) and the Bildungsroman novel North Side Story. Written between 1984 and 1994, the series set out to explore a group of street teens’ coming-of-age experiences during the Cultural Revolution.1 In these stories, Su Tong captures the cultural and geographical ambience of Suzhou, a city he knew intimately, by setting the narratives on the fictional Toon Street in an unnamed southern city. Toon Street was modeled after the street on which Su Tong himself grew up. Most importantly, he relates how a group of teenaged school drop-outs struggle blindly and in vain to assert their individuality and find meaning in a society where revolutionary collectivism has overwhelmed people’s lives while leaving no space for individualist idealism, and where effective adult mentors are absent. After writing a series of works in such genres as the family saga, neohistorical stories, and stories about women and urbanites, in 2009 Su Tong returned to the coming-of-age subject again and published another Bildungsroman novel The Boat to Redemption with a lot of motifs evident in his previous “Tong Street Series.”2 In earlier Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo, the young protagonists demonstrate a trajectory from rebellious modern students, to progressive new youth, to radical revolutionary youth, and finally to tamed socialist youth. This trajectory more or less conforms to the historical course of twentieth-century China. However, the teenagers in Su Tong’s narratives are doomed fallen youth in a country that often appears to be on the verge of falling off of an historical cliff. In this chapter, Su Tong’s coming-of-age narratives will be examined in great detail in order to illustrate how he presents the psychological and spiritual course of youth during the chaotic era of the Cultural Revolution— particularly the autonomy and subjectivity that the dissatisfied and rebellious youth often assert, along with the failure of youth to achieve maturity while coming of age in an anti-individualistic society that lacks good role models. These elements turn Su Tong’s coming-of-age narratives into a sly parody of both earlier Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo

1 Su Tong, “Xunzhao dengsheng” [Groping for the lamp switch], in Zhishang meinü [Beauty on paper] (Taibei: Maitian chuban gufen youxian gongsi, 2000), 140. 2 Su Tong, He’an [The Boat to Redemption] rev. (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2010). For the English edition see Su Tong, The Boat to Redemption, trans. Howard Goldblatt (London: Doubleday, 2010).

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in which the young protagonist’s individuality and subjectivity finally come to terms with a collectivist and revolutionary career, as well as the classical European Bildungsroman, which concludes with the young protagonist developing into a mature member of society, with his or her own perspective and greater self-knowledge. I will start with Su Tong’s first coming-of-age short story “Memories of Mulberry Garden,” which the author regards as his first truly literary work of fiction. As indicated earlier, Su Tong admits that he was greatly inspired by the works of the American writer J. D. Salinger and hence wrote the Toon Street Series. Su Tong says that what really touched him were Salinger’s use of teenagers’ colloquial language and Salinger’s concerns about the particular problems faced by the teenagers. Su Tong said that the coming-of-age narratives he had read before were such translated Russian stories as The Story of Zoya and Shura and Nikolai Ostrovsky’s (1904–1936) How the Steel Was Tempered. In these stories, revolutionary discourse overshadows the young heroes’ personal problems, and their individuality and subjectivity are developed only to the extent of meeting the all-important needs of the sacrosanct revolution. In contrast, Salinger’s stories provide a fresh revelation to Su Tong of a world full of helpless and lost teenagers who gropingly explore the outside world and assert their individuality and subjectivity when positive adult role models and guidance are absent. At the outset of his creative writing career, Su Tong had been consciously searching for an appropriate tone and language style for his stories. After reading Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Nine Stories, he almost instinctively came to write in a style close to Salinger’s, though he tried to avoid producing a mechanical imitation.3 One fall afternoon in 1984, Su Tong wrote a short story, “Memories of Mulberry Garden,” which was not published in the journal Beijing Literature until 1987. Su Tong sees this story as a sort of milestone, not because it was a success, but because it was a significant step on his path of creative writing. J. D. Salinger’s influence on this story can be traced from the story’s casual tone, first-person adolescent narrator, extensive utilization of slang, and loosely organized plot. In addition, this story carried within it the motifs that would be found in his later short narratives, such as a narrow old street in southern

3 Lin Zhou, “Yongyuan de xunzhao: Su Tong tanfang lu” [Everlasting pursuit: an interview of Su Tong], Huacheng, 1996, no. 1:105.

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China (Su Tong later named it Toon Street); a crowd of restless southern adolescents; agitated sentiments; premonitions of bloody odors on a dark street; young lives conceived and festering in damp air and on slab stone roads. Beginning with “Memories of Mulberry Garden,” Su Tong captured the narratives of his childhood acquaintances and their vacillating state of mind.4 More importantly, the story contains some thematic concerns that appear in his later coming-of-age narratives, such as the autonomy and subjectivity asserted by rebellious youth; precocious love; troubled and violent sexuality; death of the young hero at the threshold of adulthood; and the image of the adult “catcher in the rye.” “Memories of Mulberry Garden” is a fifteen-year-old boy’s record of a few fragmentary observations and experiences during a summer. There are five characters in the story: the first-person narrator, two other boys named Xiaodi (Brother Xiao) and Maotou (Hairy Head) and two girls named Danyu (Crimson Jade) and Xinxin (Pungent). The story starts with a scene in which the narrator runs into Brother Xiao and Hairy Head on his way to a public bathhouse. Afraid of being bullied by Brother Xiao, the narrator agrees to help him deliver romantic messages to Crimson Jade and then to stand guard while the couple engages in a series of trysts. Over time, Brother Xiao forces Crimson Jade to have three abortions. Finally, however, the narrator takes revenge for his humiliation by vanquishing Brother Xiao in a fistfight, causing Crimson Jade to leave him. The narrator does not see her again until she is found dead together with Hairy Head in a bamboo grove. No one knows how or why they died, but their friends memorialize them by carving their names on a stone bridge. In this story, Su Tong does not make the events in the plot add up to a clear pattern for the reader. Perhaps from the perspective of a fifteen-yearold boy, this world is too full of mystery to be portrayed as readily comprehensible. Most of the story is about the affair between Crimson Jade and Brother Xiao, and does not mention anything about the love between Crimson Jade and Hairy Head. However, there are still some clues. For example, when Brother Xiao praises Crimson Jade’s apparent fearlessness in enduring three abortions, he says: “That girl is really some-

4 Su Tong, “Shaonian xue zixu” [Author’s preface to Young Blood], in Zhishang meinü, 144.

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thing. I eavesdropped outside of the door [of the operating room], but didn’t hear her cry at all.” Hairy Head responded, “Crimson Jade is finished. She will have trouble giving birth in the future.”5 Another clue is that Hairy Head says that if he likes a woman, he will nip at her face and leave bite marks. He does precisely that when leaving bite marks on Crimson Jade’s face. Su Tong sets up Hairy Head as a foil to Brother Xiao. Brother Xiao is crude and impetuous, and essentially selfish and cowardly. Hairy Head is kind-hearted, sensible, and sensitive. When Brother Xiao uses his strength to bully the narrator to deliver a message to Crimson Jade, Hairy Head kindly helps the narrator. When Brother Xiao alleges that the narrator must be Crimson Jade’s younger brother because he has her eyes, Hairy Head defends Crimson Jade, saying that she is the only child in the family. When Brother Xiao brags about making Crimson Jade pregnant three times, Hairy Head is worried about her wellbeing. Finally, after Crimson Jade leaves Brother Xiao, she and Hairy Head perish together. The image of Crimson Jade is mysterious and full of contradictions. Su Tong deliberately depicts her as the type of independentminded and sexually active girl whom the public usually blames for sexual excesses in society. She is shy, quiet, and very feminine, but also seductive, bold, and courageous. She never shouts or cries, but she uses her black eyes with dark semi-circles beneath them to express her disagreement and anger when wronged. During the day, she shuts herself away in a mysterious mulberry garden filled with elm and osmanthus trees and gloomy houses, but secretly meets Brother Xiao at night in her boudoir. She is so shy that she always walks close to the wall, but when dancing, she rubs her long legs against the boys’ “sensitive part.” She stays with Brother Xiao even though he forces her into three abortions, but immediately leaves him after the narrator defeats him in a fight. The similar image of young woman will be found in Su Tong’s later Bildungsroman novels North Side Story and The Boat to Redemption. Su Tong’s poetic treatment of death of the young couple is in sharp contrast to the cruel, ghastly, and sometimes decadent image of death in his other narratives such as Rice, “An Opium Family,” and “The Nineteen Thirty-four Escape.” At the end of “Memories of Mulberry

5 Su Tong, “Sangyuan liunian,” in Shaonian xue [Young blood] (Nanjing: Jiangsu wenyi chubanshe, 1995), 274.

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Garden,” death seems to be a quiet, warm, and lyrical closing ceremony of the young couple’s lives. In the deep and serene bamboo grove, the exquisite and composed girl, Crimson Jade, with a clear circle of tooth-marks on her face, dies in Hairy Head’s arms. Neither before nor after presenting this scene does Su Tong tell the reader anything about when, why, or how this young couple has died. He simply presents this tableau to the reader, then casually says: “I didn’t expect them to die in this way. I felt there must have been a ‘mistake’ around this incident. Why did they want to die? They shouldn’t have been afraid of anyone, because there was no need to be afraid. Maybe they were just afraid of this ‘mistake.’”6 In saying this, Su Tong is not pretentiously mystifying the reader. The young couple could have died for any number of reasons; maybe it was just an accident, or possibly a foolish double love suicide, or perhaps even a double homicide. Su Tong’s interest is not in disclosing the details relating to the deaths, but to evoke a poetic tableau of the couple’s death. In traditional Chinese culture, bamboo groves are nearly always associated with lofty, cultivated, and reclusive literati, as with the famous “Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove.”7 In this story, however, Su Tong uses the bamboo grove as the backdrop for the death of two teenagers in order to highlight their innocence and transcendence. After their deaths, friends carve the names of Crimson Jade and Hairy Head on the stone bridge. The bridge thus becomes a monument to their love. The scene also reminds the reader of the ending of Shen Congwen’s bizarre story, “One Woman and Three Men,” in which the proprietor of a tofu shop embraces the dead body of his lover in a cave surrounded by flowers. In addition, Su Tong’s poetic treatment of the young lovers’ death is also a sign of his approval of their “premature love,” thereby breaking the age-old code of female chastity. This, in turn, contradicts the CCP’s discourse of orthodox revolutionary love. The sociologist Bόrge Bakken interprets the teenagers’ “premature love” as “a sign of egoism in which they distance themselves from society and reject collective

6

Ibid., 276. “Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove” (zhulin qi xian) refers to seven famous literati— Ruan Ji, Ji Kang, Shan Tao, Liu Ling, Ruan Xian, Xiang Xiu, and Wang Rong—in the Jin dynasty (265–420). 7

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and exemplary norms.”8 In this vein, the image of Crimson Jade and the autonomy she exerts in choosing a boyfriend demonstrates that youthful subjectivity cannot be fully suppressed even in such a highly coercive era as the Cultural Revolution, in which “the repression of personal feeling and sexuality corresponds to the myth of Mao’s nation building.”9 Some critics have tried to relate the teenage protagonists in Su Tong’s narratives to the image of “the catcher in the rye” in Salinger’s story, because these critics are inspired by Holden Caulfield’s vision: I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going. I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all.10

Su Tong does create images of “catchers” in his narratives, but they are not teenagers. The catchers in Su Tong’s coming-of-age narratives are all marginalized adults. In “Memories of Mulberry Garden,” the image of the catcher seems not yet fully developed. However, if the reader examines the story carefully, he may notice Xinxin’s grandfather, who appears to be a prototype for the catcher in Su Tong’s later narratives: At that time, I thought I had won Xinxin. However, it seemed that she forgot everything after one night. She didn’t go to the stone stairs anymore. I had no way to contact her. Her grandpa was very good at martial arts. Somehow he got wind of this affair, and started to protect his granddaughter.11

Here, Grandpa is guarding only his own granddaughter, and he is a catcher for his own house only. In Su Tong’s later narratives, the image of the catcher becomes clearer and clearer, as it is developed in several prominent characters in “An Afternoon Incident,” “Roller Skating Away,” “The Sad Dance,” and North Side Story.

8 Bόrge Bakken, The Exemplary Society: Human Improvement, Social Control, and the Dangers of Modernity in China (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 363. 9 Liu, Revolution Plus Love, 23. 10 J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1951), 224. 11 Su, “Sangyuan liunian,” 273.

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Though Su Tong regards “Memories of Mulberry Garden” as his first truly literary story, he had written and published a few short stories before the writing of “Memories of Mulberry Garden.” Many of his stories were written when he was a college student at Beijing Normal University. 1980 witnessed a turning point in Su Tong’s life. Then seventeen years of age, he traveled north to Beijing to begin his university studies. Prior to that time, the furthest place he had ever ventured was Nanjing, merely a short train ride from Suzhou. Su Tong has stated on several occasions that his four years (1980–1984) at Beijing Normal University were significant to his later writing because they exposed him to a wider world.12 Many years later in his memoirs, Su Tong describes himself in his twenties as a crooked piece of wood; he could not tell what kind of tree he would grow into because he was so easily caught up in pursuits such as romance, politics, and culture. The frustrated young man was eager to present himself as a loner. He roamed the campus or the Beitaipingzhuang area in the vicinity of the university, trying to come up with abstract and sophisticated questions to ponder. He even secretly admired fellow students who evinced suicidal tendencies. When looking back on those days, Su Tong admits that he was not really a sophisticated person; his loner image did not last long, and he took up a simple physical activity instead—playing basketball. Su Tong says that he benefited greatly from the university’s strict curriculum. He spent most of his spare time reading fiction and literary magazines, and sometimes tried his hand at creative writing. By the time of his graduation in 1984, he had published five stories in some obscure literary journals. His debut work was a short story entitled, “The Eighth Is a Bronze Statue” (Dibage shi tongxiang), which he says “followed the formulaic writing of the time: ‘reform plus romance.’ ”13 The story describes how a young man returning home from his reeducation in the countryside strives to reform the factory where he works, ultimately saving it from going bankrupt. Even though Su Tong feels ashamed to include any of his five earliest stories in any of his

12 In an interview on the TV program “Dongfang shikong” [Oriental time] of CCTV, Su Tong reminisced about his university years in Beijing. This interview was recorded by Wang Haiyan in “Su Tong Lun” [On Su Tong], Anqing shifan xueyuan xuebao, 1994, no. 4:80–85. 13 Su Tong, “Nian fu yi nian” [One year after another], in Shi yi ji [Eleven beats] (Taibei: Maitian chuban youxian gongsi, 1994), 179.

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collections, he still cherishes them. These early publications gave him the confidence and courage he needed to continue moving forward with his writing career. At the age of twenty-two, the young writer left Beijing for Nanjing with a Bachelor of Arts in hand. He was assigned to work as a counselor in an art academy where most of the students were older than he was. He soon grew bored with his daily routine of distributing stipends to students and coordinating the periodic cleaning of the school by its students. The only business trip he made was to help the school investigate a certain female student’s indiscreet private life. In contrast with his tedious routine at the office, his life after work was exhilarating. He made new friends among amateur writers and editors. He was excited about these connections with literary circles. He told himself: “Oh, they will appreciate me soon . . . They have started to talk about my works.”14 He devoted most of his spare time to writing stories while smoking inferior tobacco in his dorm. He wrote several stories and sent them to different editors in hopes of being appreciated. “Memories of Mulberry Garden” was written during this period of time, but was not published until 1987. He referred to himself as a tougao jiqi (manuscript submission machine) that ran without stop. He also compared himself to Martin Eden, the protagonist in the autobiographical fiction of Jack London (the pen name of John Griffith, 1876–1916), and said he was even keener than Eden to become a recognized writer. In 1985, Su Tong left the art academy and began work as an editor for the influential literary journal Zhongshan. He describes his work and life there as full of sunshine. The people he met every day were all involved in literary pursuits. However, the stories he wrote were still “like domesticated pigeons that always flew back to his desk.”15 This string of rejections of his manuscripts depressed the young writer. Finally, in the second half of 1986, one of his short stories was published by October, one of China’s most prestigious literary journals. Two months later, another of his stories was published by the prominent literary journal Harvest. He became more ambitious and felt that he was at last succeeding as a writer of fiction.16

14 15 16

Ibid., 182. Ibid. Ibid., 183.

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February 1987 was a lucky month for Su Tong. Three literary journals, Shanghai Literature, Beijing Literature, and PLA Literature and Art simultaneously published his stories in their February issues. From then on, the previous stories rejected by the publishers all found their destinations in different literary journals. In Su Tong’s words, God started to bless him, “this miserable boy tortured by literature.”17 In the same year, his first novella, “The Nineteen Thirty-four Escape” was published in Harvest. Since then, this journal has devoted many pages to Su Tong’s stories. Exactly like the fictional character Martin Eden, whose old, unappreciated works were published after he became famous, many of Su Tong’s stories were printed in 1988, though most of them were written before 1986. Literary critics started to pay attention. Su Tong describes his complex feelings when reading critics’ comments and reviews: “I secretly read these pieces of literary criticism with bated breath, but I tell my friends that I never read critics’ articles. I have my own business, and they have theirs.”18 Since 1988, Su Tong’s writing and publishing have enjoyed regular success. He is hardworking and prolific, and has always consciously explored diverse themes and styles. Su Tong does not think it is good for a writer to stick to one particular writing style because it will cause a crisis in his writing. Finding himself trapped in a particular style or formula, he will become preoccupied with ways to get out of this trap in order to develop and enrich his writing. Su Tong suggests that a writer should have the courage to constantly say goodbye to his old works and surpass his old styles. A writer should have the courage to enter every door and explore every dark place in the labyrinth of fiction.19 He hopes that his next story will always be different from his previous stories. Su Tong says that his obsession with fiction is neither innate nor cultivated, but a grace given from above that will let an ignorant person like him have at least some sort of “outstanding” feature.20 “Fiction,” he says, “is like a huge labyrinth in which my fellow writers and I grope. It seems all our effort is devoted towards finding a lamp switch

17 18 19 20

Ibid., 184. Ibid. Su, “Xunzhao dengsheng,” 142. Su, “Nian fu yi nian,” 174.

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and hope for the splendid brightness to instantaneously lighten up our fiction and our whole life.”21 In his autobiographical piece, “One Year after Another” (Nian fu yi nian), Su Tong describes himself as a reserved, withdrawn, timid, and incompetent person who has always indulged in some “worldly and paltry” hobbies, such as playing majiang, reading popular magazines, and looking for trendy clothing. He says he cannot live without these “secular” things because he fears that anything more sophisticated would drain away the energy and mental clarity he has reserved for writing fiction.22 This may be Su Tong’s way of differentiating himself from the stereotypical image of the serious Chinese writer as built up and sanctioned by the CCP. Su Tong emphasizes that the novel should have a soul. It should attain a certain state of austerity and emptiness, of bizarre abstruseness, or of philosophy or humanity. It is pointless to distinguish which state or realm is morally low or high; all such realms contribute to the soul of the novel. Unfortunately, he says, many stories do not achieve this kind of state; instead, since the author’s soul is not involved in writing, the resulting writings are little more than a false shell. Su Tong describes this soullessness as a tragedy.23 He says: Fiction is a reflection of a writer’s soul. You inject part of your soul into your writing; hence, the writing contains part of your life. You imprint special marks on your work by arranging every single detail and sentence in your own way. Then you build the house of fiction based on your own aesthetic standard. All this requires the loner’s courage and wisdom. You sit in this newly finished house with loneliness and pride, while readers visit it with curiosity. I think this should be the effect of fiction.24

For Su Tong, a writer does not need to take any responsibility for enlightening, saving, or educating readers. A reader’s drive to satisfy his or her curiosity is much closer to Su Tong’s sense of what literature aims at, much more so than the reader’s thirst for education or enlightenment. Furthermore, Su Tong believes that loneliness is something that everyone has to live with and struggle against throughout his or her whole life.

21

Su, “Xunzhao dengsheng,” 141. Su, “Nian fu yi nian,” 173. 23 Su Tong, “Xiangdao shenme shuo shenme” [Say whatever I can think of], in Zhishang meinü, 133. 24 Su Tong, “Xiaoshuojia yan” [Writer’s words], Renmin wenxue, 1989, no. 3:100. 22

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By 2010, Su Tong had published seven full-length novels: Rice, My Life as Emperor, Empress Dowager Wu Zetian, North Side Story, Why Would the Snake Fly? (She weishenme hui fei?, 2002), Binu and the Great Wall and The Boat to Redemption, as well as several dozen collections of novellas and short stories. These were published not only in mainland China, but also in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Su Tong’s narrative works can be grouped into four categories: neo-historical stories, stories examining the lives of women, coming-of-age stories, and stories about modern Chinese urbanites.25 The neo-historical stories include full-length novels—My Life as Emperor, Empress Dowager Wu Zetian, and Binu and the Great Wall, the Maple-Poplar Village Series of novellas and some short stories. Su Tong has compared My Life as Emperor and Empress Dowager Wu Zetian to two palaces, representing two kinds of history. My Life as Emperor is a palace built as the architect pleases, a historical story “blended with his own recipe.”26 The time of the story is not clear, and the characters are visionary. An unlikely boy protagonist becomes an emperor, and subsequently a vaudeville street performer. Su Tong is obsessed with the tortuous fate of his character, reflecting his continual shock at the impermanence of life and the mercilessness of history. In contrast, Empress Dowager Wu Zetian is a conventional historical story in which Su Tong narrates the real life of Empress Dowager Wu Zetian without exaggerating her desires and ambitions both as a woman and as a power holder. According to Su Tong, this story does not go beyond the reader’s expectations or overstep existing historical records.27 Su Tong regards Binu and the Great Wall as an extension and elaboration of his neo-historical fiction rather than a new departure from his previous works. He compares Binu and the Great Wall with My Life as Emperor.28 He indicates that both works are full of imagination

25

Chinese critics have discussed these categories in their writings. The critics include: Wang Haiyan, “Su Tong Lun,” Anqing shifan xueyuan xuebao, 1994, no. 4:80–85; Zhang Yingzhong, “Shiji mo de huimou” [A Review at the end of the century], Xiandai wenxue zazhi, 1994, no. 5:30–33; Huang Jinfu, “Chuzou yu fanhui: Su Tong xiaoshuo jianlun” [Leaving and returning: a brief discussion of Su Tong’s stories], Zhejiang shida xuebao, 1994, no. 3:45–47. 26 Su Tong, “Zixu qizhong” [Seven of my author’s prefaces], in Zhishang meinü, 149–150. 27 Ibid., 150. 28 Su Tong, Binu [Binu and the Great Wall] (Chongqing: Chongqing chubanshe, 2006). For the English edition, see Binu and the Great Wall, trans. Howard Goldblatt (New York, NY: Cannongate, 2008).

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and fantasy, but Binu and the Great Wall is better developed in terms of characterization. When he wrote My Life as Emperor, he admitted that he was so keen on the legendary implication of the story—the emperor is destined to become a street performer—that the main characters somehow come across as over-conceptualized. Compared with the protagonist Duanbai in My Life as Emperor, the female protagonist Binu is much more tangible and substantial.29 Binu and the Great Wall is a rewriting of the story of legendary Mengjiangnü, a woman renamed as Binu. She has gone through all kinds of hardships to look for her husband who was conscripted to build the Great Wall. Su Tong incorporates a lot of mythical characteristics in his rewriting and uses the Great Wall and tears as metaphors to engage his political and social criticism of contemporary China. It mirrors various social and political problems in contemporary China, and transmits a cautionary message: the seemingly softest and weakest thing can beat the mightiest tyranny, just as one widow’s tears can bring about the collapse of a section of the Great Wall. The stories in the Maple-Poplar Village Series can also be regarded as historical fiction. Su Tong invented the village of Maple-Poplar Village to represent his hometown and to describe his great grandparents’ life in the Republican era. This same village appears in stories such as “The Nineteen Thirty-four Escape,” “Flying over Maple-Poplar Village” (Feiyue wo de fengyangshu guxiang), “Opium Family” (Yingsu zhijia) and Rice. Literary critics often regard the series as a sign of Su Tong’s spiritual nostalgia for his hometown. The author himself agrees. In the Maple-Poplar Village Series, Su Tong tries to capture the shadows of his ancestors and assemble the fragments of their stories. He says that he enjoys the process of “taking the pulse of his ancestors and hometown,” by which he has seen where he comes from and where he will henceforth go. He agrees that these stories are his “spiritual return home.”30 He also admits that by using the same fictional MaplePoplar Village as the setting for a number of different stories, he is

29

Su Tong, “Su Tong tibi xie mengjiang” (Su Tong takes up his pen to write about Mengjiang,” http://www.amazon.cn/static3/lll_060817_bk_bn.asp/168-91852380337869?uri=lll_060817_bk_bn&uid=168-9185238-0337869 (Accessed June 12, 2010). 30 Su, “Zixu qizhong,” 145.

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borrowing an insight from William Faulkner’s (1897–1962) treatment of Yoknapatawpha as a symbolic hometown.31 In his stories about Chinese women, Su Tong creates diverse images of women, such as the wives and concubines of a wealthy polygamous household in “A Bevy of Wives and Concubines” (Qiqie chengqun), spinsters in “Embroidery,” and prostitutes in “Blush.” The critic Miao Lü has identified the loneliness and the pain of unrequited love revealed in these stories as an influence Su Tong received from the American female writer Carson McCullers (1917–1967), especially in her novella The Ballad of the Sad Café.32 “A Bevy of Wives and Concubines” is a significant work, which brought Su Tong national fame after the talented Chinese film director Zhang Yimou adapted it into a movie entitled “Raise the Red Lantern.” Su Tong’s initial motivation to write this story was to try something new. He wanted to write a more conventional, classical, Chineseflavored story in order to test his writing ability. He chose a clichéd topic in classical Chinese stories: the often pitiful fate of wives and concubines in a wealthy traditional Chinese family. He never denies that his success derives from the influence of such classic novels as A Dream of Red Mansions (Honglou meng), The Golden Lotus (Jin ping mei), and modern novels such as Family (Jia), Spring (Chun) and Autumn (Qiu). Su Tong calls “A Bevy of Wives and Concubines” pure fiction because he has never known anyone like the story’s protagonists, Songlian and Chen Zuoqian. What he has is an unusual passion for the past.33 After “A Bevy of Wives and Concubines,” he wrote other stories about women, such as “Embroidery” and “Blush.” The third category is Su Tong’s coming-of-age narratives, in which he reproduces childhood adventures—his own and that of his teenage friends—against the backdrop of the fictional Toon Street. The series includes a full-length novel, North Side Story, and more than ten short stories in a collection titled Young Blood (Shaonian xue). His latest novel The Boat to Redemption is also a coming-of-age novel, which won him The Man Asian Literary Prize in 2010.

31

Ibid. Miao Lü, “Xiang Sailinge zhijing: Sailinge yu Su Tong shaonian xiaoshuo bijiao” [Salute to Salinger: the comparison between Salinger’s and Su Tong’s coming-of-age stories], Baicheng shifan xueyuan xuebao 20, no. 2 (February 2006): 64. 33 Su, “zixu qizhong,” 147. 32

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In the fourth category of his works, Su Tong sometimes attempts a more realistic style to portray the ordinary lives of contemporary urban Chinese. These stories include Why Would the Snake Fly?, “A Guide to Divorce” (Lihun zhinan), “The People’s Fish” (Renmin de yu), and “White Snow and a Pig’s Head” (Baixue zhutou). In the postscript to Why Would the Snake Fly?, Su Tong quotes Lu Xun’s lament that he “was directly facing a bleak and dismal life.”34 This aptly describes the struggle of those who lived near the railway station—a symbol of the bottom of the social ladder—on the eve of New Millennium.35 The adult characters in this novel were those teenagers who grew up in Tong Street. This categorization of Su Tong’s narratives is not intended to summarize or exhaust the limits of his writing, but it helps illuminate Su Tong’s diverse content and style, and demonstrate his constant effort to surpass his own abilities. His critics and his literary contemporaries unanimously concur that Su Tong is an accomplished storyteller. Wang Anyi, a writer from Shanghai, even worries that Su Tong may be so obsessed with telling a dramatic story that he could “degenerate” into a popular story writer.36 Wang’s concern reveals her somewhat narrow understanding of the nature of literature and her prejudice against popular literature, yet it also indicates a recognition among some of Su Tong’s fellow writers of his story-telling talents. Wang’s worry is unnecessary because Su Tong’s dramatic narratives still use lyrical language and employ diverse literary techniques. This study focuses on the third category of Su Tong’s writing— coming-of-age narratives. Coming-of-age has been a constant theme in Su Tong’s narratives during different periods of his career. Even in the works other than the Toon Street Series and The Boat to Redemption, we can also detect the thematic concern of young people’s experiences while growing up. For example, My Life as an Emperor is in essence about a young man’s search for identity and vocation from an emperor to a street performer. It reveals the development of the protagonist Duanbai’s self-recognition and autonomy, and his social

34 Lu Xun, “Jinian Liu Hezhen jun” [In memory of Ms. Liu Hezhen], Yusi 74 (April 2, 1926). 35 Su Tong, postscript to She weishenme hui fei? [Why would the snake fly?] (Taibei: Yifang chuban youxian gongsi, 2002). 36 Wang Anyi, “Women zai zuo shenme?” [What are we doing?], Wenxue ziyoutan, 1993, no.4:27–32.

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integration. Binu and the Great Wall, an allegorical story with ubiquitously implicit political and social criticism, can also be read as a record of a young woman’s growing-up experiences through the journey of her search for her husband. Binu undergoes a transformation from a young woman with the modest initial intention of presenting her husband with some warm winter clothing to a heroine who rebels against social injustice by using her tears to bring about the collapse of a section of the Great Wall. Her individuality, self-identity and autonomy are gradually formed during the process of witnessing various social problems and experiencing various types of mistreatment along the journey. In addition, the subject matter in some of Su Tong’s urban stories also focus on youth—particularly their conflict with the outside world and their constant reconstructions of self-identity in metropolitan space.37 Su Tong’s preoccupation with youth is partly a projection of the author’s own childhood and adolescent experiences, as well as a reflection of his vision of coming-of-age of Chinese youth in the 1970s. Almost every story in the Toon Street Series bears the shadow of his childhood. Observing the course that the young Su Tong followed will help us understand the social space in which he wrote and thus equip us to analyze the teenage characters through whom he projects himself. It will also help us understand the generative formula underlying his Toon Street series. Su Tong was born into a family of very modest means in the city of Suzhou on January 23, 1963. His father, a clerk in a government office, and his mother, a worker in a cement factory, named their son Tong Zhonggui, which means “golden mean” and “honor”—the wishes of traditional Chinese parents for their child’s life. The pen name Su Tong, according to the author himself, simply means a child from Suzhou. In his essay “Casual Talks on the Past” (Guoqu suitan), Su Tong writes that whenever he thinks of the past, the first thing that comes to his mind is the hundred year-old street in the northern part of Suzhou where he lived. The long and narrow stone slab street was a light rustyred in the scorching heat of July and ash grey in the freezing January winters. It took him about ten minutes to walk from the south end to 37

Examples of Su Tong’s urban stories about youth that are “Nihao, yang feng ren” (“Hello, my beekeeper”), and “Jing zhong nanhai” (“The boy in the well”). For detailed discussion of the story “Hello, My Beekeeper,” see Tang, “Residual Modernism: Narrative of the Self in Contemporary Chinese Fiction,” 23.

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the north end of the street. There was an elevated bridge on each end of the street, and an overhead railway spanned the middle. The shabby houses, shops, schools, and factories of the neighborhood were mostly very crowded, so the local people spent much of their time outdoors in the areas between the bridges.38 Su Tong’s family lived across from a chemical factory. By his own account, he always stood in front of his house and watched the factory employees going to and from work because he had nothing else to do.39 Later, this chemical factory, its obnoxious and odorous emissions, and its tall chimneys became part of Su Tong’s nostalgia for the past and repeatedly appeared in his coming-of-age narratives. Su Tong describes his childhood as “a little bit lonely, and laden with anxiety.”40 He cannot recall such things as fairy tales, candies, games, or loving attention from his parents. Instead, what he remembers is poverty and hardship. His parents had almost nothing to their name except four children. Each workday, his father rode a dilapidated bicycle to work. His mother walked to the nearby cement factory carrying a basket that contained a lunch of leftovers from the previous night or just plain rice, and unfinished cotton shoes that she was sewing for her children. Her household obligations were so onerous that she had to use her tea break at work to make shoes and sew for her family. Her beautiful face was always strained from exhaustion and illness. Su Tong and his family lived on a total of eighty yuan per month. They would sit around the dinner table with a pot of cabbage and pork soup as their main dish. A dim bulb shone over the damp brick floor and moldy furniture. Su Tong recalls one time his mother lost five yuan on her way to buy groceries, and desperately burst into tears after fruitless searching. At the age of seven or eight, the sensible son comforted his mother by telling her, “Don’t cry. I will make one hundred yuan for you when I grow up.”41 As a precocious but introverted boy, Su Tong seldom participated in his friends’ games. Frequently at dusk he stood under the eaves and gawked at the busy street and hasty pedestrians. Usually, at such moments, his parents would be arguing in the house while his sisters

38

Su Tong, “Guoqu suitan” [Casual talk on the past], in Zhishang meinü, 42. Su Tong, “Tongnian de yixie shi” [Some anecdotes of my childhood], in Zhishang meinü, 37. 40 Su, “Guoqu suitan,” 43. 41 Ibid. 39

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wept behind the door. His heart was full of bitterness. He could not figure out why his parents quarreled so much, for his neighbors seemed to be at peace. The notorious Cultural Revolution darkened Su Tong’s childhood. He describes his impression of the movement thus: My impression of wudou [factional fighting] is of a barrage of gunfire . . . At night, people fired their guns from the tops of kilns, and bullets pierced through our back door . . . At midnight, my mom wrapped me in a cotton quilt and brought me to my grandma’s room, where it was safer.42

Su Tong writes that he obtained his preschool education on the street. There he learned his first complete written sentences. The walls were full of posters and slogans that every child could recite. Even the most dimwitted child could write wansui (long live) and dadao (down with).43 The ink on these posters lasted for years. Ironically, a number of cadres who had been overthrown became prestigious officials again several years later. Su Tong recalls: [During the Cultural Revolution,] a skinny middle-aged woman often walked around with a paperboard hanging from her neck. Now when I visit my hometown, I still encounter her once in a while, and the heavy word of “history” immediately flashes through my mind.44

At the age of six, Su Tong enrolled at an elementary school that occupied the grounds of a former Christian church. Its chapel had been converted to the school auditorium, where all kinds of political denunciation sessions and rallies were held. The European-style building with its colorfully decorated arched windows was still the most beautiful edifice on the street. Su Tong’s first teacher was a gentle lady with grey hair who taught him for three years. Su Tong said she was the most admirable teacher because she always wore a kind smile, which was a rarity during that chaotic era.45 In the second grade, Su Tong became critically ill with nephritis and a blood disease. He recalls that during his illness his mother often cried, and his father regularly conveyed him on his bicycle to see a traditional Chinese medical doctor. For about half a year, he spent

42 43 44 45

Su, “Nian fu yi nian,” 175. Su, “Guoqu suitan,” 45. Su, “Nian fu yi nian,” 175. Su, “Guoqu suitan,” 45.

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most of his time lying on a bamboo bed and boiling herbal medicine for himself. The neighbors all praised him as a well-behaved child, but according to Su Tong, this obedience was the result of a threat of death. He was too young to realize it, but the sickness that reduced him nearly to the point of death turned out to be an elevating spiritual experience, lifting his whole being to a higher plane. During that period, his only diversion was reading stories that his sister borrowed from a library. Su Tong counts these stories as his earliest literary awakening.46 The above-mentioned illness and temporary withdrawal from school made the boy feel lost. He dreamed of his school, classroom, sports field, as well as his classmates, all of whom lived on the same street. Everyone knew each other’s family and life stories. Su Tong never concealed the fact that the southern teenagers in his coming-of-age narratives were all modeled on these childhood friends and classmates.47 With the Cultural Revolution as the historical background, and with the fictional Toon Street in the northern part of Suzhou city as the geographical setting, Su Tong tries to demonstrate that in an abnormal era, adolescents can never properly achieve maturity and enter adulthood. The mood of these narratives is casual and adolescent. Su Tong points out that his coming-of-age narratives are exceptionally significant to him even though very few critics have paid attention to them. “The reminiscences of my childhood are remote but clear,” he writes. “Retrieving my memories from where they have fallen gives me an illusion of coming back.”48 Writing these coming-of-age narratives has been different from writing his other stories. Su Tong uses two words to describe his feeling of writing the Toon Street Series: dear and trustful. Writing about his childhood and teenage experience is like “smelling his own socks,” reexperiencing his unique aura from the past.49 The whole writing process is closely related to his memories about the past. Su Tong was in his twenties and early thirties when writing the Toon Street Series. He confirms that these narratives helped him to develop a clearer recognition of his own coming-of-age, and hence helped him become more mature. He entrusts all his past memories to the young protagonists in

46

Su, “Nian fu yi nian,” 176. Su, “Guoqu suitan,” 46. 48 Ibid., 44. 49 Su Tong made these statements during Hua Li’s interview with Su Tong in Shanghai on July 12, 2010. 47

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his narratives. Through recalling and fictionalizing his friends’ and his own childhood and teenage realities, he analyzes the sensitivity, vulnerability and the wildest fantasies that he and his friends had experienced and refused to admit at that time. Su Tong said a successful coming-of-age story should provide the author with a lens to observe his own growth. Behind his coming-of-age narratives, there is always a pair of peeping eyes. These are the eyes of Su Tong as an adult. This adult perspective keeps adjusting his memories about childhood and the teenaged world. Su Tong emphasizes that it felt very natural to use hyperbole, exaggeration, and other techniques to transform these memories into his fiction because he trusts his memories. Su Tong confirms that this trustful feeling motivates him to write the Toon Street Series and other coming-of-age narratives. During these years, the Bildungsroman structure with tragic and parodistic elements has become a recurrent pattern in his narratives. Therefore, it is indispensable to study Su Tong’s coming-of-age short stories and Bildungsroman novels in detail in order to have a better understanding of the author’s works. Coming of Age in the Toon Street Series After completing “Memories of Mulberry Garden,” Su Tong wrote a series of other short stories based on his experiences of childhood and adolescence. These stories were compiled in the collection of Young Blood. In the following paragraphs, I will discuss three of Su Tong’s coming-of-age short stories from this collection. As is the case with “Memories of Mulberry Garden,” these short stories gradually build up some motifs and thematic concerns that will become fully developed in his Bildungsroman novels North Side Story and The Boat to Redemption. Through my analyses of Su Tong’s short coming-of-age stories and Bildungsroman novels, I will delineate the social structure in which collectivity and individuality are portrayed as two poles along a continuum, while a non-exemplary adult community parallels an autonomous adolescent community. In “An Afternoon Incident,” the first-person narrator—a high school boy—records a murder that he has witnessed. Huozi (Harelip), the narrator’s classmate, is regarded as a hero because of his harelip, his giant physique, and his bravery. The narrator is obsessed with Harelip’s new hairstyle, a crew cut, and asks Harelip one afternoon to give him

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the same hairdo. The narrator plays truant that afternoon, but does not see Harelip. As he roams the street, a barber named Zhang stops him and promises to give him the style of hair cut he wants. Sitting in the barber’s chair, the narrator notices a young man standing on the stone bridge and waiting for someone. From the man’s appearance, the narrator figures out that it might be Qiuqi, a hooligan living in the southern part of the city. Qiuqi had been severely beaten by Harelip and his friends the summer before. As the narrator watches, his assumption is borne out as Harelip appears and is stabbed to death by Qiuqi. Later, on his way home, the narrator sees his younger sister, who points out that Zhang has not given him a crew cut like Harelip’s, but instead has merely shaved off all his hair. Shocked and saddened by Harelip’s death, the narrator takes his frustrations out on his sister. At the end of the story, the narrator says, “I will never forget that afternoon because it was the ugliest time in my entire life. I hope no one looks at me. May nobody in the world see my ugly appearance.”50 “An Afternoon Incident” is about juvenile delinquency, but also about the protective role of an adult “catcher.” In this story, the catcher is the barber Zhang, who forces the narrator to sit on a chair for his haircut even as the narrator witnesses a bloody murder on the bridge. Zhang will not let him intervene. The location of old Zhang’s shop is critical; it is by the ramp of the stone bridge, where Zhang can easily see what is happening on the bridge. The bridge is exactly where the teenagers on Toon Street regularly hang out. When there is no business, Zhang appears to doze off in his barber’s chair. In effect, though, he is sitting at the edge of Holden Caulfield’s “crazy cliff” and watching the teenagers. Zhang has known all these youths since they were born. When the narrator skips school and roams the street that afternoon, it is Zhang who stops him and promises to give him the same type of haircut as Harelip’s. He knows the potential danger for a teen roaming the street on a school day, especially when the teen is associating with someone like Harelip. Even though Zhang seems to be taking a nap when the narrator passes, he immediately opens his eyes and shouts: “Have a haircut, come on.”51 Even as the narrator hesitates, Zhang steers the narrator into his barber’s chair and says: “Just sit still. I can give you

50 51

Su Tong, “Wuhou gushi” [An afternoon incident], in Shaonian xue, 322. Ibid., 315.

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whatever hairdo you want.”52 Barber Zhang deliberately cuts the boy’s hair slowly because he knows what is probably going to occur on the bridge. He has observed a fellow standing on the bridge for two days, knowing he is not a local and that he is waiting to avenge himself. He probably knows that he cannot prevent what is going to happen, but he can save the young narrator by holding the boy down in his barber’s chair. Right after the murder happens, the boy wants to rush over to the bridge to take a close look. He shouts at Zhang, “Take your hands off me. Let me go and take a look.” Zhang yells: “You aren’t yet finished with your haircut; you can’t go.”53 Like eagle talons, Zhang’s hands grasp the boy’s head more and more tightly. Finally, after everyone has left the bridge, Zhang releases the narrator’s head from his grip, announcing that the haircut is finished and the boy can now go. At the end of story, the narrator discovers that Zhang has shaved his head clean instead of giving him the same type of haircut as Harelip’s. Another way that Zhang keeps the narrator away from the hooligans on the street is thus to differentiate the boy’s hair style from theirs. Among Su Tong’s narratives discussed in this book, “Roller Skating Away” deals directly with the theme of sexuality. “Roller Skating Away” records a day in the life of a Toon Street teenager. It reads like an account of a nightmare. The protagonist is a high school student. On the first day of the new semester, his younger brother breaks his roller skates. The narrator goes to look for his friend Cat Head to repair the roller skates, but aborts the repair plan after catching a glimpse of Cat Head masturbating in broad daylight. Shocked by what he has just seen, he is late for school. In class, he is required to recite a poem by Mao Zedong and is interrupted by the crying of his classmate Li Dongying, a plain-looking girl who is experiencing her first menstrual period. On the same day, he is expelled from the classroom and by chance observes the Party secretary and the school’s music teacher engaged in a furtive sexual encounter. Later, he witnesses a bloody scuffle at school and hurries back home. There, however, he encounters still more appalling incidents. The neighbor Xiao Meng’s beautiful but insane wife has tried to drown herself again, and this time, fed up with his wife’s demented behavior, Xiao Meng does not save her. At

52 53

Ibid., 316. Ibid., 319.

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last, the protagonist hears the most devastating news of the day: While skating recklessly on the street, Cat Head has died under the wheels of a truck. The outline of this story suggests that its plot is not at all new: a teenager is shocked by what he witnesses while out and about in the adult world, and to a considerable extent he loses his youthful innocence. What the protagonist observes on this chaotic day are symbolic of three important facets of life: sex, violence, and death. Cat Head’s masturbation and Li Dongying’s first menstrual period reveal these teenagers’ sexual awakening, while the scene of clandestine adultery in the school warehouse reveals the licentious desire of adults. Su Tong portrays each of these episodes as full of sinfulness and embarrassment. The death of Cat Head may be related to his guilt, or his fear that his self-gratification would be discovered by others. The author does not make it clear in the story, but the final sentence can be a clue: “What puzzled me is that Cat Head’s skating skill is incomparable; how could he have been hit by a truck?”54 Cat Head’s seemingly frenzied behavior can also be regarded as a desperate flight away from the confines of the world. As to Li Dongying’s first menstruation, this normal sign of female maturity is turned into a symbol of anguish; Su Tong portrays Li Dongying as a plain-looking, stupid girl who broadcasts the onset of her period by crying out loud in public. Finally, the scene of adultery takes place in a filthy and chaotic place—suggesting again how sexuality has become corrupted in the adult world. The guilt and fear associated with sexuality derive from the era of Maoist asceticism— the 1970s—the decade when Su Tong grew up. In the eyes of the youngsters in Su Tong’s narratives, the maturation of their bodies is regarded as the source of all kinds of disasters. Maturity terminates what seemed to be a pure and innocent childhood. “The Sad Dance” is a warm and sad story in which a twelve-year-old boy, the narrator, first experiences jealousy, disappointment, and sadness. One day, the dance teacher, a gentle and kind lady in her fifties, selects him for the dance team she is organizing. Later, the narrator discovers that for the lead role he must compete against another boy, Li Xiaoguo (Small Fruit Li), whose father is a Party official. According to the narrator, however, this story is actually about another child,

54

Su Tong, “Cheng hualunche yuanqu” [Roller skating away], in Shaonian xue, 303.

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a beautiful fair-skinned girl named Zhao Wenyan (Elegant Swallow Zhao). She suffers from urinary incontinence; whenever she is onstage, she cannot prevent herself from squatting to urinate from time to time. In spite of this disadvantage, the dance teacher keeps the girl on the team and takes great pity on her. The teacher knows that Elegant Swallow’s sickness is the result of stress, since she is on constant alert to prevent her mother from committing suicide. While leading the children in rehearsal one day, the dance teacher suddenly collapses and dies from a cerebral hemorrhage. With her abrupt passing, the stunned narrator’s short dance career comes to an end. His competitor, Small Fruit, takes over his onstage role as a dancer. From this incident, the narrator tastes jealousy, sadness, and disappointment. At the end of story, the narrator writes a few lines about the future of the other two young dancers. Elegant Swallow becomes a dancer, but her mother finally kills herself one day after her daughter leaves home for dance school. Small Fruit suffers paralysis after falling off of some scaffolding. In the narrator’s words, “This is the tragedy of fate, which means you might have merely danced once, but that would be enough for your legs to get broken.”55 This is perhaps also Su Tong’s comment about the Cultural Revolution. People who experienced the Cultural Revolution are likely to have been permanently traumatized, and may never “dance” again. In “The Sad Dance,” the most prominent character is the dance teacher, Duan Hong, who serves as a “catcher” to protect the children” from harm that they cannot perceive. This image may derive from Su Tong’s memory of his first school teacher, who always wore a kind and gentle smile on her face. Duan Hong is a spinster in her fifties who often wears white tennis shoes. “Her waist is more pliable than that of an eight year-old girl, and her movements are more graceful than willows in the wind. She has danced since she was young, while neglecting marriage and child-bearing. Duan Hong is an old maid.”56 She likes to whisper encouraging words into the ears of her young students, all of whom enjoy holding hands with her. The first-person narrator repeatedly compares Duan Hong to an old hen leading around a flock of chicks. Like a nurturing mother hen, she protects the fair-skinned girl

55 56

Su Tong, “Shangxin de wudao” [The sad dance], in Shaonian xue, 312. Ibid., 308.

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and the narrator described earlier. Her warm and reassuring gestures greatly encourage the often helpless young students. From these sketches and analyses of Su Tong’s some coming-of-age short stories, we can observe some commonalities among the young protagonists. First, they are neither the sort of progressive yet frustrated new youth who are typically depicted in pre-1949 Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo, nor are they the model students and promising “new socialist men” that are often lionized in socialist juvenile literature. Instead, they are teenaged street people who perform poorly in their academic subjects, engage in offensive behavior at school, or else drop out of school altogether. This image fits Bórge Bakken’s observation of modern and contemporary Chinese society where “paradoxically, the young are regarded both as China’s hope for a modernized future, and as a marginal group with a strong tendency to transgress moral and ideological boundaries.”57 Su Tong’s young protagonists belong to this “marginal group,” with their stance of disillusioned social aloofness and rebellious autonomy. During the Cultural Revolution, given the CCP’s condemnation of individualism and its stress on collective order, the mindsets of young people tended to become polarized. Active membership in the Red Guards and active involvement in a given school’s factional struggles was considered an exemplary path for most students to follow. However, Su Tong turns his gaze on those young people who were born into poor urban families. For various reasons, they usually became failing students or dropped out of school entirely, and thus were excluded from privileged group activities in school. This alienation from school, a symbolic site of collectivism, ironically provides them a chance to develop their individuality and subjectivity. They become a group of alienated youths who were neglected by the revolution and marginalized by collective revolutionary history. The second commonality among these young protagonists is that their daily lives were full of physical violence. Their small world is an epitome of Chinese society during the Cultural Revolution, which exhibited extreme levels of violence. In a disordered society such as this, the development of individualist ideals and personal potential among these young people will not lead them to maturity, but only to

57 Bakken, The Exemplary Society: Human Improvement, Social Control, and the Dangers of Modernity in China, 354.

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disillusionment and destruction. According to Bakken’s sociological research findings, “Most estimates for youth delinquency during the Cultural Revolution period stand at 40–50 percent of the total crime rate. Local surveys indicate that the crime rate for 14- to 25-year-olds peaked around 1973.”58 Unsurprisingly, many of Su Tong’s young protagonists are fictional representations of juvenile delinquents. In addition, the young protagonists in all these stories discover through a series of disillusioning experiences that the adult world is irreclaimably corrupt. The absence of parental guidance is obvious in these short stories. In these stories, the only positive adult image is that of the catcher, such as the barber Zhang and the dance teacher Duan Hong. The parents seem to provide no protection from a threatening society and government, and are vehicles of spiritual blindness and social decay rather than wisdom or positive role modeling. The above-mentioned commonalities become three prominent narrative motifs in Su Tong’s coming-of-age narratives: the absence of a secure political and social structure, the focus on a marginalized group of young people, and the history of the recent past. These motifs constitute an effective form of political subversion. These thematic concerns are also regarded by some critics as a mode of decadence that characterizes many of Su Tong’s narratives.59 Su Tong sets the fate of his teenaged characters against the background of the recent past, especially the Cultural Revolution. In this way, he unfolds a collective history of societal trauma. Lurking behind his narrator, Su Tong becomes a formidable analyst of these teenagers’ relationships in the context of China during the Cultural Revolution—from the negative role that parental culture plays, to the teenage peer community, to the possible solutions that desperate teens pursue. These issues and thematic concerns were examined more extensively in Su Tong’s Bildungsroman novel North Side Story. North Side Story tells of four boys who live on Toon Street: Dasheng (Growth), Xude (Virtue), Hongqi (Red Flag) and Xiaoguai (Young Cripple). This is a sad and bloody story in which the four boys all

58

Ibid., 384. Deirdre Sabina Knight, “Decadence, Revolution and Self-Determination in Su Tong’s Fiction,” Modern Chinese Literature 10 no. 1/2 (1998): 91–112. Knight argues that one prominent theme of Su Tong’s stories is decadence which can be identified in two modes—“a decadence of resignation stemming from fatalism,” and “a creative decadence amounting to a gesture of defiance or freedom.” (91) 59

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end up in different predicaments, with no one being better off than the others. The novel begins with the accidental death of Dasheng’s father. A truck hits him on his way to work, partly because Dasheng has made off with his well-functioning bicycle, causing him to needing to borrow a broken-down bike from one of his neighbors. After his father’s death, Dasheng is repeatedly reminded by his mother of the responsibility he bore for his father’s death. Obsessed with a heroic vision, Dasheng looks forward to a bloody rumble to demonstrate that the kids on Toon Street are not lanshi (puppy shit), a term of abuse hurled at them by some teens from other parts of the city. Dasheng eventually validates himself as a true hero by stirring up a scuffle and single-handedly taking on ten boys in a street fight. However, he pays the ultimate price for his impetuosity when he gets killed in the fight. Dasheng’s friend, Hongqi, a quiet boy with beautiful eyes, is sentenced to nine years in prison for having raped a fourteen-year-old neighborhood girl, Meiqi (Fine Jade). Meiqi eventually drowns herself because of the humiliation and the ensuing gossip. Her ghost roams Toon Street day and night. Another of Dasheng’s friends, Xude, seems to find a relatively normal path in life, taking a job in a bottle-washing factory staffed by former prostitutes. The CCP intends to remold them into “good” women who will follow a respectable trade. Yet Xude is seduced at the factory by a lascivious married woman, Jinlan (Golden Orchid), who at the same time is also having an affair with Xude’s father. This love triangle completely ruins Xude’s family. In the end, Xude elopes with Jinlan and moves with their newborn baby to northern China. Dasheng’s third friend, Young Cripple, is a kleptomaniac who is often an embarrassment to his family. After his mother died giving birth to him, Young Cripple was cared for by his two sisters and was violently disciplined by his hot-tempered father. Ironically, however, Young Cripple finds himself giving lectures as a model youth after he accidentally discovers a hidden ammunition depot and a “class enemy.” In this way, for the first time in his life Little Cripple brings glory to himself and his family. In addition, North Side Story is a vertically structured story in which certain characters move back and forth between a mysterious supernatural plane to a human plane, and from the nether world to the everyday world. Some objects, such as a snake or a paper heart, become the medium that connects the two worlds, and they become highly symbolic in the narratives.

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In his book by the same name, the sociologist Bórge Bakken uses the term “exemplary society” to describe the somewhat peculiar character of “Chinese society in the midst of reform and modernization.” In such a context, “‘human quality’ based on the exemplary norm and its exemplary behavior is regarded as a force for realizing a modern society of perfect order,” and “a combination of the disciplinary and the educational constitutes the exemplary society.”60 Bakken traces the modern tradition of education from modern times back to pre-modern China, arguing that “rule by morality was more widespread in traditional China than rule by law.”61 More importantly, he sees the emphasis on exemplarity as “cultural memory,” which unlike individual memory, will not perish with the death of the individual. According to Bakken, “Cultural memories can be understood as symbols, values, norms, practical strategies, thought patterns, ‘ways of doing things,’ or ‘traces’ that have materialized in a culture and function as legitimizing factors for acting in society and organizing society.”62 Parents from each generation pass on these cultural memories to the next generation. Ordinarily the parental society, composed of parents, teachers, and elders, provides positive role models for young people to imitate until the appropriate behaviors become habitual. Parents and teachers are the most significant adults in the lives of adolescents. Aside from providing moral guidance to their offspring and pupils, they help the young to gain a significant capacity for introspection as well as a sense of history,63 and teach “human decency, altruism, moral values, and a

60

Ibid., 1, 8. Ibid., 8. 62 Ibid., 10. 63 The US writer Robert Bly raises the concept of sibling society in contrast to parental society in his book The Sibling Society (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Pub., 1996). He has identified contemporary American society as a sibling society in which adults and adolescents are less differentiated. Since the 1950s, the fast development of commercialism, technology, single-parenting, divorce, and the media-driven emphasis on the youth culture have all made adults less mature and responsible than their parents’ generation. On the other hand, when they grow up in working-class, singlefamily homes, adolescents take on more adult responsibilities. The sibling society is thus one in which “parents regress to become more like children, and the children, through abandonment, are forced to become adults too soon.”(132) This problem is further complicated as people remain adolescents long past the normal adolescent period. Bly argues that in the parental society of the first half of the twentieth century, there were numerous representatives of the adult community: teachers and elders to 61

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social conscience by exhibiting these virtues themselves.”64 This theory of social learning coincides with the traditional Confucian emphasis on role models provided by parents and teachers. As expressed in two lines of the Three-Character Classic: “To feed without teaching is a fault of the father. To teach without severity reflects the laziness of a teacher.”65 During the Cultural Revolution, however, with the total rejection of Confucianism and other traditional Chinese values, fathers and teachers lost their function of providing guidance to youth. The Cultural Revolution can be seen as “an attempt to cut society off by its roots” through shattering the traditional mold in a quest “to establish a utopian dream unencumbered by memories from the past.”66 The escalation of anti-intellectualism and anti-traditionalism during that era led to moral degeneration, a lack of introspective ability, and a loss of cultural rootedness in Confucian “benevolence (ren) and altruism (shu)—the humanism of China’s ancient propriety ( guli).”67 Meanwhile, education was no longer what it should have been because it was in collusion with a valueless, chaotic society; it did not consider the lessons of the past as valid. Consequently, adults—both parents and teachers—could not provide a moral compass for youth and failed to pass on the traditional values of Chinese culture. From many young people’s perspective, this absence of proper parental authority figures and positive role models forced them to turn to their peers for guidance and support. Unfortunately, the peer community could not provide the necessary amount of nurturing for emotional growth.

whom the young were drawn. These elders served as positive role models for young people to imitate until the appropriate behaviors became habitual. Among the elders, parents and teachers were the most significant adults in the lives of adolescents. In sibling society, however, due to the lack of maturity among adults, adolescents have to make do with peer guidance from sibling society. 64 F. Philip Rice, The Adolescent: Development, Relationships, and Culture, 2nd ed. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, Inc., 1978), 73. 65 Wang Yinglin (1223–1296), San zi jing. Bai jia xing. Zeng guang, [Expanded edition of Three-Character Classic and the hundred surnames], ed. Yuan Tingdong (Chengdu: Ba shu shu she, 1988), 4. The San zi Jing, usually translated as the Three-Character Classic, has been a required text for all Chinese children in traditional Chinese society. 66 Bakken, The Exemplary Society, 17. 67 Michael Duke, “Reinventing China: Cultural Exploration in Contemporary Chinese Fiction,” Issues and Studies 25 (August 1989): 34. Wang Zengqi, a modern Chinese writer, says this about his understanding of the roots of Chinese culture: “Confucian and Confucius’s thought is the leading element [in my thought]—benevolence (ren) and altruism (shu)—the humanism of China’s ancient propriety (guli).”

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Teenagers during the Cultural Revolution were therefore caught in the transition between childhood and adulthood, struggling amidst an uncertainty about core values that seemed as prolonged as adolescence itself. In other words, their emotional maturation was frozen at the threshold of adulthood. The effects of this lack of adequate adult models and of the negative guidance of the peer community are best illustrated in North Side Story. In North Side Story, all the boys and girls of school age on Toon Street enroll at Dongfeng Middle School. This school has been taken over by the Workers’ Propaganda Team (WPT). The head of the WPT receives a promotion to become the principal of the school. As one of this school’s most rebellious students, Dasheng feels this change in the school’s leadership is absurd. School is no longer a place where children can learn how to develop positive social virtues. It has forfeited some of the key functions of education, namely “to propagate doctrines of the ancient sages, to transmit learning, and to dispel confusion.” Instead, the school becomes little more than another site for reaffirming social control.68 However, the results of this development are far from effective. The school has become such a hotbed for unfettered murder and arson that whenever its students are challenged by teenagers from other areas, a simple announcement of the name of their school is intimidating enough to frighten away any potential rivals. Confronted with this harsh reality, the teachers tend to shirk their responsibilities rather than examining their failed role as educators. They trace back the history of the school and find out that its site was the location of a prison in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Su Tong deliberately arranges for a history teacher to reveal this fact. The history teacher’s discovery legitimizes the teachers’ failure in “propagating doctrines of the ancient sages, transmitting learning, and dispelling confusion.” The teachers feel relieved because the school turns out to have a notorious and longstanding history as a place of murder and arson. They even think they should be allowed to carry guns to school in order to protect themselves from possible armed attacks by students. Supposedly part of the intelligentsia, the teachers of North Side Story have long lost the capacity for self-retrospection, and have regressed to roughly the same moral level as their students. They are no longer

68 Han Yu (768-824), “Shishuo” [On teachers], in Han Yu wen xuan [Selected works of Han Yu], ed. Tong Dide (N.p., 1980), 52.

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role models, and have lost the respect of their students. They use vulgar language and violence against their students and other adults. The school’s students and teachers curse and hit each other. It seems that the only disciplinary measure the school has left is expulsion. Su Tong writes: “The white posters announcing expulsions are posted on walls next to the school gate. The names of expelled students are constantly updated and spring up like bamboo shoots after rain.”69 Dasheng and his teenage friends Young Cripple, Hongqi, and Xude are banished from school one by one. The other would-be role models in Dasheng’s life are his father and mother. Formerly a foundry worker, Dasheng’s father has been absent from Dasheng’s life since the boy was thirteen years old due to the aforementioned fatal traffic accident. The things we know about the father come mostly from the recollections of Dasheng and his mother. The memories Dasheng has of his father are of his hot temper, coarse language, and violent behavior. When he looks at his deceased father’s picture on the wall, he can still sense a glint of anger in the man’s eyes. It seems that the only way this sturdy man knew of disciplining his son was to beat him up. His last words before his untimely death were a curse upon his son: “I should have beaten you to death!”70 Understandably, Dasheng is not genuinely saddened by his father’s death. He actually benefits from it, since he is now at least free of his father’s physical abuse. In North Side Story, there are two other significant paternal figures. One is Young Cripple’s father, Wang Deji, and the other is Xude’s father. Even though they are physically present and live with their sons, they bring nothing other than humiliation and disaster to their children. A widower as well as a habitual drunkard, Wang Deji is unable to suppress his sexual drive, which surfaces in twisted ways. When he stares at women, his eyes are “like a pair of scissors ready to cut open a woman’s clothes.”71 To indulge his desire both to peep at and punish others who are having sex, he throws himself into the Neighborhood Committee’s periodic nighttime raids on public parks to capture the perpetrators of illicit sexual activity.72 Moreover, he hypocritically

69

Su, Chengbei didai, 10. Ibid., 7. 71 Ibid., 218. 72 The Neighborhood Committee, or jumin weiyuanhui, is a nationally instituted yet locally operated organization in each urban residential area in the PRC. The director, 70

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prohibits his own daughters from dating. When his eldest daughter secretly goes out to date a man, he locks her out of the house at midnight, a punishment that leads to her murder at the hands of nightroving hooligans. From this description we can see that the image of the father in North Side Story is harsh and punitive. As psychologist F. Philip Rice observes: Parents who rely on harsh, punitive methods are defeating the true purpose of discipline: to develop a sensitive conscience, socialization, and cooperation. Cruel punishment, especially when accompanied by parental rejection, develops an intensive, uncaring, hostile, rebellious, cruel person. Instead of teaching children to care about others, it deadens their sensitivities, so that they learn to fear and hate others, but no longer care about them or want to please them. They may obey, but when the threat of external punishment is removed, they are antisocial people. Many criminal types fit this description.73

This is exactly the effect that harsh punishment from the fathers of Dasheng and Young Cripple have on their sons. Instead of becoming obedient, both Dasheng and Young Cripple come to fear and hate their fathers, and simply want to be away from them. They become more violent and destructive. Another father figure in the story is Xude’s father. Even though he is not as punitive or violent as the fathers of Dasheng and Young Cripple, he brings to his family something even more destructive. He allows himself to be seduced by the same woman who has been having an affair with his son. Drunk and driven by guilt, he makes a confession of this affair to his wife and son. His admission leads to his son’s hatred of him and the latter’s decision to run away from home, as well as to his wife’s contempt for him. Dasheng’s mother, Teng Feng, is also far from a positive parental role model. Without doubt, she possesses genuine human goodness: self-sacrifice, loyalty, compassion, and diligence, but she is a far cry

deputy director, and committee members are elected by the residents. Even though the committee is not a formal administrative organ of the government, it is under the administration and supervision of the Public Security Bureau, the nationwide police authority. Its main functions are in accordance with the PRC’s 1982 National Law Code 111, and resemble the functions of surveillance and social control that are characteristic of urban neighborhood committees in other single-party Leninist regimes such as Cuba and North Korea. 73 Rice, The Adolescent: Development, Relationships, and Culture, 526.

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from the woman who has grown up with wholesome nurturing from her parents. As the daughter of a snake-charmer, she was sexually harassed by her own father prior to her marriage. Her father eventually sold her into marriage for two hundred yuan to Dasheng’s father. “Father treated Teng Feng like a snake. After he finished playing with her, he just dumped her in this strange city.”74 “Father and the chilly nighttime wind were like two knives that stabbed at her in her memories. They left Teng Feng with permanent injuries.”75 After the wedding, she constantly suffers from her husband’s physical and sexual abuse. All these experiences make her hate both her father and her husband. Afraid of her husband, she secretly wishes for his death. However, after her husband does in fact die in a traffic accident, she constantly blames her son for having caused the accident. “Her cowardly character has changed beyond recognition. Sometimes during gloomy and depressing days, this poor woman chases and beats her son with a broom handle and tearfully complains of her sufferings.”76 The response she receives from her son, however, is: “You are out of your mind.”77 When her old snake-charmer of a father finally comes back to her to request a reconciliation between father and daughter, she turns him down and shows him the door. The impoverished old man finally freezes to death under a bridge on Lunar New Year’s eve. However, in this father-and-daughter relationship, the snake is a motif that becomes a medium connecting the human and the nether worlds. Before the snake-charmer goes in search of his daughter, he delivers a message to her through a dead snake. After the snake-charmer dies, he is transformed into a snake that haunts his daughter’s house in order to avenge his death. For Dasheng, his mother sets a negative example in terms of filial devotion. When his grandfather is chased out of their home, the old man tells Dasheng: “Someday you should treat your mother the same way she treated me today.”78 Feeling guilty about her father’s death and her failure to play her proper role as a filial daughter, she tries to hide the truth from her son by denying that the old snake-charmer was her father after all.

74 75 76 77 78

Su, Chengbei didai, 15. Ibid., 144. Ibid., 8. Ibid. Ibid., 141.

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In spite of the destructive relationship between Dasheng and his parents, readers can still notice Dasheng’s affection for his father and mother. The bicycle and the alarm clock are two motifs in the portrayal of the parent-and-child relationship. North Side Story both starts and ends with a death somehow related to a clock or a watch, and to a bicycle. At the beginning of the novel, Dasheng takes his father’s bicycle to practice riding, but because of the malfunction of his friend Xude’s watch, he is late in returning the bicycle to his father, who urgently needs it to get to work. This mistake indirectly causes his father’s tragic accident. The bicycle becomes the only tangible connection between him and his father. Later, on his way home from the town of Double Pagoda, Dasheng’s bicycle gets a flat tire and his friend tells him just to ride it like that. Dasheng, however, strokes the bicycle, which he inherited from his deceased father, and in the darkness, shakes his head. He tells his friend, “No. The bicycle would fall apart if I rode it. I would rather walk back home with the bicycle.”79 This scene is a sign of Dasheng’s lingering attachment to his father. At the end of the story, in order to arrive at the gang fight in time, Dasheng takes the alarm clock his mother uses to awaken in time to get to work. Right before he dies, he entrusts Pig Head to take the clock back home for him because his mother needs the alarm clock for work. His death then leads to his mother’s madness. The unhinged woman roams the street in the rain like a ghost and asks every person she meets: “Did you see my alarm clock?”80 Besides being a token of Dasheng’s concern for and affection to his mother, the clock also has a metaphorical significance. As an instrument of time, it is closely associated with death. The Chinese pronunciation of “clock” (zhong) is the same as that of the character zhong, which means “the end” or “death.” By using the prop of a clock at the end of the story, Su Tong may be implying that this is not only the end of the story, but also the end of Dasheng’s ill-fated life or, in a broader sense, the end of a meaningful existence for Chinese youth in the Cultural Revolution. Throughout the novel, Dasheng’s alienation and his awareness of his own lack of maturity cause him to seek out an older person to

79 80

Ibid., 22. Ibid., 269.

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provide him with guidance, for he has lost the role models of teacher, father, and mother. Dasheng’s quest is seen in his search for a martial arts instructor. With his friend Xude, he first travels to the nearby town of Double Pagoda, hoping to find a master named Monk. It turns out he has received false information. There is no such person in this small town. The only significant outcome of their trip is an ascent to the top of the wooden tower to gaze at their houses from afar. Next, Dasheng’s friend tells him that there is a master named Yan the Third whose kung fu is the best in the area, but Dasheng soon learns that he does not take disciples anymore. Dasheng does not give up, however. He finally enters the room of the legendary master, only to discover that the master has become too old and weak to teach him anything. Moreover, Yan the Third is disillusioned and refuses to teach youngsters kung fu because he believes those who want to learn it are all mere hooligans. He abruptly pushes Dasheng out of his room. Dasheng’s dream of apprenticing himself to a master is completely shattered. Constantly searching for good in the adult world, or at least something to mitigate his despair, Dasheng is continually confronted with an absence of good fortune. As discussed earlier, school should have been a place where children learn from their teachers and peers. In Dasheng’s case, school has lost its function of educating young people. In fact, Dasheng is banished from school because of his misconduct. Now he has to turn to his peers on the street. Like Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, in a world devoid of older male role models and full of a soul-destroying chaos, Dasheng’s survival is possible only through withdrawal into his peer community, the Toon Street clan. But these peers fail him as well. Xude seems to be Dasheng’s best friend. They hang around with each other most of the time before Xude goes to work in the bottlewashing factory. Xude is smart, but often acts by instinct and without taking careful thought of possible consequences of his actions. Through a series of incidents, Dasheng finds his friend to be unfair, cowardly, and frustrated by lust. The night they make their way home from their quest to find a kung fu master in Double Pagoda, both of them are worried about being scolded by their mothers. Unfortunately, Dasheng’s bicycle has a flat tire, and he can no longer ride it. Xude chooses to ride his bicycle home and leaves Dasheng walking alone through the dark suburb. Even though Dasheng does not object to his friend’s decision, he is very disappointed. He knows that he would have stayed

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with Xude if Xude’s bicycle had developed a flat tire. He concludes that Xude is not a loyal and fair-minded friend after all.81 What frustrate Dasheng even more are Xude’s mockery, his contemptuous tone, and his habit of pulling off pranks. When Dasheng, Xude, and Young Cripple go to the Grass Basket Prison to visit their jailed friend Hongqi, Xude urges Dasheng to climb a tree and peer into the prison. When Dasheng reaches the top of the tree, Xude frightens him by imitating the sound of shooting, causing Dasheng to fall to the ground and break his leg. Afterwards, however, Xude never seems to pay attention to Dasheng’s injury, even though he himself had caused it. When Xude sees Dasheng has left his bed and is trying to walk by himself, Dasheng assumes Xude will be surprised to see him walking and will ask about his leg. Xude says nothing, however. Dasheng then concludes that Xude does not really care about him.82 Dasheng’s other friend, Young Cripple, habitually steals and lies. His habit of pilfering, ironically, finally brings him honor and fame. When he tries to steal from Old Kang’s house, he accidentally finds a hidden ammunition depot and hence exposes Old Kang as a concealed counterrevolutionary. Because of this incident, the government hails Young Cripple as a hero and a model youth. Young Cripple gives speeches throughout the city. He is also guaranteed a job. Even though it sounds like a farce, it is the first time that Young Cripple makes his father proud of him. It is also the first time that father and son can have an affectionate and equal conversation. On their way home, the father advises Young Cripple to behave well, strive to join the CCP, and cut himself off from his bad friends Dasheng and Xude. This incident gives the family hope to improve their social status as neighbors begin to admire them. By including this episode, Su Tong intends to demonstrate that in an abnormal time, this seemingly harmonious father-son relationship is actually based on false pretenses. A Failed Catcher in the Rye In North Side Story, the image of the catcher is Old Kang, the former owner of a Chinese medicine shop and now a street cleaner. Su Tong endows this image with more cultural and historical significance, 81 82

Ibid., 22. Ibid., 70.

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painting him as a guardian of traditional Chinese culture and moral codes. Given the absence of adult and peer guidance in Dasheng’s world, Old Kang is the only possible positive role model Dasheng can look up to. However, Old Kang is marginalized and labeled a miscreant of the Five Black Categories during the Cultural Revolution.83 Even though he understands perfectly what an adult role model ought to be, therefore, he is unable to demonstrate it. He tries to speak up, but no one listens. Even though Dasheng is keenly aware of his need for a mentor and eager to have someone to guide him, he would never think of Old Kang. He is too young to recognize a wise man in disguise. Old Kang retains the fundamental values inherent in Confucian humanism and the Chinese intellectual tradition. This may call to mind Ah Cheng’s emphasis on the importance of education and people’s spiritual needs in “The King of Chess” (Qiwang, 1984) and “The King of Children” (Haizi wang, 1984). In Su Tong’s depiction of the character Old Kang in North Side Story, Su Tong also lays “stress on education in civilization, which represents both a much-needed reaffirmation of the spiritual values of the ‘Old Society’ and a call for serious reevaluation of Chinese tradition.”84 Old Kang witnesses history and is the bearer of historical memory. He constantly refers back to what used to happen in the Old Society. The two places where Old Kang appears are at the pharmacy and at school (even though he is not allowed to enter the latter, but must observe from outside). The pharmacy is a place to maintain physical well-being, while school promotes mental well-being. The year 1949 is a watershed in Old Kang’s life. Before 1949, he owned a Chinese medicine shop named Longevity and Health Hall—a symbol of traditional Chinese culture. However, after 1949, his shop was confiscated by the government and he became “an object of remolding” (gaizao de duixiang). Since the 1960s he has been picking up scraps of paper on the streets of the northern part of the city. Hence, he is called “Scrappicker Old Kang.” Since paper is a key material used in the recording of history, Su Tong thus portrays Old Kang as a history-picker.

83 The Five Black Categories (hei wulei) refers to five types of people singled out as targets of dictatorship during the Mao Era: rural landlords (dizhu), rich farmers (funong), rightists (youpai), counterrevolutionaries (fan’geming), and bad elements (huai fenzi). 84 Duke, “Reinventing China: Cultural Exploration in Contemporary Chinese Fiction,” 40.

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Following the confiscation of Longevity and Health Hall, the name of the medicine shop was changed to Healthy People’s Pharmacy. Over the last twenty years, the store has sold Chinese medicine, Western medicine, agricultural chemicals, and pesticides, and it has offered free contraceptives. The Chinese medicinal chest of padauk wood has become covered with dust due to neglect. Meanwhile, during these years the people on Toon Street have become accustomed to the sight of Old Kang with hunched back and his wicker basket, picking up scraps. Despite being deprived of the ownership of the medicine shop, regardless of the season Old Kang is nearly always observed sitting on the steps of the shop to sort out the scraps in his basket. Old Kang’s scraps include various kinds of posters, such as slogans, propaganda about public hygiene, court bulletins, school posters publicizing the names of expelled students, and old newspapers. He plucks out the old newspapers, because they fetch the highest price. As he collects them, however, he reads over the headlines, including: “Kim II Sung has just left,” “Sihanouk has arrived,” and “American devils are expanding their military force.”85 Old Kang thus helps people recall history. Sometimes his memory seems confined to the years before 1949. What he sees in the present propels his thoughts to the old days. He constantly reminds people of how things were in the past, and repeatedly tells people that what is happening now is sinful and criminal. The teachers complain about the chaotic state of the school and the evils of the students, saying: “While teaching here, we should get permission from the Public Security Bureau to carry firearms and ammunition for self-protection… Dongfeng School might just as well be transformed into a jail for juveniles.”86 Old Kang is very surprised to hear such words from the mouths of teachers. He refutes them: “Without an education, children will never learn to be responsible citizens. Now that the school no longer teaches even the Three-Character Classic, the children don’t know how to distinguish good from evil. How can they ever learn to be good?”87 Unfortunately, the teachers do not understand Old Kang; they conclude that he is advocating Confucian thought, which is supposed to have been struck down long ago.

85 86 87

Su, Chengbei didai, 49. Ibid., 112. Ibid.

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Old Kang’s remarks only invite mockery and physical violence from the teachers. Old Kang cannot help but sigh about the fact that teachers in his day no longer behave like teachers. He recalls his distant childhood, when the children in the northern part of the city all attended a school in the very narrow Peach Flower Alley. Whenever a teacher passed by, the students would automatically give way and let the teacher pass unimpeded. In addition, the teacher always carried a ruler in order to discipline misbehaving boys. However, a teacher was permitted to slap only the children’s hands and buttocks, nowhere else. By contrast, as he observes the brutality and disrespect of contemporary schools, he can only conclude: “It is a crime, it really is a crime!”88 Old Kang is in a muddle because there are so many things he cannot understand. He cannot understand why Red Guards smash precious china in his old medicine shop; why the “political study session” is more important than people’s lives when the pharmacy is closed for political study; why the young girl, Meiqi, tried to buy sleeping pills to kill herself; why the snake-charmer’s own daughter left him to freeze to death on a chilly winter night. When he tries to point out to people that all these recent happenings are crimes, no one understands him. Even though Old Kang realizes that fewer and fewer people understand him and has been deprived of the right to speak, he does not lose his conscience or integrity. Old Kang lives by his own moral code, which he still observes even if he is handling such minor chores as picking up scraps of paper waste. For instance, if a poster has been up for fewer than three days, he will not touch it. Even though there is a good opportunity for Old Kang to atone for his crimes as a member of Black Five Categories, he still turns down the request of the Neighborhood Committee to observe and report on young lovers’ trysts in the park at night because he believes that Heaven would not spare him if he did such a sneaky thing. Like other catchers in Su Tong’s coming-of-age narratives, Old Kang cannot save the aforementioned children in spite of all their good intensions. They are standing near the edge of the proverbial crazy cliff. But at most, they can catch only one or two of the boys. They know the danger, and they know the children are running up to edge of the “crazy cliff,” but they cannot help because their power is

88

Ibid., 113.

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overwhelmed by the evil of the times—an apt image, in fact, for the whole of China, which had in many ways run off the cliff during the Cultural Revolution. These characters are thus destined to wind up as failed catchers. Sexuality, Violence and Death In sexual maturation during the teen years, an adolescent’s emotional reactions to these changes are as important as the physical changes themselves. According to the psychologist F. Philip Rice, “Until the endocrine system completes its changes and gets into balance, the adolescent may exhibit emotional instability, fluctuations of mood, extreme emotional sensitivity, temper tantrums, periods of anger or moodiness, crying spells, or periods of excessive elation.”89 Therefore, adolescents desperately need social and familial guidance and support in order to get them through this highly self-conscious and hypersensitive period. However, Jianmei Liu points out that under Mao Zedong’s regime, “personal love as well as subjectivity were repressed or channeled into the sublimated collective energy.” Since the Yan’an era, asceticism was one of the tools used to control his people.90 This was aggravated by the highly political suppression of people during the Cultural Revolution. Most adolescents were brought up to believe that sex was wrong and dirty. Some developed a pathological, irrational fear of sex, nurtured by years of repressive and negative teaching. Bakken attributes the CCP’s “exaggerated concern with sexual disorder (luan xing)” and its emphasis on “purity and chastity” to the CCP’s “fear of social disorder.”91 He applies the anthropologists’ hypothesis that “ideologies of purity serve as symbolic expressions of social change and cultural tension, in which the physical body is used to symbolize the social order.”92 In the Chinese social context, “‘disorderly’ sexuality has become a symbol of the threat to the collective identity,” and threatens “the aim of anding tuanjie (social stability and unity), which is the very essence of the

89 90 91 92

Rice, The Adolescent: Development, Relationships, and Culture, 108. Liu, Revolution Plus Love, 18. Bakken, The Exemplary Society, 354. Ibid.

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official post-Mao CCP political line.”93 Therefore, asceticism becomes a means to prevent the transgression of social boundaries. The prohibition of teenagers’ zaolian (premature love) and the powerful sexual myth of female chastity, says Bakken, are therefore means to curb the mobility of young people.94 During the Cultural Revolution, these teenagers’ suppressed sexual desires were likely to be channeled into violence. Violence was also closely related to the people’s silence. In an era of extreme political suppression, people often choose silence. Almost any argument would remain mute. Violence tended to become the only means of expression. Su Tong said that violence and death were ubiquitous and had been part of his childhood and adolescent life. He recalls that he and his friends had often walked a long distance to view an unclaimed corpse. The person could have died for any reason: an execution, a road accident, a drowning, a murder, or a suicide. Su Tong said this sort of activity stemmed from the natural curiosity of children, along with their thirst for something unusual. The atypical frequency of this activity could only have happened in an era with more than its share of violence and death. In addition, party-state propaganda and ordinary people’s daily language were both full of violent turns of phrase. For example, the big-character posters on streets were mostly full of accounts of this group of people struggling against that group of people. People in that era typically showed little if any respect for one another, and generally were lacking in pity and compassion. Children who witnessed the violence of the adult world almost inevitably become violent themselves.95 In Su Tong’s coming-of-age narratives, sexuality is nearly always accompanied by violence or its extreme form—death. Su Tong’s linking of death with sexuality is a narrative strategy to dismantle the vision of revolutionary love fabricated by the Party. In a society where revolutionary morality is used to judge sex, these young protagonists’ primal instincts and libidinal energy are doomed to meet a tragic end. In North Side Story, Dasheng’s and Hongqi’s sexual anxieties are both associated with a young girl, Meiqi, who turns into a ghost

93

Ibid. Ibid. 95 These statements were made by Su Tong in an interview with Hua Li on July 12, 2010 in Shanghai. 94

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after committing suicide. The incident forces people on Toon Street to question their own morality and conscience. One of the most important considerations in any discussion of adolescent sexuality is the concept of masculinity and femininity. In this novel, thirteen-year-old Meiqi (Beautiful Jade) is considered the prettiest girl on Toon Street. Her femininity catches the attention of the teenage boys in the neighborhood, especially Hongqi. In fact, the attraction between her and Hongqi is mutual. Su Tong describes them thus: He liked to talk to this neighbor girl. Her shy smile and black eyes seemed to be the only enjoyable thing in the summer. He didn’t know when he started to flirt with her, and she would always be half shy and half upset . . . He liked to see this girl’s equivocal eyes and blushing face, but he didn’t know why.96

They seem destined to become a happy couple. Every thing changes, however, one summer afternoon. Hongqi feels cold-shouldered by his two friends, Dasheng and Xude, when they do not take him along to the town of Double Pagoda to look for the kung fu master. In his opinion, they have thereby broken the unwritten rules of friendship. Feeling abandoned, Hongqi decides to go swimming by himself. His loneliness, his disappointment with his friends, the stimulation from hearing the clamor of a bloody scuffle, and his attraction to Meiqi all work together to create a strong lust within him that completely overcomes his self-control. He thereupon rapes Meiqi. He recognizes his sin in Meiqi’s painful and panic-stricken eyes and on her bloodstained skirt. His deed ruins both of them; eventually he will be sentenced to nine years in prison and Meiqi will commit suicide. When Meiqi returns to school in the fall, she finds out that she has become the loneliest girl in Dongfeng Middle School. The girls who used to associate with her now avoid her. They all know what happened to her the previous summer. Meiqi feels they are all staring at her as if she had become a beggar. She feels mortified and sick at heart. She hopes the class will never be over; or else she wishes she could fly home after the class so that she would not have to face the terrible looks of her classmates. Meiqi often discusses various methods of suicide with Qiuhong (Autumn Crimson), the only girl who still talks to her. She knows she needs to swallow a mere thirty sleeping pills in 96

Su, Chengbei didai, 33.

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order to kill herself. She tells her mother that she does not want to go to school anymore; she would rather die, she says, than be forced by her mother to go. Meanwhile, Meiqi’s mother thinks of moving away from the dirty and brutal community to escape the rumors and gossip about Meiqi. She tells her daughter to keep on muddling through for a couple more days; they will move out as soon as they sell the house. Meiqi cannot wait any longer, however. She can no longer endure the harsh words and scornful stares from her neighbors, and classmates, as well as from Hongqi’s family. She finally drowns herself in the river, taking many red paper hearts with her. The unusual thing about this particular suicide is that Meiqi’s body is never found. She disappears as soon as she jumps into the river. The third day after her suicide, a red paper heart appears on the door of Hongqi’s house. Meiqi takes her revenge by becoming a beautiful ghost roaming Toon Street with these red paper hearts in her hands and a “supper flower” garland on her head. The supper flower, also known as the Mirabilis Jalapa flower or the “common four o’clock,” is another motif in the novel. Planted casually along the walls of courtyards and needing little attention, this hardy plant is the most frequently seen flower on Toon Street. It grows only in the summer, blossoms in the evening (hence the name “supper flower”), and withers with the coming of autumn. Su Tong says that these flowers suit the reality of Toon Street. They are just like the children of the street, who can be seen only at supper time. Most of the day, their mothers can never find them. The life of this flower is shortlived, as are the lives of many of the young people on Toon Street. The image relates directly to girls such as Meiqi and Jinhong (Red Brocade), who both die as a result of either rape or attempted rape. After Meiqi is raped, her mother finds that the supper flowers in front of their house no longer blossom. The blossomless plants are ugly. She cannot figure out if her daughter’s bad luck has anything to do with these wilted plants. After relating the death of Jinhong, Su Tong writes, “Some people’s lives suddenly withered, just like the supper flower on the street in the autumn.” 97 It is noteworthy that Meiqi takes the red paper hearts with her when she drowns herself. Afterwards, whenever she returns from the nether

97

Ibid., 210.

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world, she leaves red hearts on the doors or windows of houses belonging to people whose malicious gossip helped pressure Meiqi into committing suicide. The red heart symbolizes her clear conscience. Like the primary school teacher Zhou, who asked people to examine their conscience when they saw that her son was in danger but did not lift a finger to save him, this vulnerable girl returns from death to arouse the ordinary person’s conscience. In Chinese culture, the most direct expression of ethical self-reflection is to examine one’s own clear conscience. Su Tong’s writing shows that during an abnormal era, a person’s conscience is easily numbed, but certain incidents may cause people to scrutinize their own conduct, even though only for a very short moment and in a superficial way. Later in North Side Story, a swarm of bugs hovers over Toon Street. The old men say the bees have come from the nether world to portend a disaster—either a conflagration or a flood. Young people, however, believe this is just a superstition. It is Meiqi’s ghost who finally kills all the bugs. People say they hear the sound of Meiqi stomping on the bugs in the night—and sure enough, in the morning they find dead bugs and red paper hearts on the ground. In effect, Meiqi is warning the people that a disaster is coming if they continue to conduct their lives as they have of late. However, this is a community that has done away with superstitions. No one believes the old people’s warnings about ill omens and disasters. Toon Street is full of “optimistic” people. They quickly clean the ground and pour the dead bugs into the garbage and go to work as usual . . . The revolutionary masses on Toon Street are not afraid of either heaven or hell. Will they be frightened by some bugs and a ghost?98

The masses in the Toon Street neighborhood want to banish distress and detestation from their hearts. They have no confidence or ability to reflect deeply on what has been happening during the Cultural Revolution. The scene of the clean-up of bees reminds readers of the similar scene from Yu Hua’s short story “The Year Nineteen Eighty-six.” After a history teacher kills himself on the street as he demonstrates ancient punishments, his body is quickly collected and the street is cleared. His wife, daughter and the masses immediately feel relaxed and

98

Ibid., 233.

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jubilant, and blithely walk in the direction of the sunlight. They thus consign the history teacher, who remembers and deliberates upon the past, into darkness and loneliness. This aloof indifference toward the teacher is the same attitude they—and by extension the population— have taken toward spiritual life in general.99 If Hongqi’s sexual misconduct is driven by libido, then Dasheng’s case is more subtle and complicated. Dasheng has a fatal secret—his significantly undersized penis. He becomes self-conscious, hostile, and defensive whenever the subject of sex comes up. The most humiliating experience in Dasheng’s life was when his pants were taken off by some policemen in a police substation. His secret bodily shortcoming was revealed to all the policemen present, and he was mocked for it. Dasheng swears that he will get revenge. Before he dies, the one action Dasheng asks Pig Head to perform for him is to punish Young Ma, the policeman who disrobed Dasheng in the police substation. Following Dasheng’s death, Young Ma thereupon repeatedly discovers that someone has punctured his bicycle tires while his bike was parked. He cannot figure out why some people in the Toon Street neighborhood hate him so much. Even little girls who probably know little or nothing about the male anatomy sometimes puncture Young Ma’s bike tires. There is a strange relationship between Dasheng and Meiqi. In fact, it is Meiqi who actually awakens Dasheng’s sexual desire in spite of the delayed onset of his sexual maturation. When Dasheng and his friends first see Meiqi after she is raped, Dasheng keeps silent even as his friends were all commenting on this matter: The silent Dasheng saw a sudden gust of wind. The wind blew from the city moat, raising Meiqi’s white skirt higher. Her skirt looked like a bird trying to fly first to the right and then to the left, but that was unable to fly straight upwards. Dasheng watched Meiqi use her hands to hold down her skirt and walk across the bridge as if she were proceeding with a dead bird in her hands. The shadow of this girl suddenly became mournful and graceful. Dasheng felt his heart lightly struck by something . . . then another light blow . . . what sort of thing was it, so gentle and so weak? Dasheng shook his head; he didn’t know. Even many years later, he still could not explain what happened to his heartbeat on that summer night on the northern bridge.100

99 Hua Li, “Chinese Avant-Gardism: A Representative Study of Yu Hua’s ‘1986’,” BC Asian Review 13 (2002): 36–48. 100 Su, Chengbei didai, 44.

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After Meiqi’s suicide, she frequently visits Dasheng in his dreams. Meiqi is Dasheng’s fantasy even though he does not want to admit it. In one dream in particular, Dasheng’s mind is clear. He shouts to Meiqi: “I am not Hongqi, I am Dasheng.”101 In the dream, however, Meiqi’s lithe and soaking wet body is close to him, and her beautiful and sad eyes silently stare at him. Water keeps dripping from her black hair, green skirt, and fingers onto Dasheng’s youthful body. These drops catalyze Dasheng’s wet dream, and make him feel tired upon waking during the following morning. Dasheng is not afraid of Meiqi’s ghost; still, when he discovers his nocturnal emission and notices the sketch of a red heart left by Meiqi’s ghost on his window, he becomes frustrated and angry. His concern is that these dreams are diminishing his strength and jeopardizing his goal of becoming a hero in the northern part of the city. Dasheng finally takes his revenge by killing a cat that he imagines to be Meiqi’s incarnation or else otherwise controlled by Meiqi’s soul. However, Meiqi’s ghost does not stop visiting him. Her subsequent visitation is in the company of the selfsame cat. Meiqi continues to reappear as Dasheng’s fantasy of sexuality and femininity, even though she is only a ghost. A Solitary Hero on the Street From this analysis, we see that Dasheng’s alienation is almost complete—he is alienated from his parents, from his friends, from society in general (as represented by the school), and from his own sexual frustration. What makes Dasheng’s experience particularly difficult is that he is keenly aware of being isolated. His own profound recognition of alienation and his strong sense of the inadequacy of his life occur when he suddenly realizes that his close friends—Hongqi, Xude, and Young Cripple—have drifted apart by the end of summer. Seemingly, there is no one to whom he can turn for true guidance; those few to whom he does turn do not offer effective help. He has to move forward on his own, making his own decisions as to what kind of person he should become. One sociologist has pointed out: If emotional and social needs of adolescents are not met in the interpersonal relationship in the family, they turn to the gang to fulfill status

101

Ibid., 234.

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needs that would otherwise go unmet . . . Street gangs hold nearly absolute control over the behavior of individuals.”102

This is exactly what Dasheng does. He aimlessly roams the streets in the hope of encountering something meaningful. When one of his friends laughs at him for killing a cat instead of a man, he swears he will soon let people know that he is a “true man” (haohan). Forming a gang in Toon Street and becoming the “No. 1 man” or “a real man” in the northern part of the city become Dasheng’s ultimate goals. When Pig Head’s gang calls Dasheng and all the teenagers on Toon Street “puppy shit,” Dasheng is deeply irritated and insulted. He challenges Pig Head’s gang by proposing a fight. Unfortunately, no one on Toon Street wants to follow him. He therefore decides to go unaccompanied to the street rumble. He quietly muses: “The most sensational news will be produced at eight o’clock this evening.”103 He finally demonstrates that he is a true man, but winds up sacrificing his life by having single-handedly taken on ten young toughs in a street rumble. It is evident that part of Dasheng’s difficulty arises not so much from his being inherently bad as from his lack of positive role models. Suspended between the world of school and the impoverished and vulgar life of Toon Street, and in limbo between childhood and adulthood, Dasheng is adrift amidst a sea of peers that is every bit as adrift as he is. Without positive role models, these teenagers usually follow their instinctual impulses. In essence, Dasheng’s dilemma depicts the typical teenage peer community of the Cultural Revolution of the 1970s. Dasheng and his young friends’ coming-of-age experiences are part of the workings of fate. Fatalism has been one term that critics often use to describe one of the general themes of Su Tong’s narratives. The writer Ah Cheng notes that many of Su Tong’s works involve a theme that is uncommon in contemporary Chinese literature: predestination or fatalism, which in Su Tong’s narratives, intervenes with the development of one’s personality.104 The theme of predestination of fatalism is a continuation to some extent of this motif in A Dream of Red Mansions. Contemporary Chinese ideology has rejected the concept of fatalism, since it conflicts with the notion that art is merely an instrument for achieving

102 103 104

Rice, The Adolescent: Development, Relationships, and Culture, 261. Su, Chengbei didai, 261. Ah Cheng, Weinisi riji [Diary in Venice] (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 1998), 62.

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the Chinese Communist Party’s political goals. Consequently, motifs related to predestination have been practically absent from Chinese literature for many decades. Under Communism, tragedy in literature has no longer been truly tragic, but rather a combination of misery, grief, and a drummed-up stoutness. The results of this amalgamation range from dullness to absurdity. In contrast, the most touching point in Su Tong’s narratives is that readers can sense the destinies of individuals through the disguise of a social system. The young protagonists in Su Tong’s coming-of-age narratives, represented by Dasheng in North Side Story, are on a journey to find the self. If Dasheng’s sociocultural environment had belonged to a more stable society or era, as is typical in conventional European Bildungsroman narratives, he might have been able to achieve an accommodation with society and life in general by story’s end. However, like Holden Caulfield, Dasheng finds himself upset with the society in which he lives. Due to his lack of positive role models from the parental world as well as the absence of support and understanding from siblings and peers, Dasheng has to find his own way to make peace with his reality—and does so by becoming a solitary hero. However, his autonomy and individualist heroism lead him no further than to his own self-destruction. Dasheng and his friends are destined to be frozen between childhood and adulthood in China, which in the 1970s amounted to rushing headlong over the edge of the “crazy cliff.” The Boat to Redemption Su Tong has said that he had long been thinking of writing a narrative work about a river. He grew up by a river in Suzhou, and now lives next to another river in Nanjing. He believes that rivers have concealed a great many secrets, but it is hard for people to decipher these secrets.105 So he wrote The Boat to Redemption, allowing the young protagonist Ku Dongliang to take on the mission of telling the reader the river’s secrets. This lyrical and sentimental statement informs us of the author’s general motivation for writing the novel. It reveals many of Su Tong’s complex musings about his childhood, his hometown, and his teenage friends who grew up by the riverbank. 105 Su Tong, “Heliu de mimi” [The secrets of river], in Heliu de mimi [The secrets of river] (Beijing: Zuojia chubanshe, 2009), 13–18.

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Fifteen years passed between the writing of North Side Story and The Boat to Redemption. The latter novel is a blend of the Bildungsroman and the neo-historical novel. On the one hand, the story further develops a number of themes that have been evident in Su Tong’s Tong Street Series, such as the rebelliousness of school dropouts, problematic father-son relationships, unrequited love, socio-political chaos and repression, and the ambience of a small southern town. On the other hand, the story is a political allegory that subverts widespread Cultural Revolution era beliefs in revolutionary bloodlines and Maoist class divisions. The story takes place in a small riverside town named Milltown during the Cultural Revolution. The young protagonist Ku Dongliang lives with his father on a barge belonging to the Sunnyside Fleet that plies the waters of the Golden Sparrow River all year round. The boy’s father, Ku Wenxuan, was once the Party secretary in Milltown and the whole family had lived a privileged life onshore owing to the father’s special identity as the son of the female martyr Deng Shaoxiang. Ku Wenxuan had been identified as the legitimate offspring of Deng Shaoxiang because of a fish-shaped birthmark on his buttocks. This glorified revolutionary bloodline brought him political honor, official position, affluent material life, and numerous extramarital affairs. However, his revolutionary heredity was questioned and later officially denied by the government. He was even suspected of having instead been a bastard son of the notorious river pirate Feng Four. His political and social status thereupon declined precipitously, and his wife left him. He was banished to the Sunny Fleet and became one of the “boat people.” For various reasons, these boat people have all been deprived of the right to live on shore. Ku Wenxuan’s fifteen-year-old son Ku Dongliang chose to live with him on the barge after Ku Wenxuan and his wife got divorced. The story is a recollection of Ku Dongliang as a first-person narrator of the father’s and son’s thirteen years of riverbound existence. Ku Dongliang differs from the young protagonists in Su Tong’s earlier coming-of-age narratives in that Dongliang has a particularly heavy political burden to shoulder during his adolescent years. He is a direct victim of revolutionary bloodline theories and Maoist class division. Whereas the Toon Street teenagers are expelled from school and involve themselves in gang fights on the street, Ku Dongliang is forced to stop schooling and live on the river as the son of a “class alien” element. The day after the investigative team disqualifies his

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father from his former status as a revolutionary martyr’s son, Dongliang’s identity changes from a member of a martyr’s family to a kongpi (empty ass)—a Milltown slang term that means “emptier than empty and stinkier than an ass.”106 Dongliang’s Bildung is achieved through his alternative lives on the river and on dry land. Su Tong emphasizes that he has no intention of presenting the polarity of the river versus dry land on its banks, even though the metaphorical contrast between the river and adjacent dry land is evident in the story.107 People living on the river and people living on dry land are basically situated in two different worlds. The eleven families in the Sunnyside Fleet all have a shady and murky historical background. Dongliang regards his and his father’s move to the barge more as a “reclassification” than as exile or banishment.108 Though he chooses to live with his father on the barge, he longs for life on dry land as all the other boat people do. Each time he has a clash with his father, he runs ashore, only to escape to the barge for protection when he is rejected by the residents on dry land. So the river and the dry land on its banks have each functioned both as places he wants to escape from and as havens he seeks. Dongliang’s alienation and loneliness are more profound than the distress felt by Dasheng and other teenagers in the Toon Street Series. He has no peer community to join. He makes no friends either on the barge or on shore. He says, “My days on the river were unrelievedly lonely, and that loneliness comprised the last thread of my self-respect. There were lots of boys in the fleet, but they were either too old and stupid or too young and disgusting, so I had no friends.”109 When he goes onshore, he is discriminated against by his old acquaintances, and is kept under surveillance by the Pier Security Group. In addition, his alienation and loneliness are aggravated by his problematic relationship with his father and his unrequited love for Jiang Huixian. The Boat to Redemption continues the theme of tense father-son relationships that featured prominently in Su Tong’s Toon Street Series. In North Side Story, young people such as Dasheng, Xude, and Hongqi all have strained and even violent relationships with their

106

Su, The Boat to Redemption, 22. The statement was made by Su Tong in an interview with Hua Li on July 12, 2010 in Shanghai. 108 Su, The Boat to Redemption, 44–45. 109 Ibid., 47. 107

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fathers, and reconciliation between them is never achieved. The Boat to Redemption further explores such tensions between father and son. According to Su Tong, maternal love has more physical dimensions (giving birth, breastfeeding, and child care), while paternal love is more spiritual. Traditional Chinese society is a strict patriarchal society in which paternal love is usually expressed through enforcing discipline upon the son in order to make him a better person. However, in Boat to Redemption, the father Ku Wenxuan’s surveillance and discipline are brutal and sinful, thereby subverting traditional patriarchal discourse. Many of Dongliang’s humiliations and sufferings are inflicted on him by his father. Ku Wenxuan’s sanctions against Dongliang’s sexual fantasy, his prohibition against Dongliang seeing Huixian and his self-castration are tokens of redemption for one of his own sins. Ku Wenxuan had slept around with women and caused the death of one woman’s husband when he was the Party secretary of Milltown. This not only embarrasses Dongliang, but also leads to discrimination against Dongliang by various people onshore. More importantly, Dongliang’s political and social identity is closely related to his father’s. As Dongliang puts it, “It was all up to fate. My father’s fate was tied up with a martyr named Deng Shaoxiang, and mine was tied up with him.”110 Ku Wenxuan’s fall from power changes Dongliang from a happy and proud young boy on shore to a kongpi exiled on the river. The dependence-and-repulsion complex and the love-hate sentiments between father and son run like a thread throughout the narrative. In the end, Ku Wenxuan drowns himself in the river with the memorial stone of the martyr Deng Shaoxiang in his arms. His suicide is a relief to both himself and his son. The life of Ku Wenxuan is a course of wrongdoing and redemption. His life on the river is a redemption for the wrongdoings he has committed onshore, and is also a struggle to reclaim his political identity and reputation. During his thirteen years on the river barge, he has regularly sent appeals to leading Party bureaus regarding his identity as the son of a revolutionary martyr, demanding an official certificate that recognizes his martyr-family status. The fish-shaped birthmark on his buttocks is the origin of his tragic life. It brings him both glory and stigma. However, by the end of the novel, the fish-shaped birthmark had mysteriously disappeared from

110

Ibid., 42.

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his body. Similarly, the martyr’s memorial stone is the materialization of his bloodline and identity. There is a bas relief on the back of the stone: the martyr Deng Shaoxiang has a basket on her back, and a child’s head pokes up over the edge of the basket. Ku Wenxuan has identified himself with the child in the basket. It is the material proof of his existence as the son of the revolutionary martyr. At the end of the story, when the memorial stone is about to be moved elsewhere, Dongliang steals it and transfers it to their barge. “I was going to return Deng Shaoxiang’s martyr spirit to my father,” he says.111 However, when examining the memorial stone, Ku Wenxuan finds that the infant’s head is mysteriously missing from the top of the basket. He regards it as a rejection of him by Deng Shaoxiang. He comments, “Thirteen years of trying to remold myself have all been wasted. I’ve failed to earn your grandmother’s forgiveness. She doesn’t want me.”112 Thereupon, when the Pier Security Group and Milltown police department go to the barge to claim the memorial stone, Ku Wenxuan ties himself to the stone and throws himself into the river to drown. Later, Dongliang finds that his father has metamorphosed into a fish. Upon his father’s death, Dongliang is emancipated from surveillance, strictures, and the old man’s political stigma. Only with the father’s death can Dongliang enjoy some improvement in his life and fortune. Aside from the father-son relationship, Dongliang’s relationship with the orphaned girl Jiang Huixian is another major narrative thread in the story. If we were to argue that the father has brought Dongliang little more than humiliation and embarrassment, then Jiang Huixian’s appearance in his life brings him hope and joy. He entrusts all his tenderness and desire to her. He keeps a secret diary recording every aspect of Huixian’s life on the river barge and later on shore. In a certain sense, both of them are orphaned. Huixian has been physically abandoned by her parents. Ku Dongliang has been abandoned by his mother and lives on the boat with his father. Even though his father constantly keeps a lookout over him, he is spiritually alienated from his father. After his father drowns himself in the river, Dongliang also becomes an orphan. Jiang Huixian bears many similarities to the female protagonist Crimson Jade in “Memories of Mulberry Garden”—she is beautiful,

111 112

Ibid., 338. Ibid., 352.

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seductive, and defiant. However, Huixian is endowed with more political implications. At the age of seven, she is taken in the boat people’s care after both of her parents go mysteriously missing. Jiang Huixian provides the boat people with a channel to express their love and humanity in a way that has not been effaced by revolutionary ideology. This is in sharp contrast with the people onshore who refuse to take care of her following her parents’ disappearance. However, Su Tong does not intend to overstate this love. What he is more interested in are the things that happen to Huixian after she goes ashore. At the age of fourteen, Huixian is picked by the district’s propaganda troupe to play the part of Li Tiemei, the heroine of the revolutionary opera Red Lantern, and to ride in a National Day parade. Her fate changes as she moves ashore. From then on, her identity is closely related to that of Li Tiemei. She wears Li Tiemei’s costume and adopts her hairstyle. The red lantern becomes the physical expression of her identity, much like the memorial stone was for Ku Wenxuan. Su Tong presents Huixian as a treasure trove of beauty and sexual allure that any man in Milltown would have liked to possess. She is nicknamed Little Tiemei and becomes a celebrity in Milltown. She is protected by the new Party secretary Zhao Chuntang and attends banquets to accompany senior officials visiting Milltown from the district. Zhao Chuntang regards Huixian as his trump card, envisioning that Huixian will be transferred to a higher cultural unit in the district or favored by a high official someday in the future, to the benefit of his own career. However, once he realizes that Huixian has lost her potential political value, he rejects her immediately. He says to Huixian “When you are not Li Tiemei, you are nothing.”113 Thereupon, Huixian is transferred to the People’s Barbershop as a hairdresser. In the barbershop, Huixian is also surrounded by men’s greedy eyes. Dongliang observes, “Men were always entering and leaving the barbershop, and I could easily spot those who had something other than a haircut in mind.”114 Actually, Dongliang himself is one of her admirers. Each time when the fleet stops at Milltown, Dongliang tries different method of approaching Huixian or even just catching a glimpse of Huixian, long the object of his desire.

113 114

Ibid., 230. Ibid., 244.

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The relationship between Dongliang and Huixian remains ambiguous, uncertain, and intermittent throughout the narrative. This relationship seems to be a one-man show, since the reader can only follow Ku Dongliang’s perspective. The reader feels his affection for Huixian as a little girl, and also senses his frustration, joy, passion, timidity, restlessness and despair after she grows up and goes ashore. However, like Dongliang, the reader never knows how Huixian thinks about Dongliang and his obsession with her. This ambiguity is caused both by the limited narrative angle and by Dongliang’s alternative life between the boat and the bank. Su Tong has remarked that he could have switched the narrative angle to that of an omniscient narrator, but he preferred to confine the narrative to Dongliang’s perspective. In addition, this relationship is shaped by Dongliang’s intermittent life on shore. He can only see Huixian when the fleet stops at Milltown. He has to manage his time, escape from the surveillance of the Pier Security Group, and overcome his own timidity. He never knows when he will next see her. As a result, the relationship is never developed. Dongliang does not even have a chance to confess his feelings to Huixian. Only at the end of the story does the reader witness Huixian’s kindness to Dongliang. When Dongliang is beaten up by some local hooligans in the barbershop, Huixian rescues him. Later, before she marries a man on shore, she gives her treasured red lantern to Dongliang as a replacement for his diary, which had been lost during the brawl. The gift of the red lantern reveals Huixian’s appreciation of Dongliang’s affection. It is also a way that Huixian says farewell both to Dongliang and to her childhood on the river barge. At this point, Dongliang has lost the two people in the world who were closest to him—his father and Huixian. Like the young protagonist in a conventional Bildungsroman novel, Dongliang has experienced the ordeal of love and conflict with the older generation, and develops his individuality and subjectivity during his various adventures on the river and on the dry land of the riverbank. However, like Dasheng in North Side Story, Dongliang is unable to achieve social integration at the end of his prolonged adolescent years. After his father dies, it seems he is relieved and free to return ashore. However, at the end of the novel, he sees a notice board on the river bank that announces, “Beginning from today, Ku Dongliang of the Sunnyside Fleet is banned from coming ashore.”115 115

Ibid., 362.

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This notice board is carried by Bianjin, a retarded boy, who also has a fish-shaped birthmark on his buttocks and is now deemed to be the genuine descendant of the martyr Deng Shaoxiang. Su Tong uses the idiot Bianjin to signify the irrational and absurd world onshore. With Bianjin as the real son of Deng Shaoxiang, Su Tong discounts the significance of revolutionary martyrdom and the supposed honor attached to all members of such a martyr’s family. This is also an ironic rejoinder to Ku Wenxuan’s lifelong struggle to wrap himself in the identity of a son of a revolutionary martyr. For Dongliang, the biggest irony is that his social integration is rendered impossible by an idiot. He will never be able to return ashore. In this sense, The Boat to Redemption is another example of the parodistic Bildungsroman. Su Tong used the polarities of “wild” and “tame” to contrast children living during the Cultural Revolution with children living in the post-Mao era. He emphasized that the word “wild” does not mean that the children of the 1960s and 1970s—such as Dasheng, Hongqi, or even himself—observed no discipline. It means simply that they “responded to the whole world by their instinct and intuition.”116 The Cultural Revolution is an era full of heroes endorsed by the Party, but the teenagers in these novels by Su Tong cannot find any positive role models or guidance in the adult world. They have to look horizontally to their peers instead. In effect, they grow up on the streets amidst others roughly their own age. Even though in school they were forced to read and recite Mao’s boring sayings and homilies, the children always found interesting things to do after school, and looked for their role models on the streets. Su Tong affirmed that in a certain sense, they enjoyed an “absolute freedom” ( juedui de ziyou) because they followed their own inner nature. He concluded that “no matter how cruel the system is, it won’t be able to subdue human nature.”117 Many years later, after writing The Boat to Redemption, Su Tong emphasizes that when he recalls his memory of his childhood and adolescence experience during the Cultural Revolution, sufferings were always blunted somewhat by the atmosphere of a “revolutionary carnival.” The sadness was always something that he felt later on when reflecting upon his experiences more rationally.118

116 Su Tong and Huang Zhaohui, “Dianfu bing bu yiweizhe jinbu” [Subversion does not mean progress], Nandu zhoukan, March 5, 2006. 117 Ibid. 118 Su Tong, “Guanyu He’an de xiezuo,” Dangdai zuojia pinglun no. 1 (2010): 49.

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As an adult, Su Tong also reflected on the tragic side of this freedom. He refers to Wang Shuo’s story, “The Fierce Animals” (Dongwu xiongmeng, 1991), which was made into the movie In the Heat of the Sun (1994) by Jiang Wen. The story presents a series of seemingly happy and carefree adolescent experiences during the Cultural Revolution. The youthful characters feel happy at the time because they can do whatever they wish, following their instincts. Children can easily play truant, get involved in bloody gang fights or love affairs, and get up to all sorts of antics, as do Dasheng and his friends in North Side Story. They feel that this is simply the way the world is; as far as they know, everyone lives like this. There is no other point of reference. They do not know that children in other parts of the world live differently.119 As children, they do not recognize the danger of behavior motivated only by instinct and intuition. They do not know the danger of growing up without positive role models from the parental world. They did not realize that this untrammeled freedom will likely lead them to destruction. Meanwhile, the seemingly unrestricted behavior of many children during that time reveals their helplessness in coping with the realities around them and with their longing for a different world. Only after they grow up and live in a relatively normal society do they begin to realize the tragedy of their childhood. The passage of time also compels them to consider the cultural consequences of the Cultural Revolution, both for themselves and for their generation as a whole. That is why Su Tong as an adult novelist focused upon writing narratives about children growing up in the time of his own childhood. As an adult, he had a more sober attitude toward the life of young people in China during the 1960s and 1970s. He has a profoundly tragic sense of the frenetic, and chaotic aspects of life that many youth were leading in a time of trouble nationwide.

119

Su and Huang, “Dianfu bing bu yiweizhe jinbu.”

CHAPTER FOUR

FALLEN YOUTH: A TREMBLING LONER

Figure 2. Yu Hua in Beijing, July 2010 (Courtesy of the author)

In Chapter Three we saw how Su Tong’s Toon Street Series depicts the restless and tragic lives of a group of urban teenagers during the chaotic Cultural Revolution. To complete the picture of Chinese youth, Su Tong’s contemporary Yu Hua provides a rural and small town version of teenage coming-of-age experiences through some of his short stories and his full-length novel Cries in the Drizzle.1 Yu Hua 1 Yu Hua, Xiyu yu huhan [Cries and drizzle] (Taiwan: Yuanliu chuban gongsi, 1992). This novel was first published in Harvest in 1991 with the title Xiyu yu huhan. Yu

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seeks to express the disorder and distress so widespread among Chinese rural adolescents during the 1970s. Like their counterparts in the city, these youth demonstrate stunning subjectivity when their parental world fails to provide adequate models, support, and guidance. They withdraw to their peer community, retreat into fantasy, and sometimes even descend into psychosis. All are fallen youth; none becomes the socialist “new man” anticipated and promised by the CCP. Disillusion, destruction, violence, and death are what they have experienced on the way to adulthood. Therefore, the balance between the development of the young hero’s individuality and his gradual socialization is not achieved. Though the young heroes have to assert their autonomy and develop their individuality along their journey towards adulthood, they never achieve the sort of social integration that is normally expected in conventional Bildungsroman. In this way, Yu Hua’s coming-of-age narratives resemble Su Tong’s works in this genre in turning both the traditional European Bildungsroman and the modern Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo upside down. Yu Hua’s first full-length novel, Cries in the Drizzle written in 1991, has since been eclipsed by both his early experimental stories and his later works of critical realism, such as To Live, Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, and the later best-seller Brothers. Soon after its publication, Cries in the Drizzle encountered many reactions of disappointment from both readers and critics, who wrote overly negative reviews of the novel. For example, the avant-garde critic Chen Xiaoming dismisses the novel as a failure: “Because Yu Hua places too much emphasis on unique, personal experience and private psychology, the novel appears to suffer a narrative foreclosure that narrows the representation of life and historical reality.”2 Kang Liu argues that the effectiveness of Cries in the Drizzle is dampened by the author’s limited skills in managing the much “larger narrative scale of the novel”; this is because at this early stage in Yu Hua’s writing career, he had merely mastered “narrative skills in presenting experiences and events with intensity in the short

Hua changed the title to Zai xiyu zhong huhan when it was printed in book form by Huacheng chubanshe in 1993. However, the novel printed by Yuanliu chuban gongsi in Taiwan in 1992 still uses the old title Xiyu yu huhan. 2 Chen Xiaoming, “Zuihou de yishi” [The last ritual], Wenxue pinglun 5 (1991): 30–61. The English translation is cited from Kang Liu’s article “Short-Lived AvantGarde Literary Movement and Its Transformation,” in Globalization and Cultural Trends in China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004), 123.

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story and the novella.”3 Liu regards such stylistic characteristics of the novel as “illusory and allegorical narration of dreams, hallucinations, mysterious metaphors and symbols, and minute and objective details and descriptions of conversations” as nothing more than a minor extension of Yu Hua’s earlier formal experimentation.4 I disagree with Chen and Liu because they both fail to interpret the novel within the generic structure of the Bildungsroman or chengzhang xiaoshuo. Moreover, both critics view the thematic concerns of this novel in isolation from both Yu Hua’s earlier and later works. As a transitional work between Yu Hua’s avant-gardism and critical realism, Cries in the Drizzle remains the most psychologically complex novel the author has written thus far. It is precisely by means of Yu Hua’s utilization of “unique personal experience and private psychology”—highlighted by Chen Xiaoming as supposedly a key weakness of the novel—that the narrative reveals the inner individuality and potential development of the young protagonist—a salient feature of the Bildungsroman genre. However, Cries in the Drizzle is not the first work of fiction for which Yu Hua adopted the Bildungsroman structure. In his early experimental stories such as “On the Road at Eighteen” and “The April Third Incident,” Yu Hua exploited some of the formal elements of the Bildungsroman genre that later achieved a fuller development in Cries in the Drizzle. Yu Hua’s first major publication, “On the Road at Eighteen,” offers a convenient point of departure for analyzing how Yu Hua applied the Bildungsroman genre to visualize the tragic comingof-age experience of Chinese youth during troubled times, and for exploring this story’s parody of the thematic concern of the conventional Bildungsroman story. Describing a boy’s experiences as he leaves home, this notable short story achieves its symbolic effects through a series of reversals. The first-person narrator, a young boy, is walking alone on a remote highway, trying to find an inn or to hitch a ride from someone. Eventually he gets a lift from a truck driver who is transporting apples. Unfortunately, the truck breaks down along the way, and local village bystanders take advantage of the situation to steal both the apples as well as the tires from the immobilized truck. The boy receives a severe beating from the mob after trying to block

3 Kang Liu, “Short-Lived Avant-Garde Literary Movement and Its Transformation,” 122–123. 4 Ibid.

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them from pillaging the truck. However, the driver remains indifferent in the face of this brigandage, and winds up stealing the boy’s red backpack and departing with the thieving villagers. The boy stays behind in the abandoned truck, which serves as the inn for which he has been searching. Notwithstanding various modernist and postmodernist readings of the story by literary critics who ignore the Bildungsroman genre, “On the Road at Eighteen” is essentially a narrative of a young man’s “initiation and reconciliation” with the world.5 The story contains many formal elements of the conventional Bildungsroman— a youthful protagonist who has left home, an absence of paternal guidance, the experiencing of an ordeal, and a new recognition of the world. Moreover, this story embodies the thematic concerns of the Bildungsroman with individuality and socialization. Through a series of symbolic and absurd encounters with the outside world along the journey, the narrative discloses the dynamic and changing nature of the young hero, along with the rise of his individual subjectivity and autonomy, as well as a more sober recognition of himself and the world. When the young hero first sets out on his journey away from home, he harbors a very idealistic and innocent vision of the world that is marked by an awareness that seldom extends beyond the narrow range of what he has grown familiar with during his childhood.6 This is evident in his high spirits and lightheartedness at the beginning of the story. He comments on nearby mountains and clouds to his friends and relatives, whom he hails in high-spirited shouts. However, from the moment that he first hitches a ride on a truck, the world starts to reveal its darker face to him. The boy’s ensuing conversation with the truck driver, the truck’s breakdown on the road, the village mob and its violent brigandage, and his betrayal by the feckless driver shatter the cozy and readily fathomable world that he envisioned at the beginning of the journey. The outside world now presents itself as a puzzling, violent, and chaotic realm. Each of the reversals that occur on the road exemplifies a lack of reasonable behavior and an abundance of disorder in the real world. More importantly, these encounters force him to develop his individual subjectivity. It is through the process of defending the truck and its freight from the mob that the boy

5 Tang, “Residual Modernism: Narratives of the Self in Contemporary Chinese Fiction,” 10. 6 Cai, “The Lonely Traveler Revisited in Yu Hua’s Fiction,” 183.

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has to assert himself and develop his individual subjectivity. At the end of the story, he obtains a new recognition of both the outside world and his own fledgling self, and finds comfort in the abandoned truck. The absence of a father figure or other adult guidance that could provide a positive role model is evident in the story. At the beginning of the story, the young hero has “encountered quite a few people along the road, but none of them knew where the road leads, or whether there’s an inn there.”7 Obviously, he is seeking guidance from the adults he encounters along the way, but none of them has a clear answer for him, merely saying, “Keep on walking. You’ll see when you get there.”8 When he finally meets some adults—the truck driver and the local village bystanders—what he discovers in their behavior is irrationality, betrayal, absurdity, indifference, and brutality. As Xiaobing Tang has observed, the father figure is not “so much imaginary as it is undermined and de-realized.”9 The boy’s father is not even mentioned until the end of story, when the boy at rest inside the demolished truck recalls how he had been dispatched on this journey by his father. During the boy’s journey, the only link between him and his father is the latter’s gift of the red backpack, which was later stolen by the truck driver. Xiaobing Tang has interpreted the father figure as the purveyor of a “deceptive promise, a beautiful lie that has to be exposed,” pronouncing the red backpack to be “a strong symbol of revolutionary heritage, or the idealism of the father.”10 With the loss of the red backpack, the idealistic revolutionary heritage has departed, never to return. The young hero is completely cut off from his father, and left alone in a disordered, incomprehensible world. In spite of the formal elements of the Bildungsroman genre that “On the Road at Eighteen” contains, the story parodies the conventional Bildungsroman by concluding with an incomplete journey, thereby implying the absence of the young hero’s successful socialization. The conventional Bildungsroman maintains a fairly even balance between the development of individual subjectivity and gradual social integration. In a conventional Bildungsroman, the young protagonist 7 Yu Hua, “On the Road at Eighteen,” in The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature, 2nd ed. eds. Joseph S. M. Lau and Howard Goldblatt (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 439. 8 Ibid. 9 Tang, “Residual Modernism: Narratives of the Self in Contemporary Chinese Fiction,” 13. 10 Ibid., 14.

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gradually forms a mature personality along the road and achieves a high degree of socialization at the end of his journey, either by finding a vocation or entering into a happy marriage. However, in “On the Road at Eighteen,” the young hero’s adventure is full of reversals, and eventually cut short by violent brigandage. At the beginning of the story, we know that the young hero just left home and is looking for an inn, which signifies a goal in his life. After failing to find an inn, he starts to think about hitchhiking. Yet when he eventually hitches a ride in a truck, the truck is heading in the opposite direction from where the boy had intended to travel. During this process, we can see the compromises that the protagonist has felt compelled to make. “I don’t really care if the truck’s going in the opposite direction. I need to find an inn, and if there’s no inn, I need a truck. And the truck’s right in front of me.”11 All these compromises “displace all notions of destination and necessity,”12 and are at odds with the thematic tenor of the conventional Bildungsroman. At the end of the story, the young hero has reclined in the middle of the truck, where he feels comfortable and warm. This warmth and comfort result from the “sympathetic identification” the young hero finds between himself and the truck—both of them had been roughed up by violent attacks.13 This helps him to awaken to his own vulnerability, as well as to the potential brutality of the outside world. On the one hand, the protagonist defines the severely vandalized truck as his own “inn.” On the other hand, the immobilized truck shorn of its tires on a remote highway serves as a reminder of the young hero’s failure to achieve integration with society. With its tires removed by the brigands, the truck has lost its function of conveyance, thereby depriving the footloose young hero of mobility. The publication of “On the Road at Eighteen” helped establish Yu Hua’s reputation as an innovative writer. The story’s style and theme represented a fresh approach in contemporary Chinese fiction. Li Tuo opined that “Yu Hua’s fiction completely shatters our age-old conventional understanding of the relationship between literature and reality,

11

Yu Hua, “On the Road at Eighteen,” 440. Tang, “Residual Modernism: Narrative of the Self in Contemporary Chinese Fiction,” 14. 13 Ibid., 16. 12

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and between language and the objective world.”14 He especially appreciates Yu Hua’s use of language, and hails that it signaled another “emancipation of language.”15 This “emancipation of language” emerging from Yu Hua’s story is an implementation of the author’s unique view about the politics of language. In the 1980s, Yu Hua advocated a kind of “indeterminate language” (bu queding de yuyan) that was the very opposite of the popular language of the masses (dazhonghua de yuyan).16 He felt that the ordinary day-to-day language of the popular masses possesses no individuality; one sentence may evoke merely one meaning. Popular language depicts an overly predictable reality and restricts one’s understanding of this world. Indeterminate language, by contrast, breaks through the confines of popular language, searching instead for a more truthful and reliable mode of expression that reveals a world open to limitless variations and interpretations. In order to reveal the true nature of the world, language must violate common sense, seeking to offer multiple possibilities and many levels of understanding. In doing so, it must also be prepared to break the bonds of normal grammar, applying grammatical juxtaposition, displacement, and transposition. Yu Hua has observed that many ordinary words such as pain, fear, and joy do not reflect an individual’s true inner feelings, but are merely broad generalizations and subjective judgments.17 Only indeterminate language can express these emotional or psychological states—language that is more objective and authentic than popular language. In addition, at the level of language, Yu Hua has been more concerned with revealing desire than with merely portraying the character of the protagonist. Within the context of a literary work, Yu Hua believes that people, trees, houses, and rivers all have their own unique desires. A river demonstrates its desire by flowing. A house discloses its desire by silence. The combination of all these desires forms the symbolism of a

14 Tuo Li, “Xu: Xuebeng hechu?” [Preface: Where will the avalanche go?], in Yu Hua’s Shibasui chumen yuanxing [On the road at eighteen] (Taibei: Yuanliu chubanshe, 1990), 9. 15 Ibid., 10–12. 16 Yu Hua, “Xuwei de zuopin” [Contrived works], in Wo nengfou xiangxin ziji [Can I believe in myself?] (Beijing: Renmin ribao chubanshe, 1998), 161. In June 1989, Yu Hua published this famous manifesto to illustrate his writing attitude, causing an intense response in the Chinese literary scene. 17 Ibid., 167–168.

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literary work.18 Yu Hua has not found much artistic value in describing individual characteristics through abstract words such as optimistic, cunning, honest, or melancholy; by themselves, such words do not truly reflect an individual’s inner heart. Words such as these can even hamper the writer’s extended exploration of a protagonist’s sophisticated psychology. Critics also link the absurdity and the disturbing simplicity of “On the Road at Eighteen” with Franz Kafka’s (1883–1924) stories. Yu Hua admits that he has been deeply influenced by foreign literature, especially the works of Kafka and Kawabata in the 1980s when he started to write. Yu Hua did not grow up surrounded by literature. He finished primary school in 1973, the same year in which his small town of Haiyan opened a library. His father applied for two library cards for Yu Hua and his brother. Yu Hua started reading fiction, especially novels. He read almost all of the major PRC novels of the Mao era from cover to cover, including such well-known works as Bright Sunny Skies (Yan yang tian, 1964), Golden Road (Jinguang dadao, 1972, 1974), Shining Red Star (Shanshan de hongxing, 1972), and Wind and Cloud in the Mine (Kuangshan fengyun, 1972). The latter two were his favorites from this period.19 However, Yu Hua found most of the Mao-era fiction boring, particularly compared with the more fascinating big-character posters on the street during the Cultural Revolution. On his way back home from school each day, he would spend an hour in front of them, observing how people he knew hurled invectives and spread slanderous rumors against each other with the most malicious turns of phrase. On the posters, people’s imaginations were brought into full play, employing literary techniques such as fabrication, exaggeration, analogy, and irony. As Yu Hua remembered, “This is the earliest genuine literature I read. On the street, in front of big-character posters, I began to like literature.”20 It may seem ironic, even humorous, that invective-laden posters would spark Yu Hua’s interest in literature. The posters, however, were far more interesting than the made-to-order “command literature” 18

Ibid. For more information about Yu Hua’s early reading experience see Yu Hua, “Wo zuichu de xianshi” [My earliest reality], in Wo nengfou xiangxin ziji, 205–212; Michael Standaert, “Interview with Yu Hua” (interviewed August 30, 2003, University of Iowa International Writing Program), MCLC Resource Center Publication, 2004 at http://mclc.osu.edu/rc/pubs/yuhua.htm (accessed June 2010). 20 Yu, “Wo zuichu de xianshi,” 211. 19

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(zunming wenxue) of the Mao era. Yu Hua frequently employs such posters in his writings, giving detailed descriptions of their contents, as in the novels Chronicle of a Blood Merchant and To Live, as well as in his story “The Year Nineteen Eighty-six” (Yijiu baliu nian, 1987). After Yu Hua finished middle school, he received some basic medical training, later becoming a dentist in a Haiyan health clinic. However, Yu Hua felt that this job was too dull and boring. He found it unbearable to work eight hours a day, punching the time clock whenever arriving and departing for the workday. He preferred a more flexible and creative vocation. His primary motive for writing, he once averred, was to avoid working as a dentist any longer. His greatest ambition was to work in the town’s cultural center, because people there were not confined within an office eight hours a day, but could wander around town instead. After getting some short stories published in various literary magazines, Yu Hua thereupon began working as a writer at the cultural center.21 Henceforth, as he eventually moved to Jiaxing and later Beijing, all of the changes in his life had something to do with writing. When he finally began to try his luck at writing, China was fortunately experiencing a certain degree of liberation from Maoist totalitarianism. Literature soon resumed its pre-Maoist role as a significant part of most well-educated people’s lives. Many classical Chinese books and translations of foreign novels were reprinted, and many people lined up in front of PRC bookstores to buy these books, revealing the pent-up literary thirst in the wake of the Mao Era. Yu Hua was swept up in this PRC wave of a renewed interest in literature. At the outset, Yu Hua was confused in the face of such a vast array of previously inaccessible literature, whether foreign or Chinese, classical or contemporary. As though drifting on an ocean, he lost his direction. When he was finally able to make a decision, he chose translations of foreign literature as his preferred reading material, stating: My choice is a writer’s choice, or a choice made with writing in mind, rather than a choice of attitude toward life and experience. Only from foreign literature can I really understand what writing techniques are and realize the richness of literary expressions through the practice of my own writing.22

21 22

Standaert, “Interview with Yu Hua.” Yu Hua, “Wo weihe xiezuo?” [Why do I write?], in Wo nengfou xiangxin ziji, 193.

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The Japanese writer Kawabata Yasunari (1899–1972) was the first foreign author to deeply influence Yu Hua.23 In 1980, Yu Hua read Kawabata’s short story, “The Izu Dancer,” and was stunned by Kawabata’s writing. The early 1980s were the golden era of Scar Literature (shanghen wenxue) in mainland China, but from “The Izu Dancer” Yu Hua discovered there was another way to express trauma that was much more powerful and touching than that found in Scar Literature. For the next five or six years, he was infatuated with Kawabata, a sensitive and exquisite writer. It may have been limiting or even harmful for Yu Hua to have been so preoccupied with one writer for years on end. Fortunately, he encountered the writing of Franz Kafka in the spring of 1986. Kafka’s stories such as “The Metamorphosis” and “The Country Doctor” introduced Yu Hua to a new freedom of form and expression. Milan Kundera describes Kafka’s novels as “the seamless fusion of dream and reality; a supremely lucid gaze set on the modern world, along with the most unfettered imagination.”24 This sort of unleashed imagination attracted Yu Hua, disentangling him from his previous obsession with Kawabata. Yu Hua regarded Kafka’s writing as being free as the wind, and wanted his own writing to be similarly relaxed. At the end of 1986, he published his first celebrated short story, “On the Road at Eighteen.” Other stories, such as “The Past and the Punishments” (Wangshi yu xingfa, 1989) and “The Year Nineteen Eighty-six,” also show the influence of Kafka.25 In literature, the influence of other writers encourages a writer to constantly discover new ways to make his or her own writing more independent. “The legacies of Kawabata and Kafka” Yu Hua asserts, “are two museums that tell us what has once happened in the history of literature; they are not banks, and do not support any successors.”26

23 Yu Hua, “Chuanduan kangcheng yu kafuka” [Kawabata and Kafka], in Wo nengfou xiangxin ziji?, 90–94. 24 Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher (New York: Grove Press, 1986), 81. 25 Some critics have made detailed comparisons between Yu Hua’s “The Year Nineteen Eighty-six” and Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” and between “On the Road at Eighteen” and “The Country Doctor.” See Li Xiaona, “Ziyou de xiezuo: qiantan Kafuka dui Yu Hua de yingxiang” [Free writing: brief talk on Kafka’s influence upon Yu Hua], Yichun daxue xuebao shekeban 25, no. 5 (Oct. 2003): 81–82. Sun Caixia, “Xingfa de yiwei” [The implication of penalty], Xiandai wenxue zazhi, 2003, no. 3:49–51. 26 Yu, “Chuanduan kangcheng yu kafuka,” 94.

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While Kawabata taught Yu Hua the basic skills of literary imagination, Kafka revealed insights into the liberation of thought. Though some critics have praised Yu Hua for “seeming to have had almost no apprentice period,”27 this does not mean that Yu Hua did not consciously explore writing techniques, methods, and the relation between literature and truth (zhenshi). Not only had Yu Hua been influenced by such writers as Kawabata and Kafka in the early stage of his writing—he also developed some creative ideas of how to present the truth of the world through language. For Yu Hua, “On the Road at Eighteen” reflected a new attitude in his writing: the quest for truth, that goal of philosophers and mystics through the ages. In this regard, Yu Hua is similar to Marcel Proust (1871–1922), for whom the search for truth took the form of “a depiction of error.”28 Proust applied “the depiction of error” to distinguish his understanding of truth from “useless duplication of days gone by.”29 Yu Hua has also indicated that all of his efforts at writing have been attempts to approach truth, a term with specific connotations for him. At the beginning of his career, Yu Hua’s mode of thinking was tightly restricted by common sense and a rather literalistic perception of reality. In 1986, however, he suddenly broke free to explore the concept of truth on a more abstract level.30 He reasoned that life itself is not real; only people’s spiritual existence is real. Only when people enter into their spiritual world can they truly feel the boundlessness of it. In the spiritual world, all of the values propounded by common sense are shattered. Yu Hua has insisted that people’s experiences in daily life tend to rob them of imagination. These experiences are only pertinent to a superficial level of understanding that is estranged from the essence of spirit. As a result, truth is inevitably distorted through its manifestation in everyday life. Yu Hua has felt that an individual’s shallowness stems from limitations in personal experience.31 For instance, if a writer describes one

27 Yiheng Zhao, “Yu Hua: Fiction as Subversion,” World Literature Today 65, no. 3 (Summer 1991): 415. 28 Vincent Descombes, Proust’s Philosophy of the Novel, trans. Catherine Chance Macksey (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1992), 4. 29 Marcel Proust and Jacques Riviere, Correspondence: 1914–1922, ed. Philip Kolb (Paris: Plon, 1955), 3. 30 Yu, “Xuwei de zuopin,” 161. 31 Ibid., 158.

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thing just as it stands, no matter how vivid and honest his description may be, he can never entirely capture the true nature of that thing. Instead, he reveals a merely superficial level of truth. Such a concrete approach to writing must necessarily suffocate the talents of a writer, rendering our world full of merely concrete things such as houses, streets, and rivers—without revealing the essence of the world. When Yu Hua concluded that such limited forms of writing could deal merely in superficial truth, he started to look for a new manner of expression. Instead of faithfully describing the pattern of a thing, he employed what he called a “contrived” (xuwei de) manner of expression similar to Proust’s “depiction of errors.”32 The reason that Yu Hua specifically chose the term “contrived” is that in comparison with people’s everyday experience and common sense, his manner of expression deviates from the order and logic of the material world, allowing him more freedom in approaching what he sees as the inner essence of the world. Yu Hua identifies “On the Road at Eighteen” as one example of this manner of expression.33 He chooses the Bildungsroman genre to project his vision of the predicament of the self amidst a chaotic reality and to reveal the truth as he sees it in the world. The Bildungsroman structure with parodistic elements, the intervention of violence, and the series of reversals manifest in “On the Road at Eighteen” soon become preoccupying motifs in the author’s many other stories. For example, “Blood and Plum Blossoms” is about a vendetta-driven journey of a young man named Ruan Haikuo. This story is in part a parody of both the martial arts genre and the Bildungsroman genre. In her discussion of the image of the lonely traveler in Yu Hua’s “Blood and Plum Blossoms,” Rong Cai argues that this story can be read as a parodistic Bildungsroman because the author denies the young hero Ruan Haikuo any moral maturation while depriving the reader of the satisfaction of witnessing the protagonist avenge a wrong. Ruan’s journey is thus “wasted effort.”34 Another typical coming-of-age story among Yu Hua’s early works is “The April Third Incident,” of which I will give a detailed analysis in the following paragraphs.

32 33 34

Ibid., 158–172. Ibid., 158. Cai, “The Lonely Traveler in Yu Hua’s Fiction,” 180.

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In many articles, Yu Hua has expressed his appreciation of Lu Xun’s writing, especially Lu Xun’s treatment of detail. To be sure, at the early stages of his writing career, Yu Hua was chiefly influenced by foreign writers such as Kawabata and Kafka. However, with the passage of time, Yu Hua found himself attracted to a greater range of writing styles, thereby permitting more and more writers to enter his field of vision. Yu Hua has regretted that a true understanding of Lu Xun came so late in his career. Though he read Lu Xun’s short stories at an early age, he did not recognize Lu Xun’s literary value until he became a mature writer. In the mid-1990s, he reread Lu Xun and was deeply attracted by the concise narrative style and profound meaning of Lu Xun’s short stories. He concluded: I think it is too bad I did not read Lu Xun earlier . . . . However, he will also have an effect on my future life, reading and writing. I feel he will support me emotionally and ideologically at every moment.35

Some critics have compared Yu Hua’s early stories with Lu Xun’s, pointing out that Yu Hua is one of the best successors of Lu Xun in the critique of the national character and the portrayal of personal enlightenment. These qualities are illustrated in such stories as “The Year Nineteen Eighty-six,” and “One Kind of Reality.”36 Yu Hua recalls being “flabbergasted” by Lu Xun’s “A Madman’s Diary” (Kuangren riji).37 In the same year that published “On the Road at Eighteen,” Yu Hua wrote “The April Third Incident,” in which the fusion of dream, illusion, and reality is reminiscent of Lu Xun’s “A Madman’s Diary.” The story reveals the unexpected discovery and exploration of the absurdity of reality by an adolescent who is suddenly brought face-toface with the adult world. Like “A Madman’s Diary,” “The April Third Incident” focuses on the demented psychological state of a young man who has just celebrated his eighteenth birthday. He is haunted by the illusion that people around him, including his parents, neighbors, former classmates, and even strangers, have all joined a conspiracy to kill him on April 3rd. The time span of the story is only two or three days. 35

Yu Hua, “Wo zhiyao xiezuo, jiushi huijia,” in Wo nengfou xiangxin ziji, 254. Ye Liwen, “Dianfu lishi lixing: Yu Hua xiaoshuo de qimeng xushu” [Subversion of the history and rationality: the enlightenment narrative in Yu Hua’s stories], Xiaoshuo pinglun, 2004, no. 4:40–45; Yiheng Zhao, “Yu Hua: Fiction as Subversion,” 415–416. 37 Yu, “Wo zhiyao xiezuo, jiushi huijia,” 254. 36

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Much of the action, however, occurs in the protagonist’s dreams and imagination. The story, written in 1986 when Yu Hua was still fond of experimental writing, is not easy to read; in fact, it seems that Yu Hua has deliberately made the narrative line difficult to follow by breaking the chronological sequence apart and then rearranging the episodes. The story requires more than one reading to understand the plot and its implications, as well as to distinguish scenes of fantasy from those of matter-of-fact occurrences. Some paragraphs starting or ending with ellipses can be read as the protagonist’s fantasies about the supposed dangers and threats he faces. The story contains twenty-two sections and uses numbers as subtitles. There are thematic links among evennumbered sections and among odd-numbered sections; for example, the reader’s understanding of the plot can be enhanced by reading sections eight, ten, twelve, fourteen, sixteen, and eighteen consecutively and then turning to sections eleven, thirteen, fifteen, and seventeen. The actual chronological sequence of sections three, four, and five is in fact three, five, and four. The author’s distortion of chronological sequences helps to reinforce the protagonist’s confusion between fantasy, dream and reality. The Chinese critic Ye Liwen has read this story as Yu Hua’s extension of Lu Xun’s madman, who constantly senses the real or imagined hostility of the outside world toward him. The only characters the madman can read in Chinese history books are the two representing “cannibalism” (chi ren).38 Lu Xun’s portrait of the madman is “afflicted with an increasingly sharpened perception of reality.”39 “Thus it is precisely the madman’s growing insanity that provides the basis for an unusual process of cognition which leads to his final realization of the true nature of his society and culture.”40 What does Yu Hua want to pass on to his readers in portraying an afflicted young man? Leo Ou-fan Lee points out that the “recurring image of the moon gives rise symbolically to a double meaning of both lunacy (in its Western connotation) and enlightenment (in its Chinese etymological implication)” in “A Madman’s Diary.”41 Similarly, the hallucination suffered by Yu Hua’s young protagonist also helps

38

Ye, “Dianfu lishi lixing: Yu Hua xiaoshuo de qimeng xushu,” 40–45. Leo Ou-fan Lee, Voice from the Iron House: A Study of Lu Xun (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987), 55. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 39

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him gain a fuller and renewed sense of reality. Lu Xun’s and Yu Hua’s treatment of insanity as an instrument for enlightenment finds parallel in Thomas Mann’s employment of sickness in The Magic Mountain. As the critic Joseph P. Lawrence points out, The Magic Mountain is a book about “sickness” in which Mann sees that “sickness humbles the spirit, opening up access to forces more vital than those it itself commands.”42 Mann uses sickness to distance the protagonist Hans Castorp from his family and secular life in the “flatlands,” thereby disentangling Castorp from his “ ‘exterior ties’ in order to clear the way for [his] searching interior inquiries to come.”43 In the same vein, for both Lu Xun and Yu Hua, madness grows out of a hyperactive psyche, alienates the protagonist from the outside world, and yet leads him toward a more profound sensibility and consciousness. Lu Xun’s madman lives in a transitional era in Chinese history, is trained as a traditional Chinese literatus, and sees the dark side of traditional Chinese values and culture. The young protagonist in “The April Third Incident” grows up in a contemporary authoritarian society and does not share the Republican-era madman’s vision of Chinese history. His hypersensitivity to hostility from the outside world is more a reflection of the turbulent psychological experience of adolescence. It seems, however, that Yu Hua wants to emphasize that the age of eighteen can be a watershed in a young man’s life. The protagonist starts to distance himself from his childhood; he sees the outside world differently; he relies heavily on his own intuition, feeling and judgment; he flees from his home; and he sets out on a strange journey. Yu Hua’s choice of “The April Third Incident” as a title is not random; that date is the author’s birthday, suggesting that the author is projecting personal feelings into this story. The story starts on the morning of the protagonist’s eighteenth birthday. The protagonist is the only character in the story who is not given a name, suggesting that Yu Hua intended to emphasize the typical psychological turbulence experienced by a boy growing up. In the story, his parents have forgotten his birthday, and there is no celebration for him at all. The only feeling he has is a lack of support.

42 Joseph P. Lawrence, “Transfiguration in Silence: Hans Castorp’s Uncanny Awakening,” in A Companion to Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain,” ed. Stephen Dowden (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1999), 4. 43 Edward Engelberg, “Ambiguous Solitude: Hans Castorp’s Sturm und Drang nach Osten,” in A Companion to Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain,” 102.

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The age of eighteen is a turning point in the protagonist’s life. He has a premonition that things will be different after this day. Twice in the story, the image of a harmonica is associated with the age of eighteen. At the beginning, the narrator “walks into the station of the age of eighteen, and this station is permeated with the sound of a harmonica.”44 At the end of the story, the young man is on the freight train recalling a neighbor who played a harmonica at his window every day but died of hepatitis at the age of eighteen—“hence, the sound of the harmonica also dies.”45 The harmonica symbolizes the joy and innocence of childhood. When the boy next door dies on his eighteenth birthday, the beautiful sound of the harmonica dies, as does the happiness and innocence of childhood and the beauty of the outside world. The protagonist imagines that a big conspiracy against him is set to go into action on April third. His parents, neighbors, friends, classmates, and various strangers are all collaborators in this imagined conspiracy. Recalling “A Madman’s Diary,” whose cognition begins with “sensory perception—the snarling glances from a dog and a neighbor, gossip and comments from the people on the streets”—the protagonist of Yu Hua’s story eavesdrops on his parents’ conversation on the balcony and their exchanges with neighbors.46 He catches fragments of conversations: “Are you almost ready?” and “April the third.” He sees the suspicious grins of his former classmates and hears their chitchat.47 He captures a vague intimation of impending disaster from the girl Snow White, on whom he has a crush. He notices that some strangers on the street appear to be spying on him, and believes that a truck driver attempted to knock him down. To his big surprise, he discovers that “even the children are properly trained” to spy on him, aim at him with a toy gun, and lie to him.48 This image of threatening children is similar to that in Lu Xun’s “A Madman’s Diary.” Also noteworthy in Yu Hua’s story is the image of father as overseer and persecutor. In the frame of Bildungsroman, this is a deformation of the absence of fatherhood. Surrounded by what seems to him to be so much persecution,

44 Yu Hua, “Siyue sanri shijian” [The April third incident], in Wo danxiao ru shu [Timid as a mouse, and other stories] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 2004), 113. 45 Ibid, 165. 46 Leo Ou-fan Lee, Voice from the Iron House: A Study of Lu Xun, 55. 47 Yu Hua, “Siyue sanri shijian” [The April third incident], in Wo danxiao ru shu [Timid as a mouse, and other stories] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 2004), 124. 48 Ibid., 142.

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the young protagonist finally decides to flee from home. He climbs on a coal freight train the night before the April third. The combination of dream, imagination, and reality makes readers uncertain or even suspicious about the certainty of the coming conspiracy against the protagonist. The more readers read of the story, the more they suspect that the conspiracy is just the young protagonist’s conjecture or hallucination. Regardless of whether the reader believes in the conspiracy or not, it is the truthfulness of a subjective state projected in the young protagonist’s mind that matters. In the eyes of this young man, the world is full of hidden crises, uncertainty, conspiracy, untrustworthiness, and absurdity. It is the same world in which he used to live, but since his eighteenth birthday, he judges this world from his own perspective. His fantasy is, in fact, a self-conception and a sober recognition of reality in disguise. Yiheng Zhao has observed that “reality in Yu Hua’s works appears so flighty that it is more insubstantial than fantasy, and the reality in fantasy is more verisimilar than the actual reality . . . the unreal results from an interpretive effort of meanings and is frustratingly subjective.”49 The subjective interiority— one significant aspect of Bildungsroman genre—is revealed during this process of recognizing reality and developing a concept of the self. More importantly, the young hero realizes the relationship between him and the world is unsettling and ruptured. At the end of the story, the young hero has to assert himself by jumping on a coal freight train and embarking upon a new journey. Here again, as in “On the Road at Eighteen,” there is an uneven relationship between the development of individuality and gradual socialization within society. The more individual subjectivity and autonomy he develops, the more alienated he becomes from society. The social integration that occurs in conventional Bildungsroman is never achieved. Jumping on the freight train is more a sign of escaping from society than of entering it. The mobility the train brings is a means of escaping society and reality. This ending turns the story into a parodistic Bildungsroman. In both “On the Road at Eighteen” and “The April Third Incident,” violence is a motif to interrupt the youthful journey, and chaos is one of the signatures of the outside world. Yu Hua’s friends and readers have sometimes asked him, “Why do you write so much about death and violence?” Yu Hua answered this question with another question,

49

Zhao, “Yu Hua: Fiction as Subversion,” 416.

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“Why is there so much violence and death in life?”50 In the years 1986 and 1987, Yu Hua also wrote “The Year Nineteen Eighty-six,” “Mistakes by the Riverside,” and “One Kind of Reality” (Xianshi yizhong). The common subject matter of these stories is cruelty and violence. Yu Hua’s skepticism about common sense directly resulted in his extreme ideas about chaos and violence. Since he no longer trusted daily life experiences, common sense and language conventions—as stated in “Contrived Works”—he started to pay attention to violence and catastrophe, through which he discloses a multi–dimensional and contradictory reality. As Xiaobing Tang summarizes, “thus violence and catastrophe have their thematic value because they expose a chaotic reality that is the suppressed truth of our seemingly well-ordered existence.”51 Yu Hua admitted that in the 1980s, he was an angry and grim writer, depicting this negative side of reality. 52 The above-mentioned three short stories all reveal this alterative view of the world—a world of violence, blood, and death—phenomena that Yu Hua drew upon to express his dark meditations on human existence and human relationships. “The Year Nineteen Eighty-six,” for example, describes a history teacher’s self-mutilation, an action intended to remind people of the catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution, along with other phases of the violent past. “Mistakes by the Riverside” is a parody of the detective story in which the causal chain of motifs carefully preserved in a conventional detective story turns out to be totally irrelevant to the murder. Insanity is the only explanation for a series of murders on the banks of a river. Therefore, “innocence and guilt are confused in the process of fantasy-reality mutation.”53 “One Kind of Reality,” for its part, is a subversion of the Chinese myth of family amity through the cruel killings of two brothers by way of a feud within a large family.54 During the period in which he wrote these stories, Yu Hua thought violence stemmed from an individual’s 50 Yu Hua, “Preface to the Italian Version of One kind of reality,” in Wo nengfou xiangxin ziji, 151–53. 51 Tang, “Residual Modernism: Narratives of the Self in Contemporary Chinese Fiction,” 18. 52 Yu Hua, “Huozhe zhongwen ban zixu” [Author’s preface to the Chinese version of To Live], in Wo nengfou xiangxin ziji?, 144. 53 Zhao, “Yu Hua: Fiction as Subversion,” 419. 54 For more analyses of Yu Hua’s “One Kind of Reality,” see Yiheng Zhao, “Yu Hua: Fiction as Subversion,” 415–420; Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg, “One Kind of Chinese Reality: Reading Yu Hua,” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 18 (1996): 129–145.

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innermost desires, and that violence was full of passion. In the face of violence and chaos, civilization had degenerated into a slogan, and order into an ornament. This obsession with violence and chaos in Yu Hua’s early writing not only reflects the author’s intellectual concern of revealing a multidimensional and contradictory reality, but is also related to the author’s real-life coming-of-age experience. The vision of life reflected in a writer’s works is often closely connected with his or her personal life. Dickens’ childhood, for instance, throws light on certain recurring characters in his novels, particularly orphans and rejected children. Understanding Kafka’s and Zhang Ailing’s problems with their fathers likewise helps readers better interpret “The Metamorphosis” and “The Golden Cangue.” In order for readers to obtain a better understanding of Yu Hua’s obsession with violence and death in his stories, therefore, it would be helpful to review his early life. Yu Hua was born on 3 April 1960 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province, the second son in a doctor’s family. When he was still a toddler, the family moved to Haiyan in pursuit of his father’s dream of becoming a surgeon. As Yu Hua himself said in an interview, “[his] childhood was spent roaming in the hospital.”55 He remained calm when facing death and blood. Young Yu Hua often sat beside the door of the operating room to wait for his father. Every time his father came out, his white gown, hat, and gloves were stained with blood. Sometimes a nurse followed his father out of the operating room carrying a bucketful of blood and pieces of flesh. Later, the family moved into the hospital compound. The window of Yu Hua’s bedroom was directly opposite the mortuary. Masked by several trees and seemingly without a door, the mortuary looked lonely, even mysterious; Yu Hua would often stare at it. At noon one summer day, young Yu Hua entered this room, finding nothing but a concrete slab inside. He stood beside the slab and touched it cautiously. “It felt incomparably cool and refreshing. On that scorching afternoon, for me it was not death, but life.”56 Afterwards, when the summer days were at their most sweltering, Yu Hua would often come into this room, lie down on the cool concrete slab, and take a nap. He was afraid of neither death nor blood. Yu Hua later admitted that those hidden and

55 Helen Finken, “Interview with Yu Hua, Author of To Live (Huozhe),” Education about Asia 8 no. 3 (Winter 2003), 20. 56 Yu, “Wo zuichu de xianshi,” 153.

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fragmentary impressions of his life as a small boy certainly played a major role in determining his future literary direction. For example, the small mortuary and the concrete slab appear three times in Yu Hua’s novel To Live.57 The protagonist Fugui experiences the death of his son, daughter, and son-in-law in the same hospital, and their bodies are each laid out in turn on the same concrete slab. In Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, the hospital is also an important setting, where the protagonist Xu Sanguan goes to sell his blood twelve times.58 More importantly, death, blood and violence became convenient motifs in his early stories aiming at “explor[ing] the multitude of possibilities that the literary voice could offer.”59 In spite of his efforts to constantly explore multiple aspects of reality, Yu Hua has recognized that he can never fully understand the nature of the world in its entirety. His understanding at different periods of his life was always of a limited portion of that world. However, this kind of understanding was actually a simultaneous recognition of the world’s structure as a whole. From “On the Road at Eighteen” to “One Kind of Reality,” the narrative structures of his earlier stories imitated the structures of reality, with the plots and paragraphs of the stories progressing chronologically. By the time he wrote “A World like Mist,” however, he had abandoned such imitation. He adopted a structural mode of juxtaposition and transposition so as to present the diversity of the world in all its complexity. At this time, he felt a deep concern about the uncertainty of fate. He reconsidered the various kinds of relationships in this world: for example, between one person and another, between people and reality, between houses and streets, and between trees and rivers. All of these things appear to have their own destinies endowed by the world, and within them are hidden the inherent laws of the universe.60 Yu Hua constructed “World like Mist” on the basis of this recognition. In this story, the connections between one person and another, people and things, one things and another, one plot and another, and one detail and another—all seem blurred by the “mutation between real-

57

Yu Hua, To Live, trans. Michael Berry (New York: Anchor Books, 2003). Yu Hua, Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, trans. Andrew F. Jones (New York: Pantheon Books, 2003). 59 Standaert, “Interview with Yu Hua” (interviewed August 30, 2003, University of Iowa International Writing Program). 60 Yu, “Xuwei de zuopin,” 170. 58

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ity and imagination.”61 Yu Hua felt this way of writing fully expresses the strength of fate—the inherent law of the workings of the world. Yu Hua also had a specific understanding about time. The writing of “This Story Is for Willow” (Xian’gei shaonü Yangliu) was an implementation of Yu Hua’s conception of time, as explained in his statement: “When I utilized time to construct the story “This Story Is for Willow,” I felt excited about rushing into a new world. After I tried to employ a split, overlapping, and displacement of chronological time, the happiness that I gained exceeded my expectations.”62 Yu Hua insisted that time is the framework of the events that occur in the past, whereby chronological sequences can be broken during the progression of a narrative.63 When the facts of the past are rearranged in a different chronological order, different meanings occur. Obviously, this kind of arrangement or rearrangement is achieved in memory, an arrangement that Yu Hua has called the “logic of memory” (jiyi de luoji). Memory can reconstruct the past world in any sequence of events. In Yu Hua’s view, after each reconstruction of the past through memory, a new meaning can be bestowed upon the past world.64 Later, this recognition of the relation between time and memory would be further embodied in the narrative structure of Cries in the Drizzle. In his preface to the Italian translation of Cries in the Drizzle, Yu Hua describes it as a book of memories: My experience is that writing can constantly evoke memory, and I believe these memories belong not merely to myself. They are possibly an image of one era, or a mark left by the world on the inner mind of one person . . . Memory cannot restore the past. It only reminds us once in a while of what we had before!65

In particular, Cries in the Drizzle reminds us of what we once had in our childhood. The novel’s structure is based on Yu Hua’s understanding of time in memory. Memory can reconstruct the past world at any time. With each new reconstruction, new meaning is bestowed on the past world. Within the narrative of this novel, time is transformed into fragments of memories. Some critics view this earlier novel as

61

Zhao, “Yu Hua: Fiction as Subversion,” 416. Yu, “Xuwei de zuopin,” 171. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid. 65 Yu Hua, “Wo yongyou liangge rensheng” [I have two lives], in Wo nengfou xiangxin ziji, 148. 62

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the conclusion and summit of Yu Hua’s experimental writing, with one going so far as to characterize it as Yu Hua’s “first and last avantgarde novel.”66 However, I consider Cries in the Drizzle not an avant-garde novel, but rather a transitional work that is situated in between Yu Hua’s earlier experimental writing and his later critical realist writing. In many aspects, this novel retains the narrative techniques evident in Yu Hua’s earlier avant-garde stories, such as the illusory and allegorical narration of dreams, hallucinations, metaphors, symbols, and absurdities accompanied by violence. Meanwhile, it contains such narrative techniques as “mimetic or figural dialogues,” “the character’s reported speech,” and melodramatic “rawness and exaggeration”67 that later developed further to help achieve Yu Hua’s plain realism in To Live, Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, and Brothers. Yu Hua explains his change of writing style from avant-gardism to critical realism as the result of his change of attitude toward his characters. He admits that when he wrote in the 1980s, he still believed that a writer was above his fictional characters, that “the writer is a god and can create everything,” while “characters were more abstract, like signs.”68 Yet later in the 1990s when writing To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, Yu Hua claimed that he “started to hear the voice of his characters,” and discovered that “characters could lead themselves,” and “the story would lead itself.”69 This statement reveals Yu Hua’s strategic change in guiding the reader’s understanding of the story: instead of using fictional characters as mechanized props in the plot, the writer would follow along with the natural flow of the plot—the characters could lead themselves and speak for themselves. In other words, Yu Hua began to dissolve into his writing, and in a sense to become the characters in his works. Placing Yu Hua’s change of narrative style in sociopolitical context, this is his natural response to changing social realities. As Bakhtin has pointed out, the choice of a specific genre or narrative style is

66 Liu, “Short-Lived Avant-Garde Literary Movement and Its Transformation,” 113; also see Wu Yiqin, “Gaobie xuwei de xingshi” [Farewell to hypocritical form], Wenyi zhengming, 2000, no. 1:71. 67 Liu, “Short-Lived Avant-Garde Literary Movement and Its Transformation,” 124. 68 Standaert, “Interview with Yu Hua” (interviewed August 30, 2003, University of Iowa International Writing Program). 69 Ibid.

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the author’s response to some aspect of reality. Through the genre or narrative style, the author conceptualizes or visualizes his experience and reflects his discursive concern or view of a specific aspect of reality. Both the early avant-gardism and later critical realism are Yu Hua’s conscious choices. His experimental writing from 1986 to 1989 is a response to China’s transformation from a “revolutionary society to a post-socialist state, bore the imprint of ‘global’ (Western) cultural fashions and trends from high modernism to postmodernism.”70 Yu Hua and his contemporaries such as Su Tong, Mo Yan, Can Xue, and Ge Fei were at that time searching for alternative modes of writing to challenge established literary conventions, mainly the Mao Era’s formulaic ideological writing and the early post-Mao Thaw Era’s Scar Literature.71 Yu Hua himself makes his motivation very clear in the following statement: When I started to write, China had just gone through the Cultural Revolution. Literature was virtually nonexistent. Novels were all written in the same kind of narrative style. It was a deplorable situation. The evolution of different styles of narrative is what allows literature to survive. I believe that it is with my effort and the effort of a few of my contemporaries that Chinese literature now enjoys such diversity and abundance in narrative style.72

Their innovations have been mainly at the level of language and form. They have avoided the sensitive and sensational political topics that were characteristic of Thaw Era Scar Literature. Their aesthetic experiments have been more accessible to literary critics than to ordinary readers. The 1989 June Fourth is a crucial sociopolitical reason for Yu Hua and his fellow experimental writers to have changed their narrative styles. After the Crackdown, the relatively relaxed political and cultural atmosphere that had been pervasive during most of the 1980s was not available any more. With the deepening of the Party-state’s economic reforms and commercialization of society in the 1990s, these avant-garde authors’ aesthetic experiments became unrelated

70

Liu, “Short-Lived Avant-Garde Literary Movement and Its Transformation,” 103. Some critics argue that emergence of Chinese avant-garde writers and critics was a “self-conscious and self-reflexive” response to the postmodern critical and theoretical discourses primarily introduced to Chinese intellectual circle by Fredric Jameson through his lecture at Beijing University in 1987. 72 Standaert, “Interview with Yu Hua.” 71

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to the general social and political atmosphere, and attracted fewer and fewer readers. They started to explore alternative writing styles and techniques in order to adapt to the new social reality and attract readers. Therefore, these writers’ deviation from avant-gardism and their search for alternative modes of writing were a conscious effort to bridge the gap between their aesthetic expression and ever-changing social realities. For Yu Hua, his change of narrative style also reflects his increasingly nuanced understanding of society and the world. When he started to write in the 1980s, his works had originated in the tension between an imaginative world and reality. He vented this tension by frequently writing of violence and death, and for a time became an “angry and grim” writer. In the early 1990s, having accumulated a broader range of experience in life, Yu Hua gradually altered his view of the world, and turned his attention to Chinese popular culture and society. He said: I formerly approached reality with a hostile attitude. With the passage of time, however, the anger in my inner heart gradually calmed down. I started to realize that a real writer is looking for a kind of truth that involves no moral judgment. The mission of a writer is neither to vent his grievances, nor to accuse and expose; instead, he should reveal loftiness to people. The loftiness mentioned here is not a simple goodness, but a kind of transcendence after extending a spirit of understanding to all things, treating good and evil without discrimination, and looking out upon the world with sympathetic eyes.73

“Looking out upon the world with sympathetic eyes” has in fact become one of the thematic concerns in Yu Hua’s later novels. His honest concern of life has been explicitly revealed in To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant. Both novels were written in unadorned narrative embellished with sensitive irony and humor, deal with ordinary personages and their fate in the midst of wrenching societal change, and strongly affirm the strength and perseverance of human dignity and the will to muddle through and go on living under even great adversity. Yu Hua’s search for an alternative mode of writing and a sympathetic view of the world begins with Cries in the Drizzle, and he finds an appropriate genre—Bildungsroman—to tell the story. Though Cries in the Drizzle retains certain experimental features of avant-gardism

73

Yu Hua, “Huozhe zhongwen ban zixu,” in Wo nengfou xiangxin ziji, 143–146.

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and at the same time manifests some characteristics of critical realism, it distinguishes itself from both narrative styles with its unique psychological portraits of youth. In this story, Yu Hua attempts to give a full play of the main character’s psychological complexity. This psychological complexity is absent in his later novels, To Live, Chronicle of a Blood Merchant and Brothers, in which Yu Hua conveys psychological insights mainly by means of characters’ outward actions and dialogue instead of through internal psychological descriptions. Yu Hua’s explanation of the title can help readers understand the story. Cries symbolize human protest against a repressive social system that is as murky and suffocating as a drizzle of rain.74 Drizzle is also an apt image of the formative years of Yu Hua’s main character. The author invites us to consider his novel as a portrait of youth psychology during the Cultural Revolution. However, this is not to say that his characters are mere symbols. In the intellectual context of Yu Hua’s narrative, these characters are endowed with a rich literary presence in their own right. Cries in the Drizzle is a first-person reminiscence of the young hero Sun Guanglin’s boyhood in Zhejiang, from age six to eighteen. Those years, 1966 to 1978, are divided between his five years as an adopted son of an ill-matched couple in the market town of Littlemarsh, and his seven years of living with his biological family in the village of Southgate. This period coincides with the Cultural Revolution, which serves as a painful backdrop for the novel. Yu Hua gives the reader a child’s perspective on family, friendship, sex, marriage, fate, death, and birth—all interspersed with Sun Guanglin’s comments and philosophical reflections as adult. The story also describes the solitude and helplessness of Sun Guanglin’s young friends: Su Yu, Guoqing, and Lulu. The experiences of these rural teenagers lend themselves to rich artistic portrayals of abandonment, intense loneliness, inescapable fear, feelings of alienation from family members, yearnings for friendship, and the psychological trauma that accompanies the disappearance of hope and fantasy. Although the protagonist’s life experience reflects that of the author, Yu Hua does not say that this work contains more autobiographical 74

In response to questions posed by American reporter William Marx about Cries in the Drizzle, Yu Hua talked about the meaning of the novel’s title. For the full interview see “Growing Up During the Cultural Revolution,” PRI’s The World, http://www .theworld.org/?q=node/14438 (accessed December 4, 2007).

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elements than do his other full-length novels. He simply comments, “The autobiographical element in my other two novels To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant is just as important as in these two books [—Cries in the Drizzle and Brothers].”75 Cries in the Drizzle can be identified as a coming-of-age story, but it is much more. It is not confined to the life of a single generation; instead, it is a family saga spanning four generations from the 1930s to the late 1970s. This broader temporal background reflects how an ordinary Chinese family has navigated a tortuous course through modern Chinese history. This journey is also reflected in Yu Hua’s subsequent works: To Live, Chronicle of a Blood Merchant and Brothers. Personal growth is the main theme in Cries in the Drizzle. The story involves three generations: grandparents, parents, and youth. The birth of Guanglin and the death of his grandfather represent the two poles of the life cycle; the different life stories of the characters comprise the complete process of growth. It is around the growth of Guanglin’s generation, however, that the main plot of the story develops, with special emphasis on three particular qualities of growth—abandonment, anxiety and fear. As we saw in Chapter Three, parents in Su Tong’s narratives tend to be negative role models for their children. In Yu Hua’s narratives, the situation is even worse. The young characters in Cries in the Drizzle are all abandoned by their families in various ways, with paternal figures being particularly undependable. They must turn to their friends for support and guidance. In contrast with Su Tong’s unitary treatment of the cold, chaotic, and violent peer community, Yu Hua distinguishes between friends who are warm and supportive, and peers in general, who are often callous and malicious. On the one hand, the peer community as a whole seems to reflect the worst characteristics of adult society. Biological brothers, such as Guanglin and Guangping, or Su Yu and Su Hang, are remote or even hostile to each other. Guangping is betrayed by his classmates. He is also tormented by other boys when Su Yu is arrested. Other schoolchildren inform on Guoqing, and Lulu’s schoolmates ridicule him. On the other hand, the small peer community of Guanglin and his friends plays the role of a family; they are connected emotionally and provide genuine support to each other. This supportive circle of friends, to whom I will refer to as the “peer

75

Ibid.

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community,” is in sharp contrast with the relatively perilous adultdominated society during the Cultural Revolution. In Cries in the Drizzle, this parental world disappoints the protagonist and his fellow teenagers in three ways: it abandons its children, it provides negative role models, and it brings about disillusionment with the more beautiful things in life. By default, the peer community must now take up the role normally played by the parental world— providing support, comfort, warmth, understanding, and even guidance. The result of this contrast is that many youth fear growing up and entering the adult world—eventually, many young people fail to integrate themselves into the larger society. Before examining these two contradictory worlds in detail, I would like to briefly discuss the structure and historical background of the story. In traditional narrative form, the chapters of a novel are typically arranged in chronological order. In Cries in the Drizzle, however, Yu Hua writes four parallel chapters that juxtapose different aspects of childhood life within the same time period. The first chapter, the main part of the story, concentrates on the protagonist’s family life, offering a panorama of his entire childhood. It also serves as an information reservoir for the whole book by presenting outlines, highlighting key points, creating suspense, and foreshadowing the scenes in other chapters. Each of the subsequent three chapters could stand alone, but as a group they also enlarge upon certain episodes in the first chapter. Because the novel amounts to a series of reminiscences composed of different narratives about the protagonist and a number of his friends and acquaintances, the application of this juxtaposed structure rounds out each story. Although the novel involves many characters, their relationships are clear to the reader because Yu Hua narrates each story through the threads of family structures.76 The key role of the family has been the most consistent theme in Yu Hua’s works. In different stages of his writing, family values have been evaluated and represented differently. Yu Hua’s early avant-garde stories mostly question or even subvert traditional family values or Confucian ethical codes by means of violence, cruelty, and the subversion of conventional literary genres.77 However, 76

Wu Yiqin, “Qiesui le de shengming gushi” [The broken life stories], in Xiaoshuo pinglun, 1994, no. 1:62. 77 Examples of such early avant-garde stories that debunk family values are “One Kind of Reality,” “The World Is like Mist,” “The April Third Incident,” and “The Noon when the Northwest Wind is Whistling.”

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in accordance with the subsequent change of his narrative style from avant-gardism to critical realism, family values start to be presented differently. For example, in To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, Yu Hua highlights the importance of the family as the primary unit of meaning for every single individual. In Brothers, a story about the intertwined fate of two brothers during the Cultural Revolution and Reform era, Yu Hua continues to emphasize the supportive aspects of the family. Especially in Part I of the novel, Yu Hua depicts an almost idealized mode of family life during the Cultural Revolution. The two brothers to whom the title refers, Li Guangtou and Song Gang, come from two different families, and start to live under the same roof after Li’s mother, Li Lan, marries Song’s father, Song Fanping. The newly formed family is full of love, respect, caring, and warmth, and becomes a haven for family members buffeted by the chaotic outside world.78 In Cries in the Drizzle, the narrative is developed through the interactions between the families and their children: the protagonist Guanglin, and his friends Su Yu, Guoqing and Lulu. When one character’s story is narrated, the stories of his family members are simultaneously unveiled. The life and fate of each character are revealed by that character’s family relationships. The use of family relationships for the basic structure of the novel endows the work with a profound atmosphere of culture and humanity. Traditional Confucian values center on family relationships. Consequently, when Yu Hua attaches individual characters to the larger family unit, their conflicts take on deep cultural freight, leading readers to ponder the decay of traditional Chinese cultural and moral values during an abnormal era. A Degenerating and Helpless Parental Milieu In a certain sense, the story of these adolescents is a history of their abandonment by their families, with paternal figures being particularly problematical. This abandonment of youth is a revelation of human alienation, along with the absence or eradication of parental guidance. Readers are hard pressed to find a single intact and happy family among the five that Yu Hua presents in this novel. For example, the protagonist Guanglin is abandoned by both his biological family and his foster family. At the age of six, he is adopted by the PLA officer

78

Yu Hua, Xiongdi [Brothers] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 2005–2006).

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Wang Liqiang and his bed-ridden wife, Li Xiuying. The novel opens with Wang taking Guanglin away from his rural hometown of Southgate to Wang’s home in Littlemarsh, where he lives for five years. Life with Wang Liqiang’s family seems to be the only normal time in Guanglin’s childhood memory. However, this family is troubled by the tension between the husband’s unflagging sexual desire and the wife’s frailty and poor physical condition. In her study of the “revolution plus love” stories written during the first seventeen years of the People’s Republic of China, Jianmei Liu concludes that in those stories, “personal sexual love was not only channeled and sublimated into political goals, it also existed in harmony with them, demonstrating the real happiness in people’s life.”79 In sharp contrast, contemporary writers such as Yu Hua usually portray sexual life during the Cultural Revolution as grotesque and fatally damaging. Wang Liqiang, a strong, enthusiastic man in the army, suffers an unpleasant and unsatisfying sex life with his wife, a pale and chronic invalid lying on her sickbed the entire day. Wang Liqiang carries on a two-year affair with another young woman until his privacy is boldly invaded by an aggressive female CCP cadre. In the end, Wang Liqiang unintentionally kills the cadre’s two sons when he seeks his revenge on her. Later on, when Wang is surrounded by the army, he blows himself up with a grenade. On a chilly morning soon afterwards, his widow Li Xiuying departs from Littlemarsh. This episode reflects not only the darkness and meanness of the human heart, but also the abnormal psychology of people suppressed by the CCP system. Wang Liqiang’s austere family life reflects not only the asceticism required of army life, but also the sexual repression of the Mao era. As Yu Hua explains, “this asceticism stems from that era and echoes with political grimness. Sexual repression is just the physiological response to political repression.”80 Wang Liqiang’s repressed sexuality thus takes on a political dimension. His tragedy illustrates Jianmei Liu’s argument that “the erotic fantasies of the oppressed that may be unleashed by revolution are hidden within every psyche; this generates a crisis of masculine sexuality that threatens political morality.”81 Wang Liqiang’s revenge upon the female CCP cadre is a desperate demonstration that contradicts the CCP-sponsored discourse

79 80 81

Liu, Revolution Plus Love, 163. Yu Hua, “Sheshi de cesuo” [Luxurious washroom], in Wo nengfou xiangxin ziji, 131. Liu, Revolution Plus Love, 140.

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about how socialist love is supposed to be nurtured by the New Society. Wang’s suicidal revenge destroys his own family and leaves Guanglin an orphan. Guanglin now returns to his hometown, Southgate, to live with his biological family. He is not welcome there, however. He is denounced by his father as an “unlucky star” because on his first day back home, the family home catches fire, seemingly for no apparent reason. Rather than feeling reunited with his family, Guanglin feels as though he is beginning another life as an adopted son. The situation in this family is even worse than that of Wang Liqiang’s home. Guanglin’s father, Sun Kwangtsai, is an unscrupulous and hot-tempered farmer—a stark contrast with Fugui and Xu Sanguan, the kindly fathers in Yu Hua’s later novels, To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant. Those characters, Richard King observes, “become decent men, loving husbands, and sensitive fathers, earning redemption and a kind of happiness.” Sun Kwangtsai, however, never “arrive[s] at a state of grace in spite of [his] poverty, the callousness of [his] political masters, and the capriciousness of fate.”82 Instead, he remains an utter rogue who treats his own father and his sons as nothing more than stumbling blocks in his life; he is ready to kick them out of his home at any moment. He commits adultery with the widow next door and steals from his own family in order to shower her with his largesse. After the death of his wife, he degenerates further by becoming a drunkard who often weeps at his wife’s tomb in the middle of the night. At last—appropriately, it seems—he drowns in a manure pit. It seems that one of the focuses of Yu Hua’s narrative is to turn the positive image of the traditional father completely upside down by portraying Sun Kwangtsai as entirely bereft of decency, a sense of morality, and a sense of responsibility. In his interview with the journalist William Marx, Yu Hua points out that the brutality and coarseness of this character reflect the psychological defects imposed by a repressive social system.83 Guanglin’s mother, for her part, is a hardworking, kindhearted woman who endures all her hardships and humiliation in silence. There is only one occasion on which she vents her anger at her husband’s adulterous behavior: on her deathbed, she shouts a demand that 82

These quotations are from the book review by Richard King on To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, MCLC Resource Centre, http://mclc.osu.edu/rc/pubs/ reviews/king.htm (accessed March 2004). 83 William Marx and Yu Hua, “Growing Up During the Cultural Revolution.”

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he refrain from giving her household effects to the widow. In this story, Yu Hua presents a polarized array of images of women: some of these women are insulted and persecuted by men, while other women put men under their thumbs, often in an unscrupulous manner. Most of the mothers in this story such as Guanglin’s biological mother, his foster mother, Su Yu’s mother, and Lulu’s mother, belong to the first type of women who are betrayed, rejected, or victimized by their husbands or lovers, and who bear their humiliation and misery in silence. Against this meek maternal image, the shrews or domineering female types present abhorrent and intimidating characteristics, even though they show every sign of enjoying a relatively advantaged and happy life. These women include the lascivious widow; the poet’s fiercetempered wife; the aggressive CCP female cadre who regards herself as a “staunch guardian of the morals of the age” and heartlessly exposes Wang Liqiang’s love affair;84 and the Tofu Belle who cleans out her husband’s money pouch immediately after every payday. The brutality and coarseness found in these shrews are paired with the same qualities found in Sun Kwangtsai, the butcher, and various other adult men in the story. In his later works, such as To Live, The Chronicle of A Blood Merchant, and Brothers, the mother or wife images are relatively positive and not as polarized as those in Cries in the Drizzle. For example, in To Live, and Brothers, Yu Hua presents two almost picture-perfect images of a proverbial “virtuous wife and kind mother” with Jiazhen and Li Lan. In To Live, Fugui’s wife Jiazhen is portrayed as a hardworking, enduring, and forgiving woman who always remains loyal to Fugui through thick and thin. In Brothers, the mother Li Lan and her second husband Song Fanping provide their two sons with a happy and loving home life amidst the political upheavals of the Cultural Revolution. She and her husband serve as a symbol of integrity and human decency in a troubled time. Another adult member of Guanglin’s family is his grandfather, a former stonemason. In Yu Hua’s narrative, Sun Youyuan takes up the same profession as his father, leading groups of fellow stonemasons in bridge construction projects throughout southern China. His splendid career does not last long, since his predecessors have built so many sturdy stone bridges throughout the region that there is little

84 Yu Hua, Cries in the Drizzle, trans. Allan H. Barr (New York: Anchor Books, 2007), 292.

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need to build new ones. He belongs to the final generation of traditional stonemasons, whose occupation began to decline in the 1940s. Finally, the chaos of war forces him to abandon his profession and return to his hometown, where he encounters the tragic death of his parents. Fleeing from this calamity, he marries a distressed young woman of noble birth who has emerged from a short-lived marriage with the scion of a gentry family. In the face of a new wife with a relatively exalted pedigree, Sun Youyuan becomes self-abasing, humble, and docile in his married life. After the death of his wife, he continues to dwell on his memories of the past. Unemployed because of a back injury, he becomes a great burden to his sons, at whose residences he lives on a rotating basis. His remaining years in life wind up being a miserable struggle for survival as he endures constant humiliation from his son Sun Kwangtsai. When Guanglin recalls his grandfather many years later, he comments: “Given my tender age before I left home, I could not possibly feel the extent of the humiliation Granddad suffered.”85 However, Guanglin feels that his grandfather always tried to make himself invisible to the family, especially to his own sons, who regarded him with contempt as nothing more than a burden to bear. The grandfather and Guanglin thus become the two most unwelcome people in the family. The constant mistreatment that the grandfather received from his son Sun Kwangtsai not only reveals a violation of the Confucian moral imperative of filial devotion, but also raises a question: how can Confucian ethical codes be practiced during an era of harsh material circumstances? The political oppression and extremely meager material circumstances of life during the Cultural Revolution compel some people such as Sun Kwangtsai to reject traditional ethical codes as well. Given these circumstances, Guanglin is alienated from both his family and the local villagers as a whole. He attempts to rid himself of his family in the wake of his father’s degradation and his own life of aimlessness. He spends most of his time at the village pond, which provides Guanglin with sensations and recollections of warmth. He recalls, “If there is anything about Southgate that merits some nostalgic sensations, it must be the village pond.”86 Appearing repeatedly

85 86

Ibid., 172. Ibid., 21–22.

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throughout the story, this pond bears witness to his lonely childhood. Recognizing the misery of his situation in the village, he reflects: During the funeral I kept my distance. Isolation and neglect had practically nullified my existence, as far as the village was concerned . . . I realized with relief that I had been utterly forgotten. I had been assigned to a position where I was recognized and at the same time repudiated by everyone in the village.87

Therefore, Guanglin is completely alienated from his family. The pond, like the sanatorium of Mann’s Hans Castorp, isolates Guanglin from the secular outside world and offers him a retreat for introspection and contemplation. Guanglin’s immediate attempt to distance himself from his family can be regarded as a conscious and autonomous effort to break with exterior ties and pave the way for developing his interior self. Guanglin’s friend Su Yu undergoes a similar experience of alienation from his family. Su Yu’s parents are both doctors. Su Yu and his younger brother Su Hang have always been envied by other children because they live in a family that seems to be happy and affluent. However, under this facade are the hostility and resentment that the parents inflict upon each other, as well as the indifference and neglect with which they treat their children. Love and warmth have long since disappeared from the family ever since the father’s one-time affair with the same seductive widow who sleeps with Sun Kwangtsai during a two-year stay in Southgate. The mother frequently uses this affair as a weapon against the father, and even accuses Su Yu of following his father’s footsteps. Su Yu is ashamed of his family on account of this affair and his parents’ estrangement. Doctor Su’s family bears a lot of similarities with that of Yu Hua. During Yu Hua’s childhood, his parents were seldom home. Sometimes, he and his brother were locked up in the house without parental supervision for the entire night. The only recourse the two brothers seemed to have during these times was to rearrange the furniture and create an arena where they could fight with one other. On each occasion, Yu Hua would be defeated, and cry out in the hope that his parents would soon return and punish his brother for bullying him. However, for the most part his parents did not return until his voice grew hoarse and he fell asleep. Yu Hua’s mother, in particular, 87

Ibid., 40–41.

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was often assigned to night duty. She would often buy food from the hospital cafeteria and take it home to her sons as their supper. After the meal was concluded, she would hurriedly return to work at the hospital. Meanwhile, Yu Hua’s father spent most of his time in the operating room, often returning home after Yu Hua and his brother were asleep and leaving again for work before they woke up. In his childhood dreams, Yu Hua often heard someone shouting outside his window: “Doctor Hua! Doctor Hua! Emergency!”88 After 1949, the CCP gradually wormed away much of the tenderness and warmth typically felt by individuals towards one another, even within the family unit. Family life was far lower priority than a successful career under the Communist Party. Yu Hua reflects his own family model in Cries in the Drizzle. In the story, Doctor Su and his wife work in a hospital while their two sons are left uncared at home. However, Doctor Su’s family is even more apathetic about the wellbeing of family members than Yu Hua’s own family had been. Both Guanglin and Su Yu have a physical family to turn to, even though they have been emotionally abandoned by their parents. However, Guanglin’s two friends Guoqing and Lulu have been physically abandoned by their fathers and eventually become orphans. Guanglin has enjoyed his friendship with Guoqing during his stay with the Wang family in Littlemarsh; Guoqing’s mother has passed away, and he was abandoned by his father after the latter’s marriage to another woman. Guoqing thus has become an orphan at the age of nine, and by the age of thirteen has no recourse but to make a living as a coal peddler. Yu Hua vividly describes the change in Guoqing’s fate: One morning when he was nine, Guoqing woke up to find that he held his destiny in his own hands. Though far from being an adult, and still under the sway of paternal authority, all of a sudden he was independent. Premature freedom made him carry his fate on his shoulder the way he might carry a heavy suitcase, staggering along a busy street, not sure which way to go.89

After his father deserts him, Guoqing befriends an old lady who dwells on memories of her dead relatives. She brings great comfort to Guoqing when she helps him appear to communicate with his late mother in the nether world. As this experience awakens memories of

88 89

Yu, “Wo zuichu de xianshi,” 208. Yu, Cries in the Drizzle, 227.

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his mother, Guoqing’s nine-year-old imagination takes him back in time rather than forward into the future. His conversations are full of the word “past.” Yu Hua’s intent in conjuring forth this odd friendship is to demonstrate the destructive effects of parental abandonment. This abandonment immediately brings an end to the relatively carefree childhood of Guoqing, who is pushed abruptly into premature adulthood, if not even old age: Guoqing, deserted by the living, began to develop close relations with the old lady downstairs who had been deserted by the dead . . . He spent more and more time with the lonely old lady. Sometimes I would see them walking hand in hand down the street, and Guoqing’s features, normally so animated, seemed a little glum next to her black arm. She was depleting Guoqing of his energy.90

Guanglin’s other friend, seven-year-old Lulu, has also been physically deserted by his family and eventually becomes a homeless urchin. Guanglin comes to know him soon after the death of Su Yu. Therefore, their friendship echoes Guanglin’s previous friendship with Su Yu. Lulu is the only son of Feng Yuqing, who had been abandoned by a young man back when she was a beautiful young girl. Later, she had eloped with a peddler, but he has exited the scene by the time she has returned to her hometown with Lulu in tow. In order to make a living, she has now turned to prostitution. From the very beginning, this family has rarely known the presence of a father figure, and Lulu has grown extremely attached to his mother as a result. Unfortunately, Lulu eventually loses the care and protection of Feng Yuqing after she is arrested for prostitution and imprisoned. Lulu is subsequently sent to a shelter. From the foregoing analysis we see that the parental world in Cries in the Drizzle offers youth mostly negative role models, along with the abandonment and dissolution of wholesome values. The most immediate consequence is loneliness. In fact, the atmosphere of loneliness pervades the entire story. Almost everyone in the story lives an alienated life—not only the children, but also the adults, including the fathers. For instance, in the adult world, the loneliness of Guanglin’s grandfather originates from his disillusionment about the career he pursued during his youth; the subsequent alienation of Guanglin’s father is caused by his own moral degeneration; and Wang Liqiang’s 90

Ibid., 240.

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isolation stems primarily from the lack of mutuality and harmony in his sexual relations with his wife. Guanglin witnesses his father’s betrayal of his mother, his brutality towards the children, his disregard of filial obligations towards his own father, and his irresponsibility towards the entire family. Earlier, in his foster family, Guanglin observes the desperation of the adults caught in predicaments of their own making, along with the weakness, frustration, and malice of the human heart. Self-destruction seems to be the only response. Su Yu, for his part, finds his parental world to be full of the narrowness and coldness of the human heart. For Guoqing, his father’s selfishness and irresponsibility force him to face the brutal reality of life much earlier than he ought to. Meanwhile, the miserable life of Lulu and his mother shows how a vulnerable woman is subjected to indignities by men. As we saw in Chapter Three, the protagonists Dasheng and his friends in North Side Story are all expelled from school—in a sense, they are forced to continue their education on the street. The school has lost its function—“to propagate doctrines of the ancient sages, to transmit learning, and to dispel confusion”—and has become a breeding ground for murder and arson. In turn, many teachers have lost the respect of their students for having failed to provide them with proper education and guidance. In Cries in the Drizzle, Yu Hua’s portrayal of education is relatively positive, even though schools in this novel are in no way idealized. It is at school that Guanglin meets his bosom friends, Su Yu, Lulu, and Guoqing; and it is there that he finds warmth and emotional and physical support from them, in spite of the callousness and malice of the other classmates. Everywhere in this novel, school becomes the haven of these hapless teenagers. In addition, in contrast with Su Tong’s simplistic treatment of teachers in North Side Story, Yu Hua presents relatively sophisticated and humane images of teachers, and reveals that they are also often victims of the era. He also discloses their desires, weaknesses, and predicaments as ordinary flesh-and-blood human beings. Yu Hua specifically depicts two teachers: the unnamed music instructor in Southgate whose rare finesse has long been Guanglin’s ideal of adulthood, and Littlemarsh’s Zhang Qinghai, who serves as Guoqing’s guardian for a short period after Guoqing’s farther deserts him. In the story, Guanglin sees his music instructor as “the least snobbish of teachers, favoring all his pupils with the same smile.” He is captivated by the teacher’s standard Mandarin accent, sonorous voice,

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and cultivated demeanor. In an era when the arts were supposed to be exclusively at the disposal of the Party’s latest whim, the music instructor actually has the courage to tell his students that music transcends verbal communication: “Music begins where language disappears.”91 No matter how much Guanglin admires his music teacher’s elegant manner, however, the teacher is weak and helpless in the face of the brutality of the chaotic students in a time when virtue and learning are trampled underfoot. During one incident in the middle of class, for example, a student takes off his shoes, hoists them up onto the windowsill, and insolently props his bare feet up on a desk. When the music teacher reminds him to behave himself, he responds with impudent taunts. In the end, he goes so far as to throw the teacher’s music book out of the window. “Somehow,” Guanglin recounts, “I felt a sense of loss, having just witnessed how my role model was so easily humiliated.”92 Later, because of an affair with a female student, the teacher was put into prison, and was later released to teach in a remote village school. Witnessing these wrenching changes in the life of the music teacher, Guanglin gains an insight into the vulnerability and transience of the finer aspects of life in the adult world. Having lost his respect for the music teacher, Guanglin rejects him as an authority figure, and his hope for a role model in the adult world is thus shattered. This episode is only one more step in his long journey of disenchantment. Zhang Qinghai, another teacher in the novel, is somewhat similar to the catcher image in Su Tong’s North Side Story, even though at one point he maliciously forces Guanglin to admit to a crime he has never committed. Moreover, Zhang sometimes uses threats to control and discipline his students. Although Zhang Qinghai is a henpecked husband at home, at school he is an authority figure among his students and fills the role of their protector when necessary. Upon learning that Guoqing’s father has abandoned him, Zhang Qinghai takes Guoqing to see his father, commends Guoqing for his achievements, and emphasizes that Guoqing is one of the favorite pupils of every teacher here who has had him in class. After listening the father’s heartless and sarcastic response, Zhang comes back with a humorous rejoinder: “Actually, I was thinking of adopting him as my grandson.”93 91 92 93

Ibid., 82. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 260.

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Later, having noticed Guoqing squandering his limited living allowance, Zhang Qinghai takes personal responsibility for managing Guoqing’s money. Zhang Qinghai’s kindness towards Guoqing may be rooted in his natural compassion; however, given the regressive state of education during the Cultural Revolution, Zhang’s behavior is rare and precious. Guanglin’s Self-sufficient Peer Community In the world of children, the feeling of loneliness is the impetus for Guanglin’s longing for tenderness and warmth. This longing is especially relevant to the historical era that Yu Hua is seeking to portray. With the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the Communist Party advocated collectivism, gradually substituting this “ism” for tender and warm relationships between individuals—relationships that were further destroyed in the Cultural Revolution.94 With tenderness and warmth withdrawn from people’s lives, loneliness became an immediate reality. With the pure heart of a young boy, Guanglin yearns for these lost values in the midst of the cruelty of reality in Cries in the Drizzle. Luckily, the small peer community comprised of Guanglin and his friends does not disappoint him. It is noteworthy that sibling relations play no role in this supportive peer community. Guanglin has two brothers, Guangping and Guangming. The three brothers’ lives only overlap for a short period; each then goes his own separate way. Elder brother Guangping dreams of living in the city, an illusion that vanishes when he finishes high school and returns to the countryside to start his mediocre and difficult life in Southgate. Guanglin and Guangping have had a strained relationship throughout the story. The younger brother Guangming drowns in the river one beautiful summer noon while attempting to save another boy’s life. The fragility of fraternal bonds also comes across clearly in Su Yu’s estrangement from his younger brother Su Hang, in Lulu’s yearning for an older brother, and in Liu Xiaoqing’s loss of his older brother. This cold, distant, and sometimes even hostile

94

Edward Friedman, Paul Pickowicz, Mark Selden, and Kay Ann Johnson, Chinese Village, Socialist State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). In this book, the authors illustrate how the CCP’s dictatorship affected Chinese popular culture and rural society and how ordinary people resisted these changes.

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attitude between brothers is a reflection of Yu Hua’s feelings about fraternal relationships as he experienced and observed them during the late Mao era. In Yu Hua’s autobiographical essays and interviews, he rarely mentions his elder brother except in recollection of various childhood events. Yu Hua recalls that he was a quiet and docile boy when he was little. In kindergarten, he would sit there alone while his young friends played nearby. His mother remembered that every afternoon when she picked him up at the kindergarten, she would find him sitting in exactly the same place where she had left him in the morning. When Yu Hua was four years old, his then six-year-old brother began escorting him home from kindergarten. However, his brother would occasionally forget his duties and wander off elsewhere to play, leaving Yu Hua behind with nobody to look after him. When Yu Hua grew older, his parents often locked up both brothers upstairs at home instead of sending them off to kindergarten. The young brothers would often lean out over the window sill to enjoy the scenery of the countryside, where farmers were working in the fields. Yu Hua remembers that the most exciting moment of the day was when these farmers finished their day’s labor; one villager would stand on the ridge of the field and shout, “It’s time to knock off.”95 People would gradually walk over to the edge of the field, while some women would chant “knock off ” again and again. Against the background of these cries, the two brothers watched other farmers walking along the ridges between crop fields with hoes propped on their shoulders. Mothers were shouting the names of their children, while children were running around with baskets in their hands. Several children were rushing about so fast that they occasionally fell down. This scene must have impressed Yu Hua deeply, because more than two decades later he included the same images in his novel Cries in the Drizzle, though replacing the image of the brother with that of a friend. In the novel, the young protagonist leans out of the upstairs window with his friends instead of the brother, gazing at the vast crop fields outdoors. Yu Hua’s less than positive vision of the fraternal relationship is not only revealed in Cries in the Drizzle, but is also evident in both his early experimental stories and later realist works. The most extreme example is presented in “One Kind of Reality,” a story of “scathing satire on the

95

Yu, “Wo zuichu de xianshi,” 207.

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Chinese myth of family.”96 In this story, the large multi-generational family placed in an “emotional void” and “bound together by nothing but shared meals and indifference—an indifference whose other side turns out to be eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth aggression” between two brothers Shangang and Shanfeng, who kill each other without showing the slightest bit of remorse.97 This antagonistic relationship between brothers is also presented in Yu Hua’s latest bestseller Brothers, especially in Part II, which I will discuss later in this chapter. As the sociologist F. Philip Rice notes, relationships between older brothers who act as role models and younger siblings who imitate them can be “vitally important” in the development of an adolescent’s personality traits and overall behavior. The older siblings often serve “as surrogate parents, acting as caretakers, teachers, playmates and confidants.”98 However, in Guanglin’s case, it is among his classmates and other males, both younger and older, where he finds the support and guidance he needs. This peer community demonstrates the power of humanity; at the same time, it highlights the autonomy and subjectivity these teenagers exercise when they are abandoned by the parental world. These children recall Holden’s fantasy in The Catcher in the Rye—a vision of children standing in front of a cliff and serving as a “catcher” for each other—protecting each other from falling into the corruption of the adult world. When Guanglin lives with the Wang family in Littlemarsh, his friendship with Guoqing rekindles his sweetest childhood memories. As they go to the riverside to wait for waves or climb onto the roof of Guoqing’s house to look at a distant open field, they learn to share with each other and provide mutual support. After Guoqing is rejected by his father, Guanglin and another boy steal food from their homes to feed Guoqing. In return, Guoqing shares out among friends part of the pocket money his uncles and aunts have given to him. After Guanglin loses his foster parents, it is his friends who generously buy him a ferry ticket to return to his hometown and see him off at the dock. The author deliberately keeps adults out of these scenes in order to demonstrate the self-sufficiency of the peer world. When in difficulty, the children receive warmth, support, and care from their peers.

96 97 98

Zhao, “Yu Hua: Fiction as Subversion,” 418. Wedell-Wedellsborg, “One Kind of Chinese Reality: Reading Yu Hua,” 131–141. Rice, The Adolescent: Development, Relationships, and Culture, 44.

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After Guanglin returns to his hometown, he encounters the brothers Su Yu and Su Hang. Because they both feel lonely and alienated, Guanglin and Su Yu establish a deep friendship. Su Yu, a sensitive and frail soul, is associated with distinction, refinement, and spirituality. A couple of years older than Guanglin, Su Yu acts as Guanglin’s older brother and confidant. Together they experience the anxiety of their sexual awakening and the bitter feeling of being neglected by their families. However, Su Yu’s untimely death puts an abrupt end to this memorable friendship. For a short period after Su Yu’s death, Guanglin befriends a sevenyear-old boy, Lulu, the only son of Feng Yuqing. This friendship parallels his former friendship with Su Yu. However, in this friendship he plays the role of Su Yu and acts as Lulu’s older brother and protector. This friendship allows him to better understand the friend he lost in Su Yu. Our friendship quickly blossomed. Two years earlier, I had experienced the warmth of friendship thanks to Su Yu, my senior in years, and now when I was with little Lulu, I often felt as though I were Su Yu, gazing at me as I once was.99

Lulu’s loneliness and stubborn expression also remind Guanglin of his own childhood: “Watching his boyish gait, a warm feeling coursed through my veins. It was as though I was seeing my own childhood unrolling before me.”100 In conversation, Lulu looks at Guanglin with happiness and admiration, and Guanglin feels Lulu’s complete and unconditional trust. By presenting these two successive friendships, Yu Hua reveals the continuity of brotherhood in the peer community. When the older surrogate sibling finishes his mission of guiding a younger boy, that boy in turn becomes the “caretaker, teacher, playmate and confidant” of his own younger surrogate sibling.101 Yu Hua takes this self-sufficient peer community a step further: he lets these children take on some of the duties and responsibilities of the parental world. The novel is full of instances where the sons take responsibility for their fathers and mothers. For instance, Guoqing always keeps a first-aid kit with him. Whenever his father becomes ill, he asks him about his symptoms and provides the proper medication

99

Yu, Cries in the Drizzle, 128. Ibid., 125. 101 Rice, The Adolescent: Development, Relationships, and Culture, 44. 100

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as if he were a doctor. For Guoqing, the first-aid kit establishes a bond between his father and him, and serves as a token of his sense of responsibility for his father. Even after Guoqing’s father abandons him, he still believes that when his father is sick, he will come back to Guoqing for treatment. However, his innocent belief is finally shattered when he sees his father go to the hospital; he realizes that he has been completely rejected by his father. With tears running down his cheeks, he tells his friends, “I saw him go into the hospital. If he doesn’t come to see me when he’s ill, then he’ll never come at all.”102 It is after this that he initiates his friendship with the old woman who will seemingly link him with his late mother. After his mother is arrested for prostitution, seven-year-old Lulu goes to the Public Security Bureau station and unsuccessfully attempts to bring his mother back home. Later, after his mother is taken away by the police and incarcerated in a labor camp, Lulu manages to escape from the shelter and takes a long-distance bus to look for his mother. When he finally finds her, he tells her that he plans to live together with her in the labor camp. After his request is turned down by the police, he camps right outside the labor camp so that he can watch his mother working in the fields every day. Lulu’s insistence on staying with his mother reveals both his emotional attachment to his mother and his intention of being her protector—the guardian of his mother’s bedroom.103 Guangping, Guanglin’s older brother, takes on the responsibility of supporting his family, sacrificing his own ambitions in life. When his father rejects his wife and children, Guangping looks after not only his own small family and his mother but also his paralyzed father-in-law. He works like a machine and runs like a rabbit from the fields to his home and his father-in-law’s home. In spite of the family’s poverty, when his mother is seriously ill, he insists on carrying her to the hospital. The mother refuses to go, saying, “I am going to die anyway. The money’s not worth spending.” When he carries his mother on his back, however, “a girlish, bashful look began to appear on her face.”104 The mother is proud of such a demonstration of her son’s filial devotion.

102

Yu, Cries in the Drizzle, 240. Rice, The Adolescent: Development, Relationships, and Culture. Rice describes how, in families led by a single mother, the son tries to play the role of the guardian of the mother’s bedroom. 104 Yu, Cries in the Drizzle, 65. 103

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This inversion of the traditional son-parent relationship extends throughout the novel. The children are mature enough to be kind to their conspicuously vulnerable parents and protect the parents’ feelings. This human warmth radiating from the children’s world demonstrates the persistence of goodness and humanity, and stands in sharp contrast with the Party’s harsh regimentation and control. Sexuality As in Su Tong’s coming-of-age narratives, the sexuality experienced by Yu Hua’s young characters is closely related to disillusion, violence, and destruction. By exploring teenage sexual anxiety and teenagers’ disillusionment with their experiments in love, Yu Hua intends to demonstrate another aspect of his young characters’ subjectivity and individuality. Before experiencing love, Guanglin experiences profound disillusionment with regard to female beauty and purity when he witnesses the changes in two young women, Cao Li and Feng Yuqing. Like most of the boys in his class, Guanglin has a crush on Cao Li, his classmate in high school and the girl of his sexual fantasies. She is so pure and holy in Guanglin’s eyes that he blushes nervously every time he encounters her. To him, she symbolizes innocent romantic love. The illusion of her purity is shattered irrevocably when he happens to overhear some girls chatting about how enchanted Cao Li is by the hairy legs of a boy who is the worst student of the entire class. Yu Hua describes the unraveling of Guanglin’s infatuation for Cao Li: I walked all the way to the pond next to the school and stood there for a long time watching the sunlight and the foliage that floated on the water’s surface, and my deep disappointment with Cao Li slowly evolved into self-pity. For the first time in my life a beautiful dream had been shattered.105

Guanglin is concerned not only about the possible loss of Cao Li’s innocence to the hairy and masculine classmate, but also about the loss of his dream of her. Guanglin’s disillusionment with female beauty and purity is reinforced by the changes he notices in the adult woman Feng Yuqing. Feng Yuqing was once an innocent and beautiful girl, the symbol of

105

Ibid., 101.

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feminine beauty in the eyes of the village boys. Guanglin recalls: “In those days when I sat beside the pond, Feng Yuqing inspired endless yearnings when she walked by, exuding youth and buxom beauty.”106 Unfortunately, this innocent country girl is seduced and later abandoned by a young man who lives in her neighborhood. Feeling insulted and desperate, Yuqing runs off with an old peddler. Years later, when Guanglin meets her and her only son Lulu, he is shocked by the changes she has suffered: In that moment I had a clear view of her face, now ravaged by time, its wrinkles all too apparent. When her glance skimmed over me, it so lacked animation it was like a cloud of soot floating in my direction. Then she turned back towards the well, exposing her sagging buttocks and thickening waistline. At that point I slipped away, saddened not by Feng Yuqing’s having forgotten me, but by my first glimpse of beauty’s pitiless decline. The Feng Yuqing who stood combing her hair in the sunlight outside her home would, after this, always be blanketed with a layer of dust.107

The disappointment and disillusion over the two young women topple Guanglin’s belief in the possibility of pure and enduring love in the world. In spite of this, Guanglin and his friend Su Yu experience the anxiety of their sexual awakening. Their sexual curiosity and trepidation are disclosed most poignantly in the second chapter of the novel, when Su Yu’s brother steals a medical book from his father’s library and shows his classmates a picture of female genitalia. However, Guanglin misses this chance to see the picture because he has to do sentry duty at the doorway. His sexual awakening has its origins in even more secret behavior—nighttime masturbation—through which he obtains a virtually mystical feeling. His life is divided into two parts—day and night. At night, he indulges in this mystical experience, whereas during the day, he feels guilty and impure. He is so tortured by this inner conflict that he begins avoiding Su Yu. However, after listening to Guanglin’s concerns about masturbation, Su Yu tells Guanglin that this is a quite normal phase for boys to go through, and shows Guanglin the picture of female genitalia that he had previously missed. Guanglin is thereby completely relieved of his feelings of guilt. He remarks, “I will

106 107

Ibid., 22–23. Ibid., 133.

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never forget that morning beside the pond with Su Yu. In the wake of his acknowledgment, daytime recovered its beauty.”108 In spite of the solace that Su Yu brought to Guanglin, Su Yu himself struggles with his sexual frustrations, leading him one day to suddenly follow through on an impulse to embrace a young woman on the street. As punishment for this misconduct, he is incarcerated for one year. However, this incident has a positive outcome in that it enables Su Yu to understand and forgive his father’s short-lived affair with the widow. We were bewildered by that smile of his, and it was not until later that I understood what lay behind it. Despite Su Yu’s seemingly terrible plight, he himself felt that pressure had been lifted from his shoulders. Afterwards he was to tell me, “I understood how it was my father came to do what he did.”109

Careful readers may find that Yu Hua subtly presents a hint of homosexual love between Su Yu and Guanglin. In Guanglin’s eyes, Su Yu is sort of a “crystal boy”: quiet, elegant, innocent, and peaceful. Guanglin feels jealous about Su Yu’s friendship with Zheng Liang, a very tall and stout teenage boy. Guanglin becomes even more jealous of Zheng Liang when Su Yu describes his feeling of embracing the young woman as similar to his sensation of grabbing Zheng Liang’s arms. However, Su Yu finally confesses to Guanglin that he actually felt he was grabbing Guanglin’s shoulder instead of Zheng Liang’s. After hearing what Su Yu had to say, Guanglin recalled how “his smile and his bashful voice warmed me and sustained me that evening when the moonlight came and went.”110 Time and Death—the End of Adolescence Coming of age in the context of an adult world full of spiritual blindness and physical corruption, Guanglin, his brothers, and his friends have an ambiguous attitude towards growing up and making their way into society. On the one hand, their feelings of loneliness and isolation make them eager to grow up, wanting to join the company of the adult world. On the other hand, the largely miserable experiences of their 108 109 110

Ibid., 94. Ibid., 111. Ibid., 118.

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parents in that world frighten them and make them lose sight of any meaningful goals. This ambiguity is aggravated by the lack of a practical goal in their lives; they have no clear idea about their future career paths and possible vocations. They are without parental love and guidance; and at school they are vaguely aware that even their teachers lack firm convictions about a proper set of goals of life. The adult world is full of a hollow silence on matters of purpose and meaning. In the setting of the Cultural Revolution, the only approved career path for rural teenagers is laboring in the farm fields. The overwhelming likelihood of such a gloomy future makes them fear growing up, a fear confirmed by the adult life of Guangping, the protagonist’s older brother. Guangping is a courageous boy who dreams of living a decent life in the city. However, this dream is shattered when university entrance examinations are cancelled throughout the Cultural Revolution; for over a decade, students were deprived of the right even to compete for possible admission to a university. Students from the countryside are forced to return to their villages, with no near-term prospects for choosing options for their own lives: “By the time Sun Guangping graduated from high school and returned home to work the land, his self-confidence had sunk to a new low.”111 Without any specific long-term goal remaining in his life, he starts climbing into a widow’s bed at night in a manner resembling his father’s previous misadventures. In the daytime, he would gaze at old men with wrinkles on their faces and dust on their bodies who were walking back from the crop fields. His eyes reveal his complete emptiness and sadness. “This grim sight had struck a chord in him, making him wonder about the latter stages of his own life.”112 Giving tacit consent to the status quo, he embarks upon a boring and destitute life in rural Southgate. Without a doubt, such will also be the future of his brothers and other boys in the countryside. It is little wonder that they fear the inevitable journey to adulthood. In response to this gloomy future, Yu Hua points to death as a common terminus of the journey by rural youth. Three young men die before reaching adulthood: two of Guanglin’s friends and his younger brother Guangming. The young characters’ tragic fates are foreshadowed at the outset of the story with the sounds of a woman

111 112

Ibid., 56. Ibid.

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weeping on a rainy night, accompanied by expressions of fear from the six-year-old boy Guanglin. This fear of the young Guanglin is the secret fear of young Yu Hua himself. In an autobiographical essay, Yu Hua recalls that during his childhood in the hospital compound, even though he felt he could face death and blood with an undaunted spirit, young Yu Hua harbored a secret fear: At that time, my only fear was seeing treetops shining in the moonlight at night. The sharp treetops glistened, extending into the sky. Every time this scene made me tremble with fear. I did not know the reason, but I was scared as soon as I saw this.113

Accompanied Yu Hua’s fear are the nighttime mourning wails of the relatives of the deceased: “The wailing of their relatives resounded through the endless night and rose a notch, like the sun at dawn.”114 He would awaken from dreams hearing the echoes of those sad sounds, which were so enduring and touching that he felt as though they were not mere wailing, but instead one of the most moving ballads imaginable. Meanwhile, he discerned a pattern in which people were more likely to die in the middle of the night than at other times throughout the day. Yu Hua said, “I sensed in the wailing a familiarity, a painful familiarity. For a long time I thought this was the most moving song in the world.”115 Years later, Yu Hua transplanted his childhood fears and the women’s wails into his Cries in the Drizzle, and describes how “from far away there came the sound of a woman’s anguished wails. When those hoarse wails erupted so suddenly in the still of the night, the boy that I still was would shiver and quake.”116 Rain, itself a metaphor for weeping, forms the backdrop for the wailing. For his part, boy is fearful about the general lack of response to the woman’s wailing: Anxiously, I expected to hear another voice, a voice that would respond to her wails, that could assuage her grief, but it never materialized . . . Surely there is nothing more chilling than the sound of inconsolable wailing on such a desolate night.117

113

Yu, “Wo zuichu de xianshi,” 209. For the quotation and information in this paragraph see Yu, “Preface to Italian Version of One Kind of Reality,” in Wo nengfou xiangxin ziji, 152. 115 Finken, “Interview with Yu Hua, Author of To Live (Huozhe),” 20. 116 Ibid., 3. 117 Ibid. 114

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The boy later hears a sound that responds to the woman’s wails—the rustling of the clothes of a man dressed in black who is walking through the fields. In the end, however, the man is found dead in a dilapidated temple, completing the set of images: crying, drizzle, and death. Yu Hua’s philosophical understanding of death and time deeply infuses this story. The novel explores the circular nature of time, subjective versus objective time, and the polar relation between time and eternity in the embodiment of death, thus rendering time an active force. Life is limited by the framework of time. However, death transcends time. Practically every time Yu Hua describes death, he applies the phrase yi lao yong yi, which means “a solution holding good for all time.” In recalling the death of his younger brother Guangming, Guanglin feels that his brother freed himself from the constraints of time. The death of his brother is a permanent departure: When my vision traverses the long passage of memory and sees Sun Guangming once more, what he was leaving then was not the house: what he exited so carelessly was time itself. As soon as he lost his connection with time, he became fixed, permanent, whereas we continue to be carried forward by its momentum. What Sun Guangming sees is time bearing away the people and the scenery around him. And what I see is another kind of truth: after the living bury the dead, the latter forever lie stationary, while the former continue their restless motion. In the stillness of the dead, we who still roam can see a message sent by time.118

If death means only that a person is derailed from the path of time, then death should never be considered an abhorrent conclusion. Yu Hua describes Guanglin’s feeling when he first sees the dead man in the dilapidated temple: “It was the first time I had seen a dead man, and it looked to me as though he were sleeping. That must have been the extent of my reaction then: that dying was like falling asleep.”119 To die, therefore, is to enter an eternal quietude. Aside from the accidental death of Guanglin’s younger brother, two of Guanglin’s friends die of sickness at the threshold of turning eighteen: Su Yu and Liu Xiaoqing’s older brother, who always wears a peaked cap and can play beautiful melodies on a long flute. The image of this youth first appears in Yu Hua’s short story, “The April

118 119

Ibid., 34. Ibid., 5.

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Third Incident,” in which a young man plays the harmonica and dies of hepatitis. Yu Hua’s melancholic preoccupation with death is best manifested in his description of the death of Su Yu, a sensitive and thoughtful soul and one of the most memorable characters in the story. When Su Yu falls into a coma as a result of a cerebral hemorrhage, neither his parents nor his brother realize that he is seriously ill. They all assume that he is just sleeping in, and even complain that he is failing to do his usual chore of getting the hot water ready for the family. His brother seems to be his last hope for help, but his brother also fails him. “Su Yu sent out to his brother a mental cry for help, but all that happened was that he closed the door behind him.”120 Yu Hua uses three pages to recount Su Yu’s silent begging for help from his mother, father, and younger brother. He describes Su Yu sinking into a deep coma, but each time Su Yu hears the voice of one of his family members, it seems as though a beam of light is preventing him from subsiding into darkness. However, his family’s neglect of these silent pleas finally pushes him into darkness: Su Yu’s body finally found itself in an unstoppable fall that accelerated and turned into a tailspin. A stifling sensation held him in its grip for what seemed like an eternity, and then all of a sudden he attained the tranquility of utter nothingness. It was as though a refreshing breeze was blowing him gently into tiny pieces, as though he was melting into countless drops of water that disappeared crisply, sweetly, into thin air.121

The mysterious attraction that has bonded Su Yu with the protagonist Guanglin since middle school is now associated in Guanglin’s mind with his reverence for death. Su Yu’s youth is forever sealed in the form of death—a permanent and silent slumber. Su Yu’s death, as well as the other premature deaths that Guanglin has witnessed, trigger the latter’s awareness of not only the power of death, but also of human weakness and fragility. In the course of his coming-of-age, Guanglin comes to terms with death and develops an understanding of death as an alternative solution—and sometimes the most satisfying outcome— for some of life’s struggles.

120 121

Ibid., 120. Ibid., 121.

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Among his friends, only Guanglin will go on, strengthened and resolute. His growing familiarity with death, his continuing emotional attachment to his school friends, and his dissatisfaction with ordinary life may well complete his self-transformation from a lonely and aimless rural boy to a social critic and artist who could write novels like To Live, Cries in the Drizzle, Chronicle of a Blood Merchant and Brothers. After Cries in the Drizzle After Cries in the Drizzle, Yu Hua continued to explore the inner world of young men coming of age amidst an emotional background of fear and restlessness.122 As is the case with “On the Road at Eighteen” and “The April Third Incident,” the short stories “Timid as a Mouse” and “I Have No Name of My Own,” can be read as miniature Bildungsroman with tragic and parodistic leanings. None of the protagonists in these stories is “normal”; each is either unreasonably timorous or else exists in a state of restless subjection to his own illusions. By narrating the journeys of these disadvantaged teenagers, Yu Hua presents an alternative to the usual Bildung of Chinese youth. In “Timid as a Mouse,” Yu Hua depicts a boy who is so timid as to fear even a goose. At school, the protagonist Yang Gao is derided by both his teacher and his classmates. Even girls bully him. He never dares to fight them or swear at them. When he leaves school to work in a factory, he willingly and happily does the most humble work— cleaning the workshop. His fellow workers enjoy the clean environment he creates, but they also laugh at his stupidity. He never has a chance to enjoy the beneficial aspects of working in the factory because he does not fight for his share of them. Without making moral or value judgments, Yu Hua sets up a contrast between Yang Gao and his friend Lü Qianjin, who has attended the same school as Yang Gao; both young men later work together at the same factory. Lü Qianjin is a ruffian, but it seems he is much better off than Yang Gao. It is no accident that in Chinese, Yang Gao’s name is homonymic of lamb. The lamb is a symbol of sacrifice, innocence, kindness, and frailty. In this story, the lamb is neglected, insulted and hurt. People take advantage of Yang Gao’s innocence, kindness, hon122 Yu Hua, “Zixu” [Author’s preface], in Zhanli [Tremble] (Beijing: Xinshijie chubanshe, 1999), 2.

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esty, and weakness. In the end, when he tries to defend his dignity by threatening to kill Lü Qianjin, his kindness restrains him from any such violent action, and he incurs further humiliation. Yu Hua thus uses Yang Gao to mirror the brutality, numbness, utilitarianism, and ugliness so often encountered in the adult world. This story is an extension of “I Have No Name of My Own,” in which a mentally handicapped orphan named Laifa is constantly insulted by people around him. Laifa can also be vaguely identified as Guoqing’s co-worker in Cries in the Drizzle. Instead of using his name, people address him as “Sneeze,” “Bum Wipe,” “Old Dog,” “Skinny Pig,” or simply say “Over Here,” “Clear Off,” or “Hey.”123 In depriving him of his real name, people undercut his sense of dignity and treat him as if he were as insignificant as dust. Expelled from the human world by the masses, Laifa at least manages to make friends with a stray dog. He does not lose his desire, however, to be recognized as a human being. When some people finally hail him by his real name, his heart starts pounding. However, the price of this recognition is the death of his only friend, the dog. This is because some of the locals hoodwinked him into helping them catch his dog, which they later butchered and cooked. This incident triggers an inner change in Laifa. He shuts the door on this human world. He voluntarily gives up his name and chooses the state of namelessness. He vows, “If anyone ever calls me Laifa again, I’m not going to answer.”124 This is his way of fighting against an inhumane society. In spite of the calm and apathetic narrative, Yu Hua invites the reader to identify with Laifa by making him the first-person narrator. At the same time, Yu Hua directly targets the population as a whole, from the young to the old, who obtain their happiness by mercilessly attacking others, just as the masses in the story mercilessly trample on Laifa’s dignity. It is they who truly lose their name—human being.125 They lack an interior self and a respect for life, and are little better than mere animals living by base instincts.

123 Yu Hua, “Wo meiyou ziji de mingzi” [I have no name of my own], in Huanghun li de nanhai [Boy in the twilight, and other stories] (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 2004), 68–69. In the present work, I am using Allan H. Barr’s English translation of this story from “Boy in the Twilight, and Other Stories,” manuscript form (Asian Studies Program, Pomona College, 2006), 4. 124 Ibid., 22. 125 Jiang Fei, “Yu Hua jiushi niandai xiaoshuo de jiedu” [Interpretation of Yu Hua’s stories written in the 1990s], Shenyang shifan xueyuan xuebao 25, no. 2 (March 2001): 12–17.

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They are much like the masses in Lu Xun’s stories—curious and insensible people who can numbly gaze at the decapitation of another Chinese person without feeling a trace of compassion for the victim or indignation at the authorities. Even though “Timid as a Mouse” and “I Have No Name of My Own” were written in the 1990s, they are both set in the 1970s. As in “The Year Nineteen Eighty-six” and many other stories, Yu Hua reminds his readers of the devastating impact of the Cultural Revolution on the Chinese people, who became even worse than the numb countrymen in Lu Xun’s time. If Lu Xun’s countrymen were “senseless bystanders,”126 then in Yu Hua’s stories these masses have degenerated into brutal persecutors. “Timid as a Mouse” and “I Have No Name of My Own” can also be read as Yu Hua’s version of “Gimpel, the Fool,” by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–1991), winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature. “Gimpel, the Fool” is one of the ten stories that Yu Hua identified as having most influenced his own writing, and published them in his collection, The Warm Journey (Wennuan de lücheng). Commenting on this story, Yu Hua says that Singer describes “a soul purer than a blank paper. Because his name [Gimpel] is closely connected with the fool, his fate becomes a history of the deceived and the oppressed.”127 The apparent weakness that the kind and honest Gimpel manifests when he faces those who bully and humiliate him is actually powerful enough to defeat the mighty. This is also what Yu Hua wants to express in “Timid as a Mouse” and “I Have No Name of My Own.” Even though the protagonists of both stories are mercilessly trampled by the seemingly strong masses, their innocence, kindness, and honesty are more powerful; they represent the hope of recovering a rational, ethical, and humane Chinese folk society. Bildungsroman solely deals with transitional period of a man’s life—from adolescence to the threshold of adulthood, and reveals the development of the young hero’s individuality and socialization. One of the limitations of this literary genre is that it deals with only a limited phase in a person’s life. When Yu Hua started to explore broader themes of human existence, this genre was not a favorable choice any 126

Lu Xun, “Zixu” [Author’s preface], in Nahan [Call to arms] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1979), III. 127 Yu Hua, ed., “Preface” to Wennuan de lücheng [The warm journey] (Beijing: Xin shiji chubanshe, 1999), 8.

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more. Since his subsequent two full-length novels To Live and Chronicle of a Blood Merchant cover decades-long spans in the protagonist’s life, the Bildungsroman structure was no longer applicable. However, in Yu Hua’s more recent bestseller Brothers, a tale of the fate of the two brothers Li Guangtou and Song Gang during the Cultural Revolution and the Reform era, coming-of-age became one of the major patterns of his fiction again. Yu Hua has repeatedly mentioned his motivation of writing Brothers is to reflect the huge social changes China has experienced over the past four decades. In an interview carried out in 2003 when he was still writing this novel, Yu Hua noted “The first twenty years of my life, I was living in a time of poverty and oppression; the next twenty years were spent in a time of increasing wealth and freedom. The two periods are radically different. The gap between the two is like the gap between Europe in the Middle Ages and Europe nowadays.”128 Through depicting the separate paths of two brothers in the Reform era, Yu Hua presents his “disrespectful and subjective comment on the official version of recent history, or even a parody of government-sponsored portrayals of economic reform and its social consequence.”129 Brothers is divided into Part I and Part II. Part I was published in 2005 and deals with Cultural Revolution period. Part II was published in 2006 and covers the Reform period. The novel’s publication generated a good number of vehement discussions and controversies among readers and critics.130 Part I is about the two brothers’ childhood and adolescent lives during the Cultural Revolution. It reveals the close and warm fraternal relationship they developed under the influence of their loving parents Li Lan and Song Fanping. The father Song Fanping sets up a very positive role model for his sons with his love, optimism, integrity, and loyalty to the family in spite of the madness, absurdity and cruelty of the outside world. This ideal paternal image is in sharp contrast

128

Standaert, “Interview with Yu Hua.” Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg, “Multiple Temporalities in the Literary Identity Space of Post-Socialist China: A Discussion of Yu Hua’s Novel Brothers and Its Reception,” Berliner China-Hefte 34 (2008): 68. 130 Anne Wedell-Wedellsborg regards the vehement controversies Brothers has generated as an illustration of multiple temporalities in contemporary Chinese literary identity space. For detailed discussion, see her article “Multiple Temporalities in the Literary Identity Space of Post-Socialist China.” 129

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with another paternal image in the story: Li Guangtou’s biological father who died by drowning in a cesspool when attempting to peep at women in a public toilet. Part I ends with the death of Li Lan, who has never recovered from grief since her second husband Song Fanping was beaten to death by Red Guards seven years ago. The death of both parents signifies the withdrawal of parental guidance and positive role models. Therefore, the two brothers are abandoned by their parents before they even enter the adult world. Part II deals with the problematic relationship of the two adult brothers during the Reform era, especially the triangular relationship between the two brothers and a woman named Lin Hong. Lin Hong first marries Song Gang, but after Song Gang loses his job and goes away to the south to engage in business projects, Lin Hong falls into Li Guangtou’s arms. Yu Hua portrays a black-and-white contrast between the two brothers Li Guangtou and Song Gang, who are different in almost every way imaginable. Song Gang is tall, lean, feminine, honest, kind, loyal to his wife, and protective toward his brother. In contrast, Li Guangtou is short, sturdy, masculine, coarse, crude, cunning, and immoral. The differences between the two brothers embody a series of contrasting values: “sex and love, masculine vs. feminine, active vs. passive, loyalty vs. betrayal, spiritual vs. material.”131 The two brothers’ harmonious fraternal relationship nurtured by their loving family during the Cultural Revolution is mercilessly corroded by social and material forces in the Reform era. Song Gang becomes a victim of the marketized economy; betrayed by both his brother and wife, he eventually commits suicide. In contrast, Li Guangtou’s business talents and unscrupulousness lead to his success in a money-oriented society. Sex and money have been his weapons to defeat his brother Song Gang. However, after the death of Song Gang, Li Guangtou becomes impotent, and eventually gives up business as a career. Hence, as WedellWedellsborg has observed, “the absence [of brotherhood] ultimately invalidates the powers of sex and money.”132 Through portraying the dichotomized fates of two brothers and dismantling common assumptions about brotherly loyalty and amity, Yu Hua makes a powerful social criticism of China’s rapid economic development, and reveals

131 132

Ibid., 68. Ibid.

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one of its most destructive consequences for Chinese society—the loss or dysfunction of traditional family values. In terms of narrative style, Brothers is a combination of family saga, the Bildungsroman, popular stories of business success. The story also has a strong oral quality with such attributes as one-dimensional minor characters, the omniscient narrator, the straight story line, the extensive use of slang and popular stock phrases, and the succession of events, dialogues and actions.133 Strictly speaking, Brothers is not a Bildungsroman novel, but it incorporates some narrative elements of Bildungsroman, and resonates with Cries in the Drizzle in its tragic and parodist connotations. Brothers is about two brothers’ individual development, and reveals the dynamic transformation of each brother in the context of powerful social and economic pressures. However, in contrast with the typical Bildungsroman novel, the narrative is not confined to the two brothers’ coming-of-age experiences, but focuses more on their life as mature adults during the Reform era. In addition, the Bildungsroman genre emphasizes mobility and interiority, or else social integration and the development of the young hero’s individuality. But in this story, Yu Hua has no intention of revealing the development of the young heroes’ internal worlds. Instead, he focuses solely on the brothers’ overt behavior. As one critic has observed, “all of the characters in this novel—even the two brothers at the center of itare “rather flat characters; there is no attempt at internal psychological description.”134 This lack of psychological exploration of the young heroes makes Brothers a parody or subversion of the genre of Bildungsroman. This subversion of the genre is in fact a subversion of the values that the genre usually upholds, because “the codes for guided interpretation are mainly ethical codes.”135 By omitting mention of the psychological complexities of the central protagonists while drawing solely upon dramatic incidents to propel the narrative forward, Yu Hua discloses one of his deepest intellectual concerns about contemporary China. Namely, that many people seldom ponder or reflect on matters beyond their immediate ken or areas of personal concern,

133 For more detailed discussion of the story’s oral quality, see Wedell-Wedellsborg, “Multiple Temporalities in the Literary Identity Space of Post-Socialist China: A Discussion of Yu Hua’s Novel Brothers and Its Reception.” 134 Ibid., 68. 135 Zhao, “Yu Hua: Fiction as Subversion,” 419.

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thereby leading to a vacuum in an area of cognitive life that would ordinarily be devoted to moral reflection or intellectual growth. At the end of the novel, neither of the brothers has sired any children, so the family line stops with them. Therefore, Brothers is not only a parody of the Bildungsroman, but also a subversion of the family saga.

CHAPTER FIVE

TRAGIC AND PARODISTIC BILDUNGSROMAN In the previous two chapters, I have presented thematic analyses of the coming-of-age fiction of Su Tong and Yu Hua respectively. In this chapter, I will place these narratives in comparative perspective by relating them to earlier Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo written from the May Fourth era up to 1966, as well as to the European Bildungsroman tradition. In so doing, I will demonstrate that the coming-ofage fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua are not only tragic, but also parodistic, both within the context of earlier modern Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo (especially those written between 1949 and 1966) and with respect to the traditional European Bildungsroman. I will illustrate the tragic and parodistic implications of Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s coming-of-age fiction from two angles. I will first demonstrate how Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s narratives differentiate themselves from the coming-of-age fiction written by earlier Chinese writers by reviving the autonomy, subjectivity, and individuality of the protagonist. The coming-of-age fiction written from the May Fourth era up to 1966 had been influenced by the gradual victory of collectivity and revolution over individuality and subjectivity; in fiction, youth had been portrayed as the era’s chosen agents for the rejuvenation and modernization of China. The interaction between inwardness and outwardness is the tension between individualist autonomy and collective history. In this perspective, Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s narratives are parodistic. While the Cultural Revolution represented the summit of collectivism, their narratives portray the emergence of autonomy and individuality among their young protagonists. In addition, unlike earlier protagonists whose assertion of individuality and subjectivity conform to the direction of history, the school drop-outs and alienated schoolboys in Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s narratives strive to act in defiance of collectivism; they assert their individualist autonomy in an unreflective way, and in disregard of the fact that they are bound to fail. They do not find the meaning of their lives in a May Fourth-style advocacy of “national salvation,” nor do they grow up as socialist new men as the Party expects. Instead, they die prematurely, end up in jail

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or otherwise face a troubled and uncertain future. Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s chengzhang xiaoshuo are thus imbued with tragic overtones. Secondly, I will refer the two authors’ fiction to the theoretical corpus of the Bildungsroman by examining their similarities and differences with traditional Bildungsroman fiction. In so doing, I will explore the interaction between the literary genre and individual Chinese literary work, demonstrating how Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s narratives enrich the Bildungsroman literary genre by providing a body of tragic and parodistic Bildungsroman. I will argue that in their tragic and parodistic character, Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s narratives deviate from mainstream traditional European Bildungsroman fiction. That is, they do not allow the young protagonists to achieve an accommodation with society, nor to make peace with their reality after having experienced all kinds of trials. In this way, they deprive the reader of the traditional educational function of Bildungsroman. Farewell to Revolution After Mao’s famous “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” in 1942, Chinese literature in mainland China increasingly became an instrument for legitimizing and strengthening the reign of the Chinese Communist Party. The Party’s view of literature mostly gave priority to ideological correctness over artistic merit. In terms of thematic concern, individualism and subjectivity gave way to collectivism and revolutionary ideology; as one critic argues, “Mao gave individualism and subjectivity negative connotations because the individual’s private feelings and space may pose a threat to the stable and pure form of revolutionary ideology.”1 The basic task of writers was to create heroic models of workers, soldiers, and farmers. The dominant conflicts of the narratives were based upon class struggle and an adversarial conflict between the Party’s collectivist imperatives and residual individualist motivations within society. Overt political messages were the hallmark of the literary works written in the Mao era. As we saw in Chapter Two, the chengzhang xiaoshuo written in this period of time—such as Yang Mo’s The Song of Youth, Wang Meng’s Long Live Youth, and Hao Ran’s Bright Sunny Skies—follow the

1

Liu, Revolution Plus Love, 22.

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formulaic writing promoted by Mao Zedong; they portray Chinese young people as the “morning sun at eight or nine o’clock” who grow up into rosy-cheeked socialist new men and women under the guidance and support of the infallible CCP.2 In the typical novel or short story of this era, there is an evolutionary change in the young protagonist’s character and socialization. No matter which class background the protagonist comes from—whether working class or middle class— the period of youth itself is legitimized as helping to propel the protagonist into highly coveted CCP membership and an ensuing career in constructing a socialist new China. The protagonist happily embraces an inevitably bright future in Mao’s China. Represented by either a school teacher or a Party official, the Party plays a uniformly positive and central role in the psychological and mental development and maturity of the protagonist. Thus in Yang Mo’s The Song of Youth, the female protagonist Lin Daojing passionately exclaims to the undercover CCP member Lu Jiachuan, “I am looking forward to seeing you— the Party—save me, a person on the verge of drowning.”3 However, Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s coming-of-age narratives are drastically different from those of Yang Mo, the early Wang Meng, and other writers of the Mao era in terms of characterization, plot, and language. First, their major characters are not typically active, progressive, and pro-Party young men, even though they all come from the working classes apotheosized by Mao—families of the urban poor or village laborers. Furthermore, these protagonists are not diligent or high-performing students in school. The major young characters in Su Tong’s narratives all get expelled from school, and thereby have no alternative but to receive an education of sorts on the streets. The young protagonists in Yu Hua’s narratives are not banished from school, but they are not necessarily better off than the characters in Su Tong’s fiction; they are similarly marginalized or alienated. In addition, the narratives of Yu Hua and Su Tong subvert the glorified and stereotypical images of the Party secretary, school teacher, and revolutionary cadre who personalize the CCP and serve as spiritual mentors to young people in the officially-sanctioned coming-of-age fiction in the Mao era. In contrast, Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s narratives 2

For more about the literature written during the Cultural Revolution see Richard King, “A Shattered Mirror: The Literature of the Cultural Revolution” (PhD diss., University of British Columbia, 1984). 3 Yang, Qingchun zhi ge, 207.

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generally portray CCP officials as negative role models for youth. For example, in Su Tong’s short story, “Roller Skating Away,” the protagonist is expelled from the classroom and accidentally discovers an adulterous affair between a local Party secretary and a music teacher at the school. In North Side Story, the schoolteachers have regressed to the same moral level as their students by using vulgar language and behaving violently in encounters with their students and other adults. In the same novel, CCP-led mass organizations such as the Workers’ Propaganda Team and the Neighborhood Committee do nothing but damage the educational system by taking over schools and monitoring the perpetrators of illicit sexual acts, rather than providing moral and educational guidance to young people. In Yu Hua’s Cries in the Drizzle, the role of the Party among young people is even more vague and destructive. Guanglin’s foster father, Wang Liqiang, is not the heroic and politically progressive PLA military officer one invariably finds in Mao’s formulaic stories; instead, he becomes a victim of the CCP’s asceticism and provides a tragic and negative role model for his foster son. The withdrawal of the CCP’s guiding and mentoring role from Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s narratives thus negates the myth of the Party’s glorious influence on Chinese youth and parodies the coming-of-age narratives written by leftist Chinese writers in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as by writers in the Mao era. In addition, the young protagonists’ dropping out of school or their marginalization at school symbolizes their withdrawal from collective and political activities and mass movements. In this way, the narratives of Su Tong and Yu Hua depict an alienation of the self from social transformation. Through the drama of the characters’ individual experiences, both authors attempt to articulate the importance of individualism, subjectivism, and humanity. Even when the education that some of the protagonists in Yu Hua’s and Su Tong’s fiction receive seems to result in partial or total failure, at least these protagonists stand up on their own two feet; they take some responsibility for their actions rather than abjectly throwing themselves on the mercy of the collective or passively blaming society for all of their individual problems. Likewise, some of the premature love vignettes punctuating the narratives indicate that the young protagonists are exerting their subjectivity and egoism against the CCP’s asceticism and its discourse of revolutionary love. In so doing, Su Tong and Yu Hua stand up for human personality and the inner self in opposition for the leveling influence of the Cultural Revolution’s political zeal. By emphasizing

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the young protagonists’ soul-searching, Su Tong and Yu Hua turn their narratives from mass movement (the Cultural Revolution) to individual heroism, from the collectivistic mentality to private identity, and from political enlightenment to personal spiritual exploration. The tendency of turning back towards a more individualistic and less collectivistic spirit in the fiction of Yu Hua and Su Tong also resonates with the advocacy of the “farewell to revolution” explored by Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu in their book Farewell to Revolution (Gaobie geming, 1999). In reviewing history of the twentieth century China, Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu point out that the revolutionary mode of thinking and acting has dominated both Chinese intellectual life and the daily life of the Chinese people for about a hundred years, and they call for it to end.4 Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s attempt to alienate their young protagonists from this revolutionary movement can be read as a gesture to bid farewell to revolution in literary representation. In spite of their autonomy and subjectivity, the young protagonists in fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua eventually fail to achieve maturity and thereby take their place as the most recent link in the revolutionary succession of socialist China. This failure is another element that marks their narratives with parody. All of the young characters in their narratives end up on a more or less self-destructive path: Dasheng lies dead on the coal mountain after single-handedly fighting ten people; Hongqi is sentenced to waste the rest of his youth behind prison walls; Xude runs away from home to face an unpredictable future; Su Yu dies from an illness; Guanglin’s younger brother drowns; and Guanglin’s older brother faces a life of struggle in the countryside. Except for Young Cripple in North Side Story and to a lesser extent the younger brother Guangming in Cries in the Drizzle, none of these young people becomes a Communist Party member, a model youth, or some other type of heroic Maoist figure. Even Young Cripple’s emergence as a model youth reads more like a parody than a run-ofthe-mill Maoist eulogy. When trying to steal something valuable, he happens to uncover a hidden ammunition depot and thereby expose a “class enemy.” Ironically, he soon finds himself in demand as a “model youth” pep-talk speaker; for the first time in his life, he brings glory to

4 Li Zehou and Liu Zaifu, Gaobie geming: Ershi shiji zhongguo duitan lu [Farewell to revolution: a critical dialogue on 20th-century China], ed. David D.W. Wang (Taibei: Maitian chuban gufen youxian gongsi, 1999).

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himself and his family. This transformation of Young Cripple into a model youth under false pretenses is Su Tong’s way of parodying the notion of model youth in Mao era formulaic fiction. In Cries in the Drizzle, Guangming drowns while trying to save the life of an eight-year-old boy. Even though this admirable act of “sacrificing oneself to save others” (sheji jiuren) was repeatedly apotheosized during the Mao-era as a reflection of the lofty virtue acquired by the socialist new man, Yu Hua treats Guangming’s heroic sacrifice more as a personal tragedy for himself and his family: “Sun Guangming drowned while trying to save him [the young boy]. It would be going too far, of course, to present this as an act of heroic self-sacrifice. My little brother had not reached a level of such lofty virtue as to be willing to exchange his own life for someone else’s.”5 Guangming’s death provides his father and brother with a temporary illusion of Guangming as a widely respected hero. They imagine the government will visit the hero’s family, glorifying them by means of public accolades and thus upgrading their political status. Unfortunately, nothing of the sort ever happens. Therefore, this entire narrative sequence amounts to a satire in which Yu Hua reveals the emptiness of much CCP rhetoric about the Party’s reverence for heroes and martyrs. Not only do Su Tong and Yu Hua disapprove of their young protagonists becoming progressive model youth under the Party’s guidance and cultivation—they also draw upon some episodes to satirize the Party’s heavy-handed political control over the PRC citizenry. For example, in Cries in the Drizzle, Guanglin’s primary school teacher suspects Guanglin of having written a slogan of denunciation against him. Guanglin’s two best friends are sent to pressure him to admit this to the teacher. Facing his friends’ betrayal and the teacher’s interrogation, the young boy is forced to admit to a crime he never committed. Guanglin’s forced confession in school is a powerful and vivid example of the inhumane practices of Party indoctrination and ritualistic confession at the local level, which became deeply rooted in the Yan’an Rectification Movement in 1942 and continued all the way through the Cultural Revolution, and in some contexts continue up to the present day. Accordingly, in the coming-of-age fiction written in the Mao-era, this kind of moralistic manipulation is always described in a eulogistic manner: the young student recognizes and owns up

5

Yu, Cries in the Drizzle, 35–36.

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to having made ideological mistakes, thanks to help from teachers or peers of sound ideological standing or class pedigree. In addition to these parodies reflected in the characterization and plotting, Su Tong and Yu Hua subvert Mao-era rhetoric by using popular ideological jargon and political slogans for the benefit of the protagonists. In the literary works of the Mao era, political and ideological jargon is usually applied in a eulogistic manner to transmit uplifting political messages. An example of the subversion of this saccharine idealism occurs in Cries in the Drizzle when an urban-based Party official named Zheng Yuda asks Sun Kwangtsai’s opinion of the People’s Commune. Kwangtsai confirms that the People’s Commune is a good thing because “meals are free.”6 In spite of the extensive Party-state propaganda about the benefits of the People’s Commune— promoting steel production, undertaking water projects, and improving agricultural productivity, local farmers merely notice the more practical aspects of the People’s Commune: everything is shared, and home-cooked meals are replaced by communal dining-hall meals. Sun Kwangtsai’s down-to-earth response to Mao’s radical collective unit exposes the gap between high-flown official Party rhetoric and a practical grass-roots perspective. In the same story, Mao’s ideological statements are often appropriated for the characters’ personal advantage. For example, a shrewish wife conveniently and passionately combines fashionable political jargon with classical poetry and pop lyrics to reprimand her husband, a gifted but henpecked poet. The husband’s letters of repentance, his pledges to reform, and his confessional statements of self-criticism, similar to those written by CCP members to show their loyalty to the Party, become proof of his obedience to his harsh wife. In another scene, the CCP’s practice of “recalling yesteryear’s bitterness in order to reflect on today’s sweetness” is exploited by both Guangping and his father Kwangtsai for different purposes. The father asks his wife and sons to wear ragged clothes in order to impress government representatives. “When we think of the miseries of the Old Society,” he says, “we are all the more aware of how wonderful life is in the New Society.” However, when Guangping is ridiculed by his classmates in school for wearing ragged clothing, he “comes up with a compelling

6

Ibid., 70.

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justification for his abandonment of this costume,”7 telling his father that their ragged clothing is an insult to the brave new Communist society. Similarly, it is common to see in Su Tong’s North Side Story that the children and women conveniently quote or ape Chairman Mao’s words and political slogans in order to legitimize questionable behavior that has nothing to do with politics. For example, before Sumei takes revenge on Jinlan, a debauched woman who has seduced both Sumei’s husband and her son, Sumei encourages herself and justifies her violence against Jinlan by citing Chairman Mao’s famous sixteencharacter guideline for the use of force: “We will never attack unless we are attacked; and if we are attacked, we will certainly counterattack.”8 In another scene, when Old Zhu tries to mediate the tense relationship between his mother and his wife Jinlan, he juxtaposes the tense relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law with the longstanding rivalry between the USSR and the USA: “Even the Soviet revisionists and the American imperialists have initiated peaceful negotiations—how come the two of you can’t practice peaceful coexistence?”9 The extensive use of ideological statements and political jargon in fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua thus not only reflect the impact of political tag phrases on Chinese society in the Mao-era, but also present a mockery of that same rhetoric; the sharp contrast between the overtly political implications of Party leaders’ statements and slogans and their down-to-earth utilization by the rank-and-file citizenry amounts to a parody of the Mao-era literary mainstream. From the foregoing analysis, we can see that fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua is oppositional and parodistic in relation to earlier Chinese coming-of-age narratives, especially those written in the Mao-era. They achieve this through their subversion of the CCP’s glorified role in the tutelage of Chinese youth, their reassertion of the autonomy and subjectivity of young people, their denial of the possibility of Chinese youth growing up into new socialist men and women, and their exploitation and debasement of Maoist official jargon and the Party’s

7

Ibid., 44. This famous tenet was laid down by Mao Zedong in 1939 in his article “On Policy,” and since then has become the CCP’s chief guideline for the use of force. 9 Su, Chengbei didai, 243. 8

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political rhetoric. In the process, the narratives achieve a profound reflection upon the political ethos of the Cultural Revolution. In living through the Cultural Revolution, the characters in fiction by Su Tong and Yu Hua are destined to endure a troubled and even tragic existence. Both authors embrace an essentially pessimistic view of the future of the generation of young Chinese who came of age in the 1970s. In both authors’ childhood during the Cultural Revolution, Su Tong and Yu Hua experienced one of the most violent and chaotic eras in human history. As a result, they both have remained writers with a strong sense of history. They have felt indignant about the hardships that they and other Chinese people experienced during the decade of the Cultural Revolution. Their narratives challenge the reader to reflect deeply on the origins of the Cultural Revolution and ponder what an individual citizen can do about the waste of human lives and talent that resulted from such Maoist debacles. This is genuine literature, not mere infotainment for the ruling elite. For Su Tong and Yu Hua, writing coming-of-age narratives is thus not only a lyrical manner of exploring the disastrous effects of historical events upon Chinese people in general and young people in particular, but also their reminder to the world that the cataclysms of history cannot be forgotten. Unfulfilled Bildung When Su Tong and Yu Hua wrote their coming-of-age fiction, it was close to two centuries since the term for the literary genre known as the Bildungsroman had been coined in Europe in the 1810s. The sociohistorical background of the two authors’ oeuvres differs substantially from the era of humanistic idealism of late eighteenth-century Germany, from which Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship emerged, and yet their fiction resonates with the European Bildungsroman tradition in terms of its plot and characterization, introspection, humanistic concerns, and psychological and intellectual seriousness. However, in spite of these commonalities, the fiction of Su Tong and Yu Hua differentiates itself from traditional European Bildungsroman fiction by largely excluding any romantic or love interest from its youthful protagonists’ journeys toward adulthood, as well as by preventing these protagonists from achieving an accommodation with society. In this regard, the anti-Bildungsroman or tragic version of Bildungsroman in Su Tong

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and Yu Hua is close to the “parodistic Bildungsroman,” a term that literary critics such as Martin Swales have applied to describe Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.10 The following discussion will explore both the commonalities that our two authors’ chengzhang xiaoshuo share with the traditional Bildungsroman as well as the differences between them. The Bildungsroman “depicts the formation of the hero up until a certain level of completion”11 with “a balance between activity and contemplation.”12 Here, activity is understood to be the accumulation of experience, or what might be considered the ordeal of life. Contemplation refers to the introspection and self-reflection that leads to the psychological and intellectual development of the young protagonist. Such novels by Su Tong and Yu Hua as North Side Story and Cries in the Drizzle exemplify major elements of the plot in a Bildungsroman: “Childhood, the conflict of generations, provinciality, larger society, self-education, alienation, ordeal by love, the search for a vocation and a philosophy [of life].”13 Both Chinese writers’ narratives maintain a balance between “reflection” and “action.”14 Su Tong’s North Side Story tells of the protagonist Dasheng’s experiences from the time he is twelve until his death at nineteen. Yu Hua’s Cries in the Drizzle is an adult’s reminiscences of his boyhood from age six to his departure for university studies at eighteen. In both novels, the “conflict of generations” is reflected in the negative role models of the parental world in general, and specifically in the relationships between fathers and sons. A common picture emerges in Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s description of the adult world. The deep-rooted antiConfucianism and anti-intellectualism of the Cultural Revolution have led to the emptying of “the humanism of China’s ancient propriety”15 across the whole of Chinese society and to the loss of the function

10

Swales, The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse, 125. Mahoney quotes Dilthey’s later definition of Bildungsroman in his article “The Apprenticeship of the Reader: The Bildungsroman of the ‘Age of Goethe,’” in Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman, 101. 12 George Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press, 1971), 135. 13 Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding, 18. 14 Hardin emphasizes the balance between reflection and action of the Bildungsroman novel in the introduction to Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman. 15 Michael Duke, “Reinventing China: Cultural Exploration in Contemporary Chinese Fiction,” Issues and Studies 25 (August 1989): 34. 11

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of education, namely “to propagate doctrines of the ancient sages, to transmit learning, and to dispel confusion.”16 In this new social and historical context, adult society, represented by the father and teacher, cannot provide proper moral and cultural guidance to children. The Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo thus resemble their European counterparts in the way their gradually maturing youthful protagonists such as Dasheng in Su Tong’s North Side Story and Guanglin and Guoqing in Yu Hua’s Cries in the Drizzle are either fatherless or else alienated from their fathers. After having grown alienated from the biological father or having lost him altogether, the teenagers in these two novels search for a surrogate parent or a substitute bonding within the peer community. Su Tong’s young protagonists generally find themselves more alienated and helpless than those of Yu Hua. In North Side Story, for example, Dasheng’s peer community is as helpless and cruel as the parental society, and finally leads him to self-destruction. In Yu Hua’s story, Guanglin’s peer community is supportive, caring, and guiding, in sharp contrast with adult circles in society. Therefore, Su Tong comes across as more pessimistic than Yu Hua, illustrating even more poignantly the contrast between the two authors’ works on the one hand, and the more optimistic classic Bildungsroman on the other. In North Side Story, Dasheng is suspended between the world of school and the vulgar Toon Street lifestyle. He is able to fully recognize his alienation, which is caused by the death of his father, bitter relations with his mother, expulsion from school, and disappointment with his friends. His peer community, represented by his friends— Hongqi, who ends up in jail; Xude, who elopes with a married woman; and Young Cripple, who misguidedly becomes a model for youth— offers Dasheng very little generosity or support. He finds that he cannot “invest his trust in anyone who is not an image of innocence.”17 Seemingly, there is no one to whom he can turn for guidance, either his parents or his peer community. Dasheng must move forward by himself, keeping his own counsel. He sets off on his lonely journey and becomes a solitary hero.

16 Han Yu (768-824), “Shishuo” [On teacher], in Han Yu wen xuan [Selected works of Han Yu], ed. Tong Dide (n.p., 1980), 52. 17 Bly, Sibling Society, 19.

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Setting out on a journey, symbolically and often literally, is a key element in the traditional European Bildungsroman. The journey enmeshes the young man within a broader social milieu and serves as both an “agent of liberation and a source of corruption.”18 Throughout this journey, the young protagonist experiences all kinds of difficulties and finally achieves maturity. For example, in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Wilhelm’s symbolic journey is his involvement with theatrical circles. During that period of time, Wilhelm experiences friendship, love, responsibility, and the harshness of societal realities. In Dasheng’s case, his larger society is the street gang. His goal is to organize his own gang on Toon Street and gain recognition as a true man by defeating the other gangs in town. Dasheng finally fulfills his wish at the price of his young life. The youth subculture in Yu Hua’s Cries in the Drizzle is much more positive. It plays the role that should have been played by the parental world: providing support, comfort, warmth, understanding, and even guidance to frustrated adolescents. The friendships of the protagonist Guanglin with various friends throughout his childhood provide him with necessary emotional and physical support and guidance. Despite this, Guanglin cannot escape the fate of alienation. Guanglin’s alienation derives from his being abandoned by both his biological and his foster families. His friends Guoqing and Su Yu suffer similar abandonment, one ending up an orphan, the other dead. Because of the complete alienation from their families, the young men in Yu Hua’s narratives are forced to assert their independence much earlier than they should. In Cries in the Drizzle, the protagonist has two journeys: first away from the countryside where his biological family lives to the town where his foster family resides, and then from the town back to the countryside. His first journey starts at the tender age of seven, when he is adopted by the Wang family. This change of life brings him to a much larger world than that of the countryside. To some degree, the journey from home amounts to a flight from provinciality. Guanglin experiences much more than his brothers, who are left behind in the countryside. While residing in town, Guanglin attends primary school, enjoying the friendship of his classmates and a relatively affluent material life. At the same time, he witnesses the brutal reality of the

18

Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding, 20.

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adult world: a husband’s betrayal of his wife, a desperate man’s bloody revenge and suicide, and a father’s ruthless abandonment of his son. Five years later, Guanglin sets out on his second journey, returning from the town to the countryside. This second journey occurs in adolescence and further alienates him from the adult world, which is represented by his biological family. His father regards his return as an unlucky sign because their house catches fire without apparent reason on the very day he arrives home. What he witnesses at this home is simply the extended rural version of the family life he previously experienced in his foster home in town: the harshness and narrowness of provincial village life, the father’s betrayal of the mother, the father’s mistreatment of the grandfather, the mother’s helplessness, and the parents’ neglect of their children. In this period, he enters into a deep friendship with Su Yu, who plays the role of the older brother, “caretaker, teacher, playmate, and confidant.”19 The two journeys between countryside and town show Guanglin both sides of the same coin: despite different economic and geographical settings, the degenerate, desperate, and helpless adult worlds are the same. The ordeal of love is a common element in Bildungsroman narratives, such as David Copperfield’s innocent love for Dora in David Copperfield, or Wilhelm Meister’s love for Natalie in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. In Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s narratives, the ordeal of love is reflected merely in the anxiety of young men’s sexual awakening, not in a love interest or romance per se. Due to the highly political, repressive, and ascetic nature of the Cultural Revolution, this anxiety is aggravated by the lack of proper sexual education and guidance from the parental world. Accordingly, the teenagers that Su Tong and Yu Hua portray develop a pathological, irrational fear of sex. They are caught between their natural sexual desire, misconceptions of sexuality, and the generally repressive atmosphere of the whole society, and are prone to violence as a means of venting their pent-up desire for sex and love. In Su Tong’s coming-of-age narratives, sexuality is always accompanied by violence or its extreme form, death. For example, in “Roller Skating Away,” Cat Head’s masturbation and subsequent intense shame leads to his fatal road accident. In “Memories of Mulberry Garden,” two young shamefaced lovers, Crimson Jade and Hairy Head, die in a

19

Rice, The Adolescent: Development, Relationships, and Culture, 44.

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bamboo grove with the boy’s bite marks imprinted on the girl’s face. In North Side Story, Hongqi, a quiet boy with beautiful eyes, rapes his beloved girlfriend Meiqi with disastrous results: he is sentenced to prison for nine years, while Meiqi in turn commits suicide. In the same story, the sexual experience of the young protagonist Dasheng is even more disturbing: the ghost of Meiqi awakens Dasheng’s sexual desire. Overwhelmed by shame over his wet dreams, he kills a cat that he believes is the incarnation of Meiqi. In Cries in the Drizzle, teenage sexual awakenings are portrayed in a manner less marked by violence and suffering, but the overall sentiments are similarly disturbing and tragic. The protagonist Guanglin’s sexual awakening begins with his secret masturbation at night and leads to his strong sense of guilt and impurity and his alienation from his close friend Su Yu. Meanwhile, Su Yu’s own frustration leads him one day to suddenly embrace a young female stranger on the street, resulting in his incarceration for a year. In a normal society, an adolescent’s sexual awakening is often accompanied by romance or love interest that largely satisfies both his sexual and emotional needs. In both Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s narratives, this sort of satisfying love interest or romance is either absent or else doomed to destruction. Even when there are occasional glimmers of genuine love between boy and girl, they are all short-lived. Instead of leading to a normal romance and marriage, the mutual attraction between Hongqi and Meiqi in North Side Story leads to the destruction of two young lives. In Cries in the Drizzle, the genuine love between Guoqing and his sweetheart incurs nothing but mockery and strong opposition from the girl’s parents. Eventually, he embarks upon a hopeless campaign of retaliation against the girl’s parents. In the same story, the admiration of Guanglin’s elder brother for his female classmate brings him only insult and alienation due to her family’s higher social and political status. Giving tacit consent to the status quo, the elder brother withdraws to the countryside and climbs into a widow’s bed, just as his father had done at a previous juncture. Removing romance and love from the experience of adolescent sexual awakening, Su Tong and Yu Hua thus show how in 1970s China adolescent sexual maturity is not ordinarily accompanied by love, but instead by guilt, shame, violence, and even death. In this way, their works contrast sharply with the traditional Bildungsroman. Another key difference is in the way the novels end. Even though critics repeatedly emphasize that the Bildungsroman is about the journey

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of youth itself and that achieving a gratifying result is not the point, most traditional European Bildungsroman novels have a positive ending marked by the protagonist’s reintegration with society. The tension between “potentiality and actuality,” which is central to the growth of the young hero, is thereby released. For example, Wilhelm Meister finally leaves the theatre, accepts the guidance of the Society of the Tower, and marries the beautiful Amazon. The Society of the Tower is the means to foster Wilhelm’s intellectual and cultural ideals—and ultimately point the way to a new society.20 In contrast, no young man from the narratives of Su Tong and Yu Hua experiences happiness or reintegration at the end of his journey. Guanglin seems to be the only one with a promising future, since he will leave home for university. Yet rather than taking this as an optimistic ending, I see the narrator Guanglin as a witness and medium of history. He has witnessed the suffering of his peers and the degenerate, desperate lives of his parents’ generation. He carries the responsibility of remembering this period of history and passing its lessons on to later generations. In essence, Bildungsroman novels are developed around the tension between the young protagonist’s potential and reality. This tension is the ordeal the youth has to cope with in order to achieve maturity. At the end of most Bildungsroman fiction, the young protagonist finds an “accommodation” between the individual and the society. In other words, the two ends meet, and the circle of life is sealed. In the fiction of Su Tong and Yu Hua, the complexity of individual potentiality is revealed in the young protagonist’s assertion of independence and autonomy; his dissatisfaction with the status quo; his ambition; his anxiety, loneliness, fear, and alienation; and his longing for warmth, tenderness, and support. The reality he has to face is a chaotic society full of political suppression, a failure of the educational system, the loss of humanity and cultural tradition, the lack of positive role models and guidance from his parental generation, and the drifting and helplessness of his peers. Under such circumstances, his sense of self-realization can never come to terms with his reality. His youthful aspirations remain unfulfilled. None of the protagonist’s childhood experiences—his education, his conflicts with his parents’ generation, his journeys, his entries into a

20

Swales, The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse, 57–73.

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larger world, and his ordeal of love—help him to learn lessons, achieve maturity, make peace with reality, or find an accommodation with society. Instead, these bitter experiences lead him only to destruction. In this way, the two Chinese authors demonstrate that in an abnormal era such as the Cultural Revolution, for the most part young people cannot successfully step over the threshold from youth to adulthood. They are frozen between childhood and adulthood. Death is the ceremony of their adulthood. The Bildungsroman demands a balance between activity and contemplation. Martin Swales has emphasized that “the great texts sustain the dialectic of practical social reality on the one hand, and the complex inwardness of the individual on the other.”21 The process of a young protagonist achieving practical accommodation within society parallels his psychological and intellectual development. The young protagonist’s self-reflection and his exploration of his potential is a significant concern of the Bildungsroman. In the fiction of Su Tong and Yu Hua, the complex inwardness of the young protagonists is explored as the plot of a given narrative progresses, but in ways that are distinct from their European counterparts. In North Side Story, the way the novel explores the underlying tension of Dasheng’s persona is particularly noteworthy. Dasheng is not an unthinking person; however, his self-examinations and his analysis of his situation are too simple, and too often he relies on convenient labels. At any given point in Dasheng’s life, there are more aspects to his personality than he is able to recognize in any pursuit or course of action. For example, in his bizarre relationship with Meiqi both before and after her death, he never realizes that Meiqi, for him, is a cipher for feminine beauty and fragility, womanhood, physical vitality, and spontaneous sensuality. Instead, each time after his wet dream, he only experiences feelings of anger, frustration, and hatred. This is because like everyone else living on Toon Street he regards the midnight visits of Meiqi’s ghost as her way of taking revenge for the wrongful death she had suffered. He cannot recognize his inner thirst for tenderness and affection, his deep sympathy for a fragile beauty, and the even more profound insight that his joy coexists with darkness and death. Similarly, he sees his father’s death merely as relief from further physical and verbal abuse on the old man’s part; he cannot fathom his

21

Ibid., 6.

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own loss of faith in the values of home and family. When he searches for a martial arts master to teach him kung fu, he doesn’t recognize his deep longing for a role model who could provide him with proper guidance. He complains of his friends’ betrayal, cowardliness, degeneration, and drifting apart, but he does not realize that his friends are struggling with their own dilemmas. He grows alienated from his peers and yet longs to be brought back into the fold with them. Through his narrator, Su Tong tries to highlight what his hero fails to recognize: Dasheng’s quest for a fulfilling life is limited by the historical and political conditions of his time. Therefore, Su Tong provides another character, Old Kang, to help Dasheng reflect upon reality. As the bearer and guardian of the fundamental values inherent in Confucian humanism and the Chinese intellectual tradition, Old Kang is endowed with cultural and historical significance. Having lived in two different societies, the “old society” before 1949 and the “new society” after 1949, he has witnessed the social and political changes in China, and clearly realizes the crises of the time—the failure of the educational system, the loss of traditional values, and the rejection of Confucian moral codes without the provision of any satisfactory replacement. He knows well the problems society in general is facing, as well as the particular problems with which Dasheng and his teenaged friends must cope. In a normal society, Old Kang would have been able to offer Dasheng and his friends the guidance and help they need. Unfortunately, after 1949, Old Kang has dropped to the bottom of the social ladder and has been deprived of the right to speak. Even though he is aware of the current social atmosphere of anti-intellectualism and anti-humanism, he still tries to educate others. Unfortunately, no one listens to him; he is destined to be a failed “catcher.” Dasheng, limited by his education, experience, and intellectual complexity, cannot recognize the support and guidance offered by Old Kang. Old Kang’s random comments about the status quo, such as “It is a crime, it is really a crime!” also reflect the author’s opinion of that era. Dasheng is alienated from family and society throughout his adolescent years. The loss of his father at an early age, his distant relationship with his mother, and his disappointment with his friends bring an immense emptiness to his emotional life. In turn, this emotional void drives him to strive for something to brighten his life. Unfortunately, he wanders through his experiences with a false sense of where he is going and what he is achieving in the process. He believes that the street gang promises a fuller exploration and extension of his

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personality than anything vouchsafed by Toon Street. For him, the essence of the street gang is the physical, palpable enactment of becoming a real man. However, the practical reality of Toon Street and Dasheng’s aspirations of organizing a powerful street gang are insufficient to sustain Dasheng’s existence. He is simply unable to convert any of his inner feelings into a practical outward expression of emotion. An untimely death is the price Dasheng pays for continuously divorcing his imaginative life from social reality. In North Side Story, Su Tong emphasizes Dasheng’s strong will and his endeavor to achieve self-realization both in action and reflection. In Yu Hua’s Cries in the Drizzle, the author focuses more on the philosophical exploration of the manifold themes of existence—loneliness, fear of growth, human nature, death, and fate. Cries in the Drizzle is a discursive narrative, an adult’s reconstruction of his childhood. The recollecting self celebrates precisely that modest human wholeness that is the interaction of world and self. Yu Hua chooses the first-person narrator as a convenient device to unfold the train of reminiscences. The choice of a first-person narrator, both as a child and as an adult, makes the narrative more flexible. As the primary narrator, the child is employed to recount the relatively concrete, surface-level stories and scenes that can be observed through a child’s eyes. The voice of the adult narrator provides the vehicle by which the implied author (or the second self ) can draw upon deeper levels of meaning to express his relatively abstract outlook or ideas. In his reminiscences of childhood, the adult narrator often inserts his seasoned opinions and feelings as well as his philosophical understanding of birth, death, love, friendship, time, and the like. In addition, the adult narrator’s reflections highlight the limitations of the child’s introspection and self-reflection. His function is similar to that of the character Old Kang in Su Tong’s North Side Story. Cries in the Drizzle is not a description of the successful formation of the hero’s personality. Unlike Dasheng in North Side Story, who sets himself the goal of becoming the head of a powerful street gang, Guanglin seems unclear about what he wants to do or become as an adult. The two important periods of his life—living with his foster family and subsequently with his biological family—are both beyond his control. This does not mean that he lacks any autonomy, however. He is a child with an imaginative and lonely disposition. He seeks release from brutal realities of the day by withdrawing to his inner world to construct a fantasy that includes the wholeness of being,

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destiny, and death. After witnessing the death of so many people around him, and much like Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain, he “arrives at an understanding of humanity that does not simply ignore death or scorn the dark, mysterious side of life.” He accepts death, “but without letting it gain control of his mind.”22 He expresses his humanity by reacting to the deaths of his friends with sympathy and condolences. Guanglin’s character is formed gradually through the confluence of his inner aptitudes and talents and through the influence of external events. There is no final end to Guanglin’s course other than a casual reference to his departure for university. From the above analysis, we can see the links between North Side Story and Cries in the Drizzle on the one hand, and the Bildungsroman tradition on the other. First, each story is about a young hero searching for a much fuller realization of the self than what can be ordinarily achieved in the world in which he grows up—even though the grim reality of China in the 1970s prevents him from achieving any accommodation to that society. Second, the balance between practical living and the individual’s creative inwardness is explored. The hero’s course is shaped not simply by his all-important contacts with the social world of adults and peers, but also by his individual psychology, his fondness for self-reflection, and his complex inner world. In spite of commonalities with the Bildungsroman tradition, these Chinese narratives are distinct as specifically Chinese Bildungsroman of the post-socialist period. The tragic and parodistic sense of these Chinese narratives stands out prominently. First, although these narratives contain the main elements of the traditional Bildungsroman novel—“childhood, the conflict of generations, provinciality, the larger society, self-education, alienation, ordeal by love, the search for a vocation and a philosophy [of life]”—these experiences do not help the protagonists to achieve maturity, as in the traditional Bildungsroman. Instead, they generally lead the young heroes to destruction. Second, the everyday social world that would ordinarily guide the protagonists and eventually help them accommodate themselves to society instead proves to be chaotic and violent. This world does not allow them to find a path leading to a fulfilling relationship with society. Third, the educative environment of the youthful protagonists is not the world of parents, teachers, and adult mentors, but rather the barely literate

22

Ibid., 106.

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and merely “street-smart” peer community. Therefore, the “education” implied in the German bildung does not really occur.23 At best, for the generation that came of age during the Cultural Revolution, it is a negative and often destructive form of education. Within the modern Chinese literary tradition, there are certain periods of time when the Chinese chengzhang xiaoshuo closely follows the traditional European Bildungsroman genre. Some prominent examples include: Yu Dafu’s and Ding Ling’s novellas written in the 1920s about May Fourth students’ frustration and growth; the novels written by Ye Shaojun and Lu Ling in the 1930s and 1940s about the fate of various young Chinese intellectuals; and the socialist coming-of-age narratives written by Yang Mo and Wang Meng in the 1950s. However, in the post-Mao era, especially in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the comingof-age narratives written by Su Tong, Yu Hua, and others who grew up during the Cultural Revolution deviate from the classic Bildungsroman in their tragic, oppositional, and parodistic characteristics. In the current era of economic reform, widespread commercialization, and globalization, interest in Chinese Bildungsroman continues among both readers and writers of Chinese literature. The newest generation of writers, including Guo Jingming and Han Han, born in the relatively affluent and less chaotic period of the 1980s, has produced a corpus of youth narratives drastically different from those of Su Tong’s and Yu Hua’s generation, in terms of thematic concerns, plotting, and diction. However, these new contemporary narratives continue to be somewhat parodistic in form: their fictional adolescents, too, are in a painstaking struggle with feelings of emptiness, loneliness, and loss. They, too, drift in a society experiencing transition—although now it is a transition from socialism to state capitalism, and from an ideological orientation to a preoccupation with financial success. And like the protagonists of Su Tong and Yu Hua, many of them also fail to achieve maturity.

23

For a discussion of conceptual history, or Begriffsgeschichte, see Reinhart Koselleck, “On the Anthropological and Semantic Structure of Bildung,” trans. Todd Presner, in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 170–207.

GLOSSARY Ah Cheng 阿城 anding tuanjie 安定团结 Ba Jin 巴金 baihua 白话 baihua wen 白话文 “Baixue zhutou” 白雪猪头 Bi’an hua 彼岸花 Bianjin 扁金 Bing Xin 冰心 Binu 碧奴 bu queding de yuyan 不确定的语言 Caizhu de ernümen 财主底儿女们 Cao Wenxuan 曹文轩 Chen Duxiu 陈独秀 Chen Ran 陈染 Chen Sihe 陈思和 “Chenlun” 沉沦 “Cheng hualunche yuanqu” 乘滑轮车远去 Chengbei didai 城北地带 chengzhang xiaoshuo 成长小说 Chen Xiaoming 陈晓明 chi ren 吃人 Chun 春 “Cixiu” 刺绣 Congwen zizhuan 从文自传 dadao 打倒 Dai Houying 戴厚英 Dai Jinhua 戴锦华 Dangdai zhongguo wenxue gaiguan 当代中国文学概观 Dasheng 达生 dazhonghua de yuyan大 化的语言 De Qing 德清

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Deng Huoqu 邓豁渠 Deng Shaoxing 邓少香 dizhu 地主 “Dibage shi tongxiang” 第八个是铜像 Ding Ling 丁玲 Dongtian li de tonghua 冬天里的童话 Du Heng 杜衡 Fan Guobin 樊国宾 fangeming 反革命 fazhan xiaoshuo 发展小说 “Feiyue wo de fengyangshu guxiang” 飞越我的枫杨树故乡 Feng Jicai 冯冀才 Feng Zhi 冯至 Fengyangshu cun xilie 枫杨树村系列 Fugui 福贵 funong 富农 Fu Zheng 福徵 gaizao de duixiang 改造的对象 “Gudian aiqing” 古典爱情 guli 古礼 Guo Moruo 郭沫若 Guo Dengfeng 郭登峯 Guoqing 国庆 “Guoqu suitan” 过去随谈 Haiyan 海盐 haohan 好汉 He’an 河岸 He Xifan 何希凡 “Hebian de cuowu” 河边的错误 hei wu lei 黑五类 Hong 虹 Hong Zicheng 洪子诚 “Hongfen” 红粉 Honglou meng 红楼梦 Hongqi 红旗 Hongqi pu 红旗谱

glossary Hongwa 红瓦 Hu Feng 胡风 Hu Shi 胡适 Hu Zhi 胡直 huaifenzi 坏份子 Huang Jinfu 黄金夫 Huang Tingjian 黄庭坚 Huangdi 黄帝 Huhan yu xiyu 呼喊与细雨 Huozhe 活着 ji 记 Jia 家 Jiang Huixian 江慧仙 jiaoyu xiaoshuo 教育小说 Jiaxing 嘉兴 Jinguang dadao 金光大道 Jin ping mei 金瓶梅 jiyi de luoji 记忆的逻辑 juedui de ziyou 绝对的自由 Kang Youwei 康有为 Kangzheng suming zhi lu 抗争宿命之路 Kongpi 空屁 Kuangshan fengyun 矿山风云 “Kunxue ji” 困学记 Ku Dongliang 库东亮 Ku Wenxuan 库文轩 lanshi 烂屎 lei 类 Li Mei 李枚 Li Tuo 李陀 Li Yang 李扬 Li Zehou 李泽厚 Liang Bin 梁斌 Liang Qichao 梁启超 liangjia funü 良家妇女 liangzhi 良知

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Lidai zixu zhuan wenchao 历代自叙传文钞 “Lihun zhinan” 离婚指南 Li Guangtou 李光头 Lin Bai 林白 Lin Biao 林彪 “Lingyizhong funü shenghuo” 另一种妇女生活 Li Tiemei 李铁梅 Liu Banjiu 刘半九 Liu Na’ou 刘呐鸥 Liu Zaifu 刘再复 Lu Ling 路翎 Lu Qiao 鹿桥 Lu Xinhua 卢新华 Lu Yin 庐隐 Lu Ji 陆机 luan xing 乱性 “Lun sanshi niandai zuoyi dushi xiaoshuo zhong de chengzhang zhuti” 论三十年代左翼都市小说中的成长主题 Mao Dun 茅盾 Mao Qiling 毛奇龄 Mao Xihe xiansheng quanji 毛西河先生全集 Mi 米 Mianmian 棉棉 Mingru xue’an 明儒学案 Mu Shiying 穆时英 muzhiming 墓志铭 Nanren de yiban shi nüren 男人的一半是女人 Nanxun lu 南询录 neixin 内心 “Ni biewu xuanze” 你别无选择 Ni Huanzhi 倪焕之 “Nian fu yi nian” 年复一年 nianpu 年谱 Ouyang Shan 欧阳山 Ouyang Xiu 欧阳修

glossary Qingchun wansui 青春万岁 Qingchun zhige 青春之歌 Qingnian zazhi 青年杂志 “Qiqie chengqun” 妻妾成群 Qiu 秋 ren 仁 Ren a ren 人, 啊, 人 “Renmin de yu” 人民的鱼 San jia xiang 三家巷 “Sanrong zhuiren guang zixu” 三农赘人广自序 “Sangyuan liunian” 桑园留念 “Shafei nüshi de riji” 莎菲女士的日记 Shanghai Baobei 上海宝贝 shanghen wenxue 伤痕文学 “Shangxin de wudao” 伤心的舞蹈 Shanshan de hongxing 闪闪的红星 Shaonian xue 少年血 “Shaonian zhongguo shuo” 少年中国说 sheji jiuren 舍己救人 Shen Congwen 沈从文 shi 诗 shi yan zhi 诗言志 Shi Zhecun 施蛰存 “Shibasui chumen yuanxing” 十八岁出门远行 Shiji 史记 “Shishi ruyan” 世事如烟 “Shu” 曙 shu 恕 Sima Qian 司马迁 Siren shenghuo 私人生活 “Siyue sanri shijian” 四月三日事件 Song Fanping 宋凡平 Song Gang 宋钢 Su Shi 苏轼 Su Tong 苏童 Sun Guanglin 孙光林

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glossary

Sun Guangming 孙光明 Sun Guangping 孙光平 Sun Jing 孙婧 Sun Kwangtsai 孙广才 Su Yu 苏宇 Tang 糖 Tao Qian 陶潜 Tong Zhonggui 童中贵 tougao jiqi 投稿机器 Wang Anshi 王安石 Wang Haiyan 王海燕 Wang Jie 汪价 Wang Meng 王蒙 Wang Yangming 王阳明 Wang Yinglin 王应麟 Wang Yunxia 汪云霞 “Wangshi yu xingfa” 往事与刑罚 wansui 万岁 Wei Hui 卫慧 “Weihu” 韦护 Weiyang ge 未央歌 Wenfu 文赋 Wennuan de lücheng 温暖的旅程 Wenxuan 文选 wenyan 文言 “Wo danxiao ru shu” 我胆小如鼠 Wo de diwang shengya 我的帝王生涯 “Wo meiyou ziji de mingzi” 我没有自己的名字 Wu Xiangzhi 翔之 Wu Yiqin 义勤 Wu Zetian 武则天 wudou 武斗 “Wuhou gushi” 午后故事 “Xiangei shaonü Yangliu” 献给少女杨柳 Xiangchunshu jie xilie 香椿树街系列 “Xianshi yizhong” 现实一种

glossary

213

“Xianxue meihua” 鲜血梅花 Xiaoguai 小拐 Xiao Tong 萧统 “Xiaoxiao” 萧萧 Xiaoshuo yuebao 小说月报 “Xibeifeng huxiao de zhongwu” 西北风呼啸的中午 Xin qingnian 新青年 xinmin 新民 Xiongdi 兄弟 xiuyang xiaoshuo 修养小说 xu 序 Xu Meixia 许美霞 Xu Sanguan 许三观 Xu Sanguan maixue ji 许三观卖血记 Yang Mo 杨沫 Ye Liwen 叶立文 Ye Shaojun 叶绍钧 Ye Shengtao 叶圣陶 “Ye Shengtao de jiaoyu qingjie yu Ni Huanzhi de xinling bianqian” 叶圣陶的教育情结与倪焕之的心灵变迁 yi lao yong yi 一劳永逸 Yige ren de zhanzheng 一个人的战争 “Yijiu baliu nian” 一九八六年 “Yijiu sanling nian chun shanghai” 一九三0年春上海 “Yijiu sansi nian de taowang” 一九三四年的逃亡 “Yingsu zhijia” 罂粟之家 Youfang zhen 油坊镇 youtong 幼童 youpai 右派 Yu Dafu 郁达夫 Yu Hua 余华 Yu Luojin 遇罗锦 Yu Xian 余弦 Yuan Tingdong 袁庭栋 Zai xiyu zhong huhan 在细雨中呼喊 zaolian 早恋 Zhang Hong 张闳

214

glossary

Zhang Xianliang 张贤亮 Zhang Xuexin 张学昕 Zhang Yingzhong 张应中 Zhao Chuntang 赵春堂 Zhao Hongqin 赵洪琴 zhi 志 zhong 钟 zhong 终 Zhongshan 钟山 Zhongguo dangdai wenxueshi jiaocheng 中国当代文学史教程 Zhongguo xiandai sixiang shilun 中国现代思想史论 “Zhongguo xiandai chengzhang xiaoshuo de xushixue yanjiu” 中国现 代成长小说的叙事学研究 zhuan 传 zhulin qi xian 竹林七贤 zi 自 “Ziwei muzhiming” 自为墓志铭 Zou Rong 邹容 Zuben Hanshan dashi nianpu shuzhu 足本憨山大师年谱疏注 zunming wenxue 遵命文学 “Zuzhibu xinlai de nianqingren” 组织部新来的年轻人

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INDEX Abrams, M. H., 24 Ah Cheng, 111, 121 anding tuanjie, 114 autobiographical fiction/novel/story/ writing(s), 8, 24–25, 33, 36–39, 45, 83 autobiography, 8, 24–25. See also zhuan Ba Jin, 63 baihua, 39, 42, 47 Bakhtin, M. M., 3, 8, 25–26, 152–153 Bakken, Bórge, 80–81, 99–100, 102, 114–115 Beijing, 17, 56, 66, 83, 139 Beijing Literature, 77, 84 Beijing Normal University, 82 Bi’an hua, 69 Bildung, 3–4, 17, 20, 22, 29, 50, 195–206 Bildungsroman, 1, 3–4, 5, 8, 10, 13–32, 187–188. See also chengzhang xiaoshuo & Bildung inwardness, 8, 16, 20, 23, 47 outwardness, 8, 16, 20, 47 phantom genre, 20 plot of Bildungsroman, 20–22 symbolic form of modernity, 16, 47 youth, 16–17, 39, 70 Bing Xin, 47 biographical novel, 24–25 biography, 8, 24–25. See also zhuan Bruford, W. H., 3–4 Buckley, Jerome Hamilton, 16, 21 Cao Wenxuan, 29 Chen Duxiu, 28, 41–42, 56 Chen Ran, 68 Private Life/Siren shenghuo, 68 Chen Sihe, 30 chengzhang xiaoshuo, 1, 3, 5, 8, 10, 27–31, 187–195 Green Henry, 29 Romanticism, 39, 44 youth consciousness/mentality, 13, 27–28 youth discourse, 28–29, 39–40, 46 Chiang Kai-shek, 52, 55–56, 60 Chinese Cultural Revolution as History, The, 1, 11 Esherick, Joseph W., 1, 10

Pickowicz, Paul G., 1, 10 Walder, Andrew G., 1, 11 chi ren, 144 coming-of-age narrative, 1, 3–5, 7, 8, 9. See also chengzhang xiaoshuo Cultural Revolution, 1, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 67, 71–72, 76, 92–93, 99–100, 103, 114–115, 129–131 Dai Houying, 67 Dai Jinhua, 29 Ding Ling, 27, 47–51 “Miss Sophie’s Diary”/“Shafei nüshi de riji,” 48–51, 54 Dream of Red Mansions, A, 38, 88, 121 Duke, Michael S., 43–44 fazhan xiaoshuo, 29 Feng Zhi, 29 Five Black Categories, 111 formulaic (writing/stories/fiction), 53–54, 82, 153, 189–190, 192 genre, 14–15 dialectical relation between literary genre and social reality, 15 Goethe, J. W. Von, 17–18, 20, 29–30 Sorrow of Young Werther, The, 29 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 17–18, 29, 198–199 Goldman, Merle, 48 Guo Moruo, 28, 41 history of Bildungsroman, 15–27 Blanckenburg, Friedrich von, 18 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 3, 18–19, 27 Entwicklungsroman, 19–20, 29 Erziehungsroman, 19 Hardin, James, 27 Martini, Fritz, 15, 17–18 Morgenstern, Karl Von, 17 Honglou meng. See Dream of Red Mansions, A Hu Feng, 61, 63 Hu Shi, 28, 41–42 Japanese I-novel, 39, 44–46 jiaoyu xiaoshuo, 29

226

index

Kafka, Franz, 138, 140 Kawabata Yasunari, 138, 140

post-Mao(-era), 13, 33, 46, 70, 115, 153, 206

Lee, Leo Ou-fan, 44, 49. See also Romanticism Li Mei, 53 Li Yang, 29, 65–66 Li Zehou, 70, 191 Liang Qichao, 28, 40–41, 45 Lin Bai, 68 One Person’s War/Yige ren de zhanzheng, 68–69 Liu Banjiu, 29 Liu Jianmei, 114, 159 Liu Na’ou, 59 Liu Zaifu, 191 Lu Ling, 60–63 Children of the Rich/Caizhu de ernümen, 60–63 Lu Xun, 28, 41, 45, 52, 143–146 “Madman’s Diary, A,” 143–146 Lu Yin, 47

Rice, Philip F., 106, 114, 170

MacFarquhar, Roderick, 10, 71 Mann, Thomas, 3, 22–24, 50, 145, 196 Magic Mountain, The, 3–4, 50, 145, 196, 205 Mao Dun, 53, 58 Mao Zedong, 1, 60, 64, 67–68, 71, 96, 114, 189 “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art,” 60, 64, 188 Mao-era, 29, 64, 68, 129, 138–139, 153, 159, 169, 188–190, 192–194 May Fourth, the, 1, 8, 28, 33, 43–47, 50, 58, 187 memoir, 8, 16, 24–25 Mianmian, 69 miniature of the Bildungsroman, 13 Moretti, Franco, 8, 15–16 Way of the World, The, 8 Mu Shiying, 59 nativist, 59 neo-perceptionalist, 59 New Youth, 28, 41–42, 56, 61 novel of development. See Entwicklungsroman parodistic Bildungsroman, 1, 3–5, 8, 10, 187–206 parody, 4, 76. See also parodistic Bildungsroman pedagogical novel. See Erziehungsroman

Salinger, J. D., 75, 77 Catcher in the Rye, The, 75, 77–78, 81, 109–110 Nine Stories, 77, 79 Sammons, Jeffrey, 20, 22 Scar Literature, 67 Lu Xinhua, 67 Schoenhals, Michael, 10 self-referential fiction, 46–47 Self-strengthening Movement, 40 Shanghai, 52–56, 59, 89 Shanghai Literature, 89 Shen Congwen, 59 Shi Zhecun, 59 Su Tong, 1, 4–9, 34, 70–73, 75–130, 187–206 “An Afternoon Incident”/“Wuhou gushi,” 9, 76, 85, 94–96 Binu and the Great Wall/Binu, 2, 9, 86–87 “Blush”/“Hongfen,” 6, 88 Boat to Redemption, The/He’an, 2, 9, 122–129 Bianjin, 129 “Casual Talks on the Past”/“Guoqu suntan,” 90–93 “catcher,” 78, 81, 95–96, 98–99, 110–114, 167, 203 Dasheng, 100–122, 188–206 “Drawing upon Childhood,” 7 “Embroidery”/“Cixiu,” 6, 88 Empress Dowager Wu Zetian/Wu Zetian, 6, 73, 86 “Guide to Divorce”/“Lihun zhinan,” 89 Ku Dongliang, 122–129 Maple-Poplar Village Series/ Fengyangshu cun xilie, 6, 86–87 “Memories of Mulberry Garden”/“Sangyuan liunian,” 9, 77–81, 199 My Life as Emperor/Wo de diwang shengya, 2, 6, 9, 86–87, 89 Nanjing, 75, 82, 122 North Side Story/Chengbei didai, 2, 9, 100–122, 190–192, 194, 196–197, 200, 202, 204–205 “Opium Family” “Yingsu zhijia,” 87 Rice/Mi, 2, 6, 9, 73, 79, 86–87

index “Roller Skating Away”/“Cheng hualunche yuanqu,” 9, 96–97, 190, 199 “Sad Dance, The”/“Shangxin de wudao,” 9, 97–99 Suzhou, 76, 82, 90, 93, 122 Tong Zhonggui, 90 Toon Street Series/Xiangchunshu jie xilie, 9, 94–122 “White Snow and a Pig’s Head”/“Baixue zhutou,” 89 Young Blood/Shaonian xue, 8 Swales, Marin, 3, 4, 8, 14, 19, 202 German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse, The, 3, 8 Voyage In, The, 27 Xin Qingnian. See New Youth Xinhai Revolution, 41, 55 xiuyang xiaoshuo, 29 Yang Mo, 64, 188–189 Song of Youth, The/Qingchuan zhige, 64–67, 188–189 Ye Shengtao, 54–58 Schoolmaster Ni Huan-chih, 54–58 Yu Dafu, 27, 45, 48–51 “Sinking”/“Chenlun,” 45, 48–51 Yu Hua, 1, 4–8, 34, 70–73, 131–186, 187–206 “April Third Incident, The”/“Siyue sanri shijian,” 9, 68, 133, 142–147, 178–180 “Blood and Plum Blossoms”/“Xianxue meihua,” 73, 142 Brothers/Xiongdi, 2, 9, 183–186 Chronicle of a Blood Merchant/Xu Sanguan maixue ji, 2, 6, 10, 150, 152, 156, 158, 160 “Classical Romance, A”/“Gudian aiqing,” 72 Cries in the Drizzle/Zai xiyu zhong huhan, 2, 7, 9, 131–133, 152, 154–180, 190–194, 196–199, 200, 203, 205 “Contrived Works”/“Xuwei de zuopin,” 137, 148

227 Haiyan, 138, 139, 149 Hangzhou, 149 “I Have No Name of My Own”/ “Wo meiyou ziji de mingzi,” 9, 180–182 “indeterminate language”/bu queding de yuyan, 137–138 Jiaxing, 139 “logic of memory”/jiyi de luoji, 151 “Mistakes by the Riverside”/“Hebian de cuowu,” 40, 148 “On the Road at Eighteen”/“Shibasui chumen yuanxing,” 9, 13, 16, 133–136, 138, 140–142, 147 “One Kind of Realty”/“Xianshi yizhong,” 148, 169 “popular language of the masses”/ dazhonghua de yuyan, 137 Sun Guanglin, 155–180 “This Story Is for Willow”/“Xiangei shaonü Yangliu,” 151 “Timid as a Mouse”/“Wo danxiao ru shu,” 9, 180–182 To Live/Huozhe, 2, 6, 10, 150, 152, 156, 158, 160 “Year Nineteen Eighty-Six, The”/“Yijiu baliu nian,” 139, 140, 143, 148, 182

Zhou Zuoren, 45 Zhuan, 34–39 Deng Huoqu, 37 historiography, 35 Hu Zhi, 37 Huang Tingjian, 34 Lu Ji, 35 Ouyang Xiu, 34 Shiji, 35 Sima Qian, 35 Su Shi, 34 Wang Anshi, 34 Wang Yangming, 36–37 Wu Pei-yi, 36–38 Xiao Tong, 35 Zen Buddhist accounts, 36 Zou Rong, 41