Following Kenneth King’s pioneering transmedial synthetic writings on post‐modern dance practices and Kimerer L. LaMothe’s call for dance to be treated seriously in religious and philosophical discourses, I examine Yan Geling’s novella Baishe (White Snake, 1998), in relation to Lilian Lee’s novel Qingshe (Green Snake, 1986–93), with a focus on how dancing and writing function literally, metaphorically, dialectically, and reciprocally, in these narratives. In my textual and contextual analyses of Yan’s White Snake text, I borrow Daria Halprin’s therapeutic model for accessing life experiences through the body in motion. I argue that, through a creative use of writing and dancing as key metaphors for identity formation and transformation, Yan’s text, in the context of contemporary China, offers innovative counter‐narratives of gender, writing, and the body. Yan’s White Snake is considered in the following three contexts in this paper: firstly, the expressiveness of the female body in the White Snake story; secondly, the tradition and significance of writing women in Chinese literary history; and thirdly, the development of dance as a profession in the PRC, with a real‐life snake dancer at the center. These three different frameworks weave an intricate tapestry that reveals the dialectics of writing and dancing, and language and the body, throughout the latter half of twentieth‐century China. Furthermore, Yan’s text foregrounds the Cultural Revolution as an important chronotope for experimentation with a range of complex gender identities in relation to the expressive and symbolic powers of dancing and writing.
The introduction and translation of Sylvia Plath’s (1932–63) poetry into Chinese in the 1980s had a significant impact on women’s poetry in contemporary China, particularly the work of Zhai Yongming (b. 1955) and Lu Yimin (b. 1962). Expanding on Lawrence Venuti’s theory of translation and intertextuality, this article explores the relationship between Chinese translations of Plath and the poetry of Zhai and Lu. It examines four sets of Plath translations and the accompanying paratextual commentaries, demonstrating how Plath’s Chinese translators inscribe their individual interpretations onto their translations. It shows how these texts are integral in shaping the early poetic output of Zhai and Lu, who further recontextualize Plath through their own poetry, revealing how Plath has been understood, evaluated, and transformed in contemporary China. Ultimately, this process results in a bold new gendered poetics that marks a turning point in Chinese women’s writing.
Water under Time, the novel by the reputed Chinese fiction writer Fang Fang, appropriates and reconstructs the conventions of the hysteric narrative as an affective form of feminine history telling and writing. The novel, which accounts Hankou city’s past through the heroine’s life story, illustrates how feminine hysteria provides a gendered lens of reconstructed historical authenticity via the panorama of China’s early Republican period, the anti‐Japanese War, and the present new millennium. Transcending the official historical accounts, Fang Fang’s narrative features women’s innovative reconfiguration of contesting historical discourses about the city, the community, and the nation. This study of Water under Time suggests that women’s explorations of hysteria actually surpass the psychoanalytical reading of hysteria as paradigms of feminine bodily, sexual, and social abjection, and instead envisions it as a validating narrative aesthetic which carries the potential to rewrite the boundaries of gender, nation, and history.
Through a close reading of Wei Hui’s bestseller Shanghai Baby (1999), this article highlights five elements to delimit a post‐romantic neoliberal literary sensibility and its ruptures: (1) a “melotraumatic” quest for exuberance, (2) denial of dependency, (3) a celebration of individual choice and market rationalities, (4) disillusionment and disappointment, and (5) a quest for intelligibility through narrative. Along the way I probe the narrator’s residual romanticism as a little‐addressed foundation of the novel’s testimony to a generational sensibility. By examining the relationship between Coco the narrator and Coco the protagonist, I contend that the narrator’s sustained self‐remembering evokes her growing unease with neoliberal values. The tension between post‐romantic cynicism and residual romanticism suggests the extent to which a supposedly dissident novel may entice precisely for the ways its deep structure reinforces dominant discourses. Whereas Coco the protagonist follows a logic of consumerism, Coco the narrator gestures to non‐commercial values—loyalty, care, empathy, trust, and solidarity. Appreciating the novel’s residual romanticism alongside its post‐romantic cynicism sheds new light on the story, its context, ambiguous feminism, and reception.
Neither comrades nor yet full‐fledged consumers, Chinese dagongmei (female migrant workers) and their experience(s) are an essential part of the story of China’s globalizing economy. The growing body of scholarly literature on internal migrant workers exposes a chilling underside to China’s passionate embrace of market‐oriented reform—which certainly should give pause to those otherwise inclined to hail the rise of global capitalism as a glorious shift toward democracy and greater personal freedom. My particular interest in the subject lies in the intersection of the rural‐to‐urban labor migration phenomenon, gender, and the realm of contemporary cultural expression. This article examines the diverse array of literary and visual representations of dagongmei, a site of distinctly post‐Mao ideological contestation. It begins with a discussion of dagongmei within popular and mainstream media. It then turns to the broad historical and cultural contexts that have spurred the grassroots emergence of worker literature in recent decades in southern China. The article concludes with an analysis of work by two women writers―poet Zheng Xiaoqiong and novelist Wang Lili―that offers highly gendered accounts of the contemporary migrant labor experience.
Peng Xiaolian is a rare and prolific Chinese author who writes both fiction and non‐fiction works and directs both dramatic and documentary films. Peng has not only written, cowritten, or rewritten all the screenplays of her eight dramatic features and two documentaries but is also the author of one novel, twelve novellas, over a dozen short stories, four book‐length memoirs, three collections of film reviews, and numerous essays. The existing scholarly studies, however, nearly all focus on Peng’s dramatic films, with much less, if any, attention directed at her writing and documentaries. To really understand Peng as a film auteur, however, it is necessary to look at her films and writings together. Given the quantity and complexity of her works and the space limitations of this article, I examine Peng’s subversion of the conventional treatment of character, location, and time in three thematic sections reflecting the key narrative motifs in her work. I first summarize existing studies of Peng’s films, highlighting the rarely examined interaction between visuality and spatiality in her films. Then, after defining her sense of time in narrative, I demonstrate how family history and self‐reflexivity are the major difference between her films and her nonfiction works. Last but not least, I discuss how, through her use of multilayered narratives constructed by the female voice and subjectivity, her complete repertoire constitutes a unique history of modern Chinese women. This article aims to demonstrate how, through her use of multilayered narratives constructed by the female voice and subjectivity, her complete repertoire constitutes a unique history of modern Chinese women.
The metaphor at the heart of Hong Kong filmmaker Flora Lau’s debut feature film, Bends (2013), set in the border spaces of Hong Kong and Shenzhen, is that of intersection. By constructing a quietly observant view of life on both sides of the Sam Chun River, which separates Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland, Lau’s film inhabits this metaphor by cutting through the public and private domains with a narrative of intimacy and connection at the nexus of wider socioeconomic concerns. Delving into Hong Kong–mainland relations, Bends inserts the real‐life social issues of immigration, border control, economic privilege, and China’s one‐child policy into its diegesis to capture Hong Kong at a moment in time. In considering the intertwined relationship between identity, politics, and urban space, this paper employs the trope of disappearance perpetuated in critical discourses on Hong Kong as a point of departure to explore the distinct filmic topography of Bends, which attempts to cinematically preserve the dynamics of the city under Chinese administration. In so doing, this paper also examines Lau’s interest in giving marginalized female groups narrative agency to shed light on an alternative perspective of the special administrative region and its unfolding relationship with the motherland.
If a domesticated translation from Chinese to English can be understood as an act of eurocentrism, then the difficulties in translating Wong Bik‐wan’s latest novel Weixi chong xing (The re‐walking of Mei‐hei, 2014) reveal how this Hong Kong female writer uses language to escape patriarchal and colonial influences. This article examines how Wong makes use of the strategy of writing as a “repressed” individual (both in terms of her subject position and language style). Even though her language and sentences are at times short and dense, and the rhythm is fast, Wong demonstrates how one can reveal more by seemingly saying less. Attempts to reduce her text to a single interpretation have only resulted in failure. If it is hard for the repressed to speak without oppression, Wong illustrates how one can circumvent the constraints through the tactic of evasion, and demonstrates how the repressed can explode from gaps and silence.