China’s rise within a global economy has had diverse consequences for Chinese women. For the super rich and the rising middle class, it has offered opportunities for vast wealth. For the newly emergent underclass of migrant workers who have flooded to the cities, it has engendered exploitative states of vulnerability, especially for rural women. In this paper we locate our inquiry in the context of globalization and its impact on rural women’s lives as witnessed through the medium of a unique and distinctive women’s life narrative, Sheng Keyi’s Bei mei (Northern Girls). The text testifies to the underside of women’s lives within the new market economy, documenting the cruelty of global capitalism. It presents an alternative version of the history of China’s rise in the global economy and maps a trajectory of increasing inequality from a previously silenced female perspective. Sheng Keyi’s world speaks to the sordid world of women, the world of yin. It coexists with the dizzying ascent of the yang―as the powerful nation grapples with social inequality and fragmentation. In its international circulation, Northern Girls opens readers to the contradictions and ambivalent aspects of China’s economic rise and its consequences specifically for migrant women.
According to Angelica Duran and Yuhan Huang, Mo Yan’s “artistic works” are “towering within the literatures of the world.” His novel Si shi yi pao (Pow!, 2012) offers one of the clearest recent examples of what Shelley W. Chan calls Mo’s “postmodern playfulness.” In his afterword to Pow! Mo says that the story “gives way to an improvisation that swings between reality and illusion,” thus suggesting the notion of “hallucinatory realism” as a “blending” or “merging” of the illusory and the real. This article examines the ideology—that is, the class politics of consciousness—of this swingy postmodern storytelling, taking a critical view of Mo’s playfully bold assertion: “I’ve always taken pride in my lack of ideology, especially when I’m writing.” I argue that the swinginess of “imagination” in Pow! embodies what Marx calls a “happy confusion” that (re)articulates the “post”-class doctrine of “combine two into one.”
Leung Ping-kwan (1949–2013), a leading writer and cultural critic of Hong Kong, has around ten collections of poems published over the past few decades. Beginning in 1997, Leung wrote about food, making significant contributions to poetry in Chinese. Drawing literary texts from Leung’s collections of poetry, this paper aims to cast light on the role that Leung has played in the shaping of foodscape poetics and how he elaborates and addresses historical memory and cultural politics. In addition, this paper contends that his deconstruction of nationalism and an emphasis on “wisdom of peoples’ livlihood” lies at the core of Leung’s foodscape poetics, and they constitute a “positionality” rooted in his experience in Hong Kong.