by Hualing Nieh
I again make innumerable phone calls. The Family Planning Information Center finally found me a doctor in Worchester, New York. Besides performing abortions in hospitals he also performs saline solution injection abortions at his own clinic every day there are more than ten people who go to his clinic, he doesn’t know when he can fit me in he tells me to wait for his call.
I wait by the phone all day.
In the evening I call I-po he tells me not to worry about the cost one thousand two thousand he can pay . . . I cry over the phone he says:
Dear, I love you very very much.
I have only two days left in New York, I must get out and see the sights. I wander around between the steel and glass. Every time I come out of the subway I encounter a new surprise: Radio City, Times Square, Metropolitan Museum, Empire State Building, Greenwich Village, Broadway theatres . . . I’ve come back to Wall Street!
I come out of the exit of the subway and run into a man. There were bags around his eyes. When you look at him, he doesn’t see you at all. Even if a pretty girl walks by, he doesn’t see her, either. I smile at him, no response. He is coming out of the New York Stock Exchange and walking along Wall Street. His head lowered, he walks very slowly, amidst the hurrying people he appears very odd. I am curious about him, so I follow him to the end of Wall Street.
I follow him into a cemetery. He sits on a cracked tombstone. It’s drizzling. I stroll between the tombs. The words carved on the tombstones are already faded. This is the only quiet place in New York. I circle around the cemetery. The man suddenly stands up. ‘What about it!’ He suddenly speaks, then looks up at the sky. He turns around, looks at me. I walk over. He says his name is Goldberg. I say he can call me anything. He laughs and invites me to dinner.
We drink in the Oak Room of the Fifth Avenue Plaza Hotel, a trio stops at our table to play the violin. He suddenly ‘livens’ up, calls me Miura Ayako. He says in his eyes all Oriental women are Miura Ayako. During the Korean War he was fighting in Korea, he went on leave in Tokyo, he had a Japanese woman called Miura Ayako. I say during the Korean War I was a waitress at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, my sole desire was to be a movie star. I fell in love with an American G.I.; his name was David. I go on making up stories. He raises his glass and calls me Miura Ayako. I raise my glass and call him David. We click glasses.
When we finish eating, he says I’m an interesting woman. He picks a rose from the vase on our table and gives it to me, kisses me on the cheek saying, ‘I lost a million and a half dollars today.’
Dr Johnson in Worchester calls. He says I can go to his clinic tomorrow night at six o‘clock, that’s his supper time, he must charge double, altogether eight hundred dollars. I say,‘I’m sorry, dear doctor, I want to keep my child. I’m not coming.’
I call Dr Johnson and beg him to see me tomorrow night at six. I’m willing to pay triple the cost I’m an alien with no way outl must get an abortion, he coldly says all right but don’t change your mind again.
I ask Teng to drive to Worchester, then drive back home. He agrees.
I call I-po. He is very happy, he says he’s been thanking of the way I looked soaking in the tub.
All right, let’s see what’s happening in Worchester.
Teng and I drive there. All along the way, sunny skies, black clouds, rain, fog, the weather keeps changing. The water flows, the wind flows, the light flows. The leaves are all turning red.
The car races down a slope. On two sides are dense forests. I smell a whiff of smoke, mixed with the fragrance of blood, mud, and fresh-cut grass. I don’t know where it’s coming from. Teng also smells it. When the car gets closer to the bottom of the hill, the smell of the fragrant smoke gets thicker. We drive to the front of a run-down gate, the smoke is drifting over from the other side of the wooden gate.
Teng and I get out of the car.
The wooden gate is open. Hanging on it is a rusty padlock. Teng and I walk in. The smoke drifts along the path. Several leaves float down, they float down, brush my face, wet and cool. I take off my shoes and walk in the mud; I breathe in deeply the fragrant smoke. Teng says I look so striking. It’s getting dark. The smoke gets thicker.
The path turns and reaches the bottom of the valley. Thick columns of smoke shoot upwards; beneath the columns of smoke are mounds of mud; beneath the mud are burning branches; beneath the branches are pigs being roasted. Shadows bob up and down. Are they people or smoke? We can’t tell. We stand still, then see they are people; then we see it’s a large clearing, to the side are several small wooden huts. A strong beam of light shines from the corner of the clearing, the people are enveloped in the light. The light revolves, light and darkness alternating on the people’s bodies like a slithering snake entwining itself around them, twisting and turning, the people begin to gyrate, too. All bright, then plunged into darkness. The people and the shadows sing ‘Nothing Is Real’. Teng and I begin to dance along.
Suddenly a gunshot. The people and the shadows are still dancing in the slithering light. The smoke covers the entire mountain valley.
Another gunshot.
Someone says the gunshot came from the other mountain valley. Some people walk up the mountain path. Teng and I follow them, cross the low mountain, and descend into another valley. There is a river in the valley. There is a dense mist over the river. Several policemen and a woman are standing by the river. A strong beam of light shines into the small wooden hut on the opposite shore.
The strong light blinds me I can’t open my eyes I see again Sang-wa sitting on the ground and holding the white cat with a black tail. The half-bodied policeman says house check take out your identity cards!
Suddenly a gun fires the bullet whizzes and disappears into the mist. Again the gun fires blindly in the mist. There is no god there is no god there is no god! A desperate voice cries out from the mist. George George don’t shoot! I’m here your wife is here! George I love you come home with me! The woman on the bank shouts across the river into the mist. George shouts I have no home I have no home! Gunshots again. George don’t shoot anyone put the gun down come home with me! Don’t shoot anyone! George! I won’t kill anyone I just want to kill myself I can’t go on living there’s nothing worth living for! George put the gun down come outside the house! I can’t see you the mist is too thick! George I love you! George . . . George . . . come on home . . . George . . .
Teng drives slowly and steadily. He gives the glass ball on the seat a few shakes. Snow in the glass ball begins to fall floating above the Great Wall the land near the Great Wall is my homeland. I suddenly think of the abortion. Did I go to the doctor’s? Did I kill my child? I talk to myself. Teng pats me on the shoulder and tells me to calm down. He says I’ve suffered so much he didn’t know what to do, but now he knows. I don’t need to go to see the doctor anymore, when he says that he stops, then picks up the glass ball again and shakes it saying Mulberry, I want to marry you, we can return to the mainland together, we can work together for the country, we can raise our children there together, our children should be raised on their own land. I stammer and can’t say a word we both look at the Great Wall in the snow at last I say: Teng, you’re still young you can’t marry a woman who’s already dead you must not see me again.
When I get home I call I-po. I call all day long but there’s no one home. I hope to tell him immediately that I didn’t go through with the abortion, I will take all the responsibility.
I call him the next day at noon.
‘Hello.’ His voice is very soft.
‘I’m back! I’ve kept the child.’
‘Hello, are you there?’
‘Betty’s dead. I need you.’
‘Did she really die this time?’
‘She really died. Heart attack. Just like that - gone. Now at the funeral parlour. The funeral’s tomorrow morning. I’ll come over to see you.’
‘That’s not necessary.’
‘Why not? Our problem is solved! I’m happy you kept the child.’
<
br /> ‘The child has nothing to do with you.’
‘I want my child!’
‘Then make one in a test tube!’ I hang up.
I call Teng. No answer.
I call Teng no answer. l want to tell him he is my only strength, my reason to go on living, but he shouldn’t marry a woman like me. I already owe him so much so much. I try all night to call him but no answer. Where did he go suddenly I am afraid
I go to Betty’s funeral from the entrance to the cemetery I can see I-po standing there. Yellow leaves drift all over the graveyard ...
I didn’t enter the cemetery, but went to Teng’s place. His room was locked. His name wasn’t on the mailbox anymore. No matter where he goes, he will take it as it comes. In his heart he’s found freedom. Because he has decided his own course of action.
I get a phone call from the man in dark glasses. He says next Monday he’ll be passing by my area he must question me once again because he has discovered some new problems with my case, before they make the final decision. He must make sure everything is clear ...
(LONE TREE, IOWA) LAST NIGHT A FREAK ACCIDENT OCCURRED ON A ONE WAY STREET IN LONE TREE. AN EMPTY CAR CRASHED INTO A TREE AND BURNED. A WOMAN WAS FOUND LYING BY THE ROADSIDE A THOUSAND YARDS AWAY. SHE WAS UNCONSCIOUS, BUT DID NOT SUFFER ANY SERIOUS INJURY. SHE IS NOW RECOVERING IN MERCY HOSPITAL. THE CAUSE OF THE ACCIDENT IS NOT KNOWN. THE WOMAN’S IDENTITY IS NOT KNOWN.
I find the news story at the newsstand, I buy a copy for a souvenir after I escape from Mercy Hospital.
EPILOGUE
Princess Bird and the Sea
One day Nu-wa, daughter of Yen-ti the sungod, sets sail to the East Sea in a small boat. There’s a storm and the boat capsizes. Nu-wa drowns, but she refuses to die.
She turns into a bird with a blue head, white beak and red claws. She is called Princess Bird and goes to live on Ring Dove Mountain.
Princess Bird wants to fill in the sea and turn it into solid ground. Carrying in her beak a tiny pebble from Ring Dove Mountain, she flies to the East Sea, then drops the pebble in the water. She flies back and forth, day and night; each trip she takes another pebble.
The Sea roars, ‘Forget it, little bird. Don’t think that you can fill me in even if you take thousands and millions of years.’
Princess Bird drops another pebble into the sea and says, ‘I will do it if it takes me billions and trillions of years, until the end of the world. I will fill you in.’
The East Sea bursts out laughing. ‘Go ahead, you silly bird!’
Princess Bird flies back to Ring Dove Mountain, takes another pebble, flies back to the East Sea, and drops it in the water.
To this day, Princess Bird is flying back and forth between the Sea and the Mountain.
AFTERWORD
The printing of a new edition of Hualing Nieh’s Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China by the Feminist Press is cause for rejoicing. A classic of contemporary Chinese literature that has, through multiple translations, become a traveling text with a protean career, Nieh’s novel, completed in the early 1970s, has suffered a tortuous publication history in which direct and indirect censorship have figured prominently.1 Until now English-language readers have had only sporadic access to the text. The world, however, seems to be catching up with this visionary work of art, ahead of its time in so many ways. This republication, which makes the work available to a wider audience, testifies to the novel’s vitality and critical importance.
The themes that Mulberry and Peach engages through sophisticated formal experimentation are by now staples of world literature: violent encounters between a traditional society and modern colonizing powers, catastrophic political upheaval, physical and cultural displacement, border-crossing and identity transformation, state control (whether feudal, totalitarian, or capitalist) of the individual, inscription of the female body with the ideologies of patriarchy and nation, madness as a form of spiritual transcendence in a world gone mad, to name but a few. Yet when Nieh began to write Mulberry and Peach in the late 1960s, living in exile in Iowa to escape the repressive Nationalist regime in Taiwan, she had few literary precedents to draw upon. With a boldness that appears striking even over a quarter century later, Nieh invented her own literary vehicle.
So complex and unique is Mulberry and Peach that it defies classification. In some of its diction, allusions, and imagery, it is as traditional as any classical Chinese romance. The elements in the novel that would be identified as Gothic by a Western reader—decay, confinement in claustrophobic spaces, ghosts, vampires, women endangered, ancient secrets uncovered—are in fact Chinese through and through, not ill-conceived borrowings from a foreign tradition.2 Yet Nieh’s novel is at the same time a product of Western influences. High modernist techniques like stream-of-consciousness interior monologues and temporal montage are evident throughout, but the novel also displays features associated with postmodern fiction, such as pastiche and metafictional uses of the epistolary and diary forms.
One is bound to find something startling and thought-provoking in the novel whether one is interested in China, Chinese in America, the Chinese diaspora; tradition and modernity; technology; spirituality; diaspora and exile; trauma, witness, testimony and survivorhood; sin, guilt, and redemption; language and representability; feminism, lesbianism, gender transgressions; psychoanalysis; citizenship, nation and trans-nationalism, imperialism, or postcoloniality—again just to name a few concerns familiar to today’s readers, some of which came into intellectual fashion long after 1970. Over the almost three decades since its first appearance, Mulberry and Peach has been claimed, variously, as an example of modern Chinese literature, overseas Chinese literature, literature by writers from Taiwan, literature of exile, diasporic literature, Asian American literature, feminist literature, border-crossing literature, and more.3 In this afterword I will concentrate on “Chinese” and “feminist” readings of the novel.
SYNOPSIS AND STRUCTURE
Mulberry and Peach is so textually and thematically rich that any synopsis would fail to do it justice. Yet it is useful for readers to have an overview before giving themselves over to the novel’s powerful narrative sweep. Briefly put, the novel is about a woman who lives through some of the most harrowing traumas in recent Chinese history and ends up suffering from what is clinically known as multiple personality disorder or dissociative identity disorder. The story begins in 1945, when Mulberry is a girl of sixteen in war-torn China. It ends in the United States in 1970, when the protagonist’s identity has split: Peach, the secondary personality, exhibits traits totally opposite to Mulberry’s.
The novel is divided into four parts. Each part opens with a letter to the U.S. immigration service written by a mocking, teasing, and defiant Peach from various points on the American continent, and each closes with an excerpt from Mulberry’s diary. Framing the four major parts are a prologue, in which Peach denies to an immigration official any connection to the “dead” Mulberry, and an epilogue, which retells a Chinese myth. While the four parts are in chronological sequence, their linearity is disrupted by flashbacks and the vivid immediacy of stream-of-consciousness. In addition, there is no single, continuous voice: shifts between the voices are not always marked.
Interwoven into the story of one woman are numerous historical and cultural allusions, Eastern and Western, all meticulously researched, whether the subject is the architecture of the Forbidden City or the tragic cannibalism of the Donner Party. Further adding to the novel’s narrative and thematic complexity is the overall framing: Peach’s letters not only fracture the novel’s temporal and spatial structure but also call into question the veracity of Mulberry’s life events.
Each of the four excerpts from Mulberry’s diary is set in a time and place saturated with historical significance.4 In part one (1945), at the end of World War II and on the eve of China’s victory over Japanese invaders, Mulberry, a runaway from a dysfunctional family, is stranded in a boat along with other refugees in a Yangtze River g
orge. In part two (1948—49), the civil war between the Communists and Nationalists is about to end in the Communists’ favor. Mulberry enters the besieged city of Beijing (Peking)—for centuries the capital of China—to marry Shen Chia-kang, the man to whom she has been betrothed since childhood.5 In part three (1957—59), Mulberry is in Taiwan, the island to which the losing Nationalists had fled along with many refugees. She hides out in an attic with Chia-kang, now a fugitive from the law for embezzlement, and with their daughter Sang-wa. In part four (1969—70), the protagonist is alone in the United States as an illegal alien hounded by the Immigration Service. She is pregnant from an affair with a Chinese professor and cannot decide whether to have an abortion. The identity dissociation has occurred; Peach is becoming increasingly aggressive and is, in fact, about to “kill off” her primary identity, Mulberry.
Nieh’s innovativeness reveals itself not only in the text’s structure but also in its diction, syntax, and even page layout: variations in sentence length and rhythm, paragraph structure, and typography are carefully correlated with narrative content, and interspersed with maps and pictures. All in all, Mulberry and Peach is a demanding text, but it is one that amply rewards the reader willing to enter its world of searing, at times surrealistic, intensity.
READING CROSS-CULTURALLY
To fully appreciate Mulberry and Peach, the reader needs to be attuned to Nieh’s dual gesture toward universality and timelessness on the one hand and toward historical and cultural specificity on the other. The epilogue offers a typical example of such duality. The tale of the Princess Bird attempting to fill the ocean is immediately accessible to Western readers: her futile but heroic mission parallels the Greek myth of Sisyphus. But it would be a simplification to read the Princess Bird story only as a commentary on the human condition, although it is no doubt that. The story is also firmly grounded in cultural and gender specificity. In Nieh’s version of the myth of Jingwei, the Princess Bird who attempts to fill the ocean by dropping pebbles, one by one, from its beak is a daughter of Yen-ti (Yandi), who, along with Huangdi, is considered an ancestor of the Chinese people.6 Nieh’s story, therefore, suggests the inability of the Chinese people to repair past traumas and fulfill their destiny. And, significantly, Nieh’s central figure is female, in defiance of long literary traditions, Eastern and Western, in which cultural representation is assigned to the male hero.