Mulberry and Peach

by Hualing Nieh

  This interplay between the general and the particular is also seen in the protagonist’s names, which make up the novel’s title. The author is very proud—and justly so—of the Chinese names of the two personalities, Sangqing and Taohong, which literally mean “Mulberry Green” and “Peach Red” (or Pink, according to some critics). The color imagery is quite accessible to non-Chinese readers. If they guessed “freshness and innocence” for “mulberry green,” and “passion and danger” for “peach red,” they would not be far wrong. On the other hand, the cultural accretions attached to these words may not be readily apparent to the Western reader. Each plant word is extraordinarily evocative in the Chinese language. The mulberry feeds the silkworm that produces silk, and the invention of silkworm cultivation by the mythical Leizu, the wife of Huangdi, is considered the beginning of Chinese civilization. Thus the mulberry is a sacred tree in China. For an English-language reader, though, the word “mulberry” lacks these sacred, mythic connotations; instead, the nursery rhyme “Here We Go ‘Round the Mulberry Bush” is what may come first to many readers’ minds. Similarly, in English the word “peach” is more likely to call up the fruit than the flower, but in Chinese it is the reverse: the peach blossom has long been a favorite of Chinese poets and painters and is replete with centuries of allusions ranging from the erotic to the utopian to the tragic. Although the peach fruit’s association with sensuality/sexuality in English is consonant with one meaning of tao in Chinese, the other meanings are lost in translation. Anticipating the Anglophone reader’s difficulty with the two names, Hualing Nieh added the subtitle Two Women of China, admittedly awkward—and a misnomer considering the two women are really one—but a necessary compromise to avoid giving a bewildering first impression.

  On the first page of the novel, when Peach announces the “death” of Mulberry to the “man from the Immigration Service,” she remarks:‘Call me anything you like. Ah-chu, Ah-ch’ ou, Mei-chuan, Ch’ un-hsiang,

  Ch’iu-hsia, Tung-mei, Hsiu-ying, Ts’ui-fang, Niu-niu, Pao-pao, Pei-pei,

  Lien-ying, Kuei-fen, Chu-hua. Just call me Peach, OK?’ (3)

  What looks like a nonsensical list in English is in fact made up of either affectionate nicknames or else “pretty” names (related to flowers, the seasons, or jewelry), which, in traditional China, were commonly given to maidservants and singer-actresses—women who pleased men with their subservience or sexuality. Thus, despite Peach’s posture of toughness and self-emancipation, the list reveals a fundamental continuity between herself and centuries of women under patriarchal oppression. This kind of subtle signification is lost in translation.7

  This short discussion of the protagonist’s names not only illustrates the challenges of translation and cross-cultural reading but should also enhance the reader’s appreciation of Nieh’s acute sensitivity to these issues, as well as the tremendous care and thoughtfulness with which she constructed her masterpiece. Cultural allusions aside, there is sufficient sensory immediacy in many of Nieh’s descriptions to engage readers from various backgrounds: recurrent images of animals and movement, a stranded boat, a stopped clock, a crumbling wall, a pig at slaughter, or a flesh-eating ghoul, all have a certain “universal” resonance.

  HISTORICAL CONTEXT

  The element most likely to frustrate or intimidate the non-Chinese reader is the historical framework of Mulberry and Peach. To readers unfamiliar with modern Chinese history, the temptation might be to tune out the profusion of proper names, dates, and events and to leap directly to the level of the “universal.” But there is a better way, one that does greater justice to Nieh’s genius: a little contextual knowledge enormously illuminates Nieh’s craft and order.

  The simple and general historical outline provided here is intended to help readers unfamiliar with modern Chinese history; the accompanying analysis provides one reading frame for approaching the complexities of Mulberry and Peach. To historically informed Chinese readers, such a reading frame is perhaps obvious: certainly it is encouraged by Nieh’s own published comments on the novel.8 Most published criticism on Nieh (some of it, though not much, available in English) offers some version of a nationalist-allegorical approach to the text, envisioning Mulberry and Peach as a fable of the tragic state of modern China and Nieh as exhibiting an “obsession with China” shared by many contemporary Chinese writers.9

  The novel begins in 1945, at the end of World War II, but Nieh’s vision cannot be understood unless we go further back, at least to the decline of the Ch’ing (or Qing or Manchu) Dynasty, China’s last imperial dynasty, and to the forced opening of China in the nineteenth century by imperial powers—Western ones as well as Japan. The expansionist ambitions of these powers, their superior technology and weaponry, and the weakness and corruption of the Manchu government combined to bring humiliation upon humiliation upon the Chinese people—military defeats, unequal treaties, astronomical indemnities, ruin of native economies, extraterritorial rule. Parts of China were made into colonies, others became virtual colonies, and the country was ripe for dismemberment. Revolutionaries led by Dr. Sun Yat Sen, after several attempts, overthrew the Manchus and established the Republic of China in 1911. (His party was the Kuomintang, or Nationalists.)

  Although this revolution put an end to China’s imperial tradition and in theory created a modern nation-state, what followed was not the hoped-for revitalization through entry into modernity. Instead, a period of warlordism followed in which the Chinese people were constantly overrun and exploited by the armies of rival political factions. The influence of foreign capital continued to expand, in collaboration with a rising urban bourgeoisie. At the same time the vast peasantry remained mired in poverty and victimized by inequitable landownership. A fledgling Communist movement appealing to the dispossessed, the Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1921 and began to gain momentum. For a while, they and the Nationalists worked together.

  In 1926, Chiang Kai-shek, a follower of Dr. Sun Yat Sen, successfully led a military expedition (known as the Northern Expedition) to defeat warlords and unify China under Nationalist rule. Immediately upon his victory, Chiang conducted a bloody purge and drove the Communists underground. During the next seven years, the Nationalists engaged in a series of “extermination campaigns” to root out the Communists. To survive, the latter fled across China through some of its most unforgiving terrain, in a journey known as the Long March (1934—36), eventually stopping in Yenan (Yanan) in Shensi (Shaanxi) Province in the north. By this time, the leadership of Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong), Chiang’s arch-rival, had been consolidated. Mao Tse-tung built a power base in Yenan and settled in to wage protracted warfare against the Nationalists, using a strategy of guerilla warfare and reliance on the peasantry—a departure from classic Marxist doctrine emphasizing the urban proletariat as the vanguard of revolution.

  After years of gradual aggression, Japan invaded China in 1937 in a brutal campaign of rape, pillage, and torture—one of its most notorious episodes being the Rape of Nanking (Nanjing), also known as the Nanking Massacre. The Nationalist government was forced to relocate from Nanking to Chungking (Chongqing) in the mountains of southwestern China. To resist the Japanese invaders, the Nationalists and Communists again worked together—reluctantly, vigilant against each other’s next move. In 1941 World War II began and China became an ally of the United States in the Pacific War. American aid went to the Nationalists, but the Communist buildup in the countryside proceeded apace, fueled by the patriotic struggle.

  The end of World War II and the defeat of Japan was a signal for the civil war between the Communists and Nationalists to resume. The former won in spite of their inferior weaponry; the Nationalists fled south to the island of Taiwan, bringing the Republic of China with them. In 1949 Mao Tse-tung stood on top of Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, in Beijing and declared the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.

  What ensued was a long period of division between the two Chinas, each claiming itself to
be the legitimate representative of the Chinese people and the other to be a usurper, each forbidding its own citizens to learn about or interact with their compatriots across the Taiwan Straits, and each imposing repressive control on its own people. All direct travel, communication, trade, and cultural exchange were banned. Families and friends suffered separation for decades, too fearful of charges of espionage to maintain their relationships.

  Chiang Kai-shek ruled the island state with an iron fist, persecuting local Taiwanese natives as well as political dissidents within the Nationalist Party. On the mainland, Mao Tse-tung launched one mass political movement after another in the name of continuing revolution, typically with catastrophic results. The Great Leap Forward (1958—60), an ill-advised program of rapid collectivization and industrialization, left the populace vulnerable to horrendous famines. The ordinary Chinese were caught in the crossfire; though they would have been content to make a living and raise a family in peace, politics would not leave them alone. Not only did domestic politics impinge on their daily lives, but each China was caught in the Cold War geopolitical game of the superpowers. The Republic of China became aligned with the United States; the People’s Republic of China (temporarily) with the Soviet Union.

  With American aid propping up Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorship, the 1960s was a period of political frustration and cultural claustrophobia for many people in “Free China,” despite improving material prosperity. The dream of escape to the United States was widespread, especially among intellectuals who could take advantage of educational opportunities to emigrate. On the mainland—the United States having imposed an embargo on “Red China” since 1949 and the Soviet Union having deserted its client in 1960—the Communists kept on a course of economic and cultural isolation, except for relationships with Third World nations. The 1960s saw the launching of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966—76), which quickly plunged the nation into self-destructive conflict. The Vietnam War, in which the two superpowers took opposite sides, further reinforced the mainland China—Taiwan divide.

  Chiang Kai-shek died in 1975 and was succeeded by his son Chiang Ching-kuo in 1978, who began easing Taiwan into a more open society. Mao Tse-tung’s death in 1976 led to the fall of ultra-left factions; under the new leadership of Deng Xiaoping, the mainland also began a process of economic and political change. The rigid antagonism between the two sides began to thaw in the 1980s. But these easings of tension did not take place until years after the period in which Mulberry and Peach is set.

  ALLEGORIES OF MODERN CHINESE HISTORY

  Learning something about this bitter history of strife and suffering enables the reader to appreciate the wealth of historical detail Nieh has managed to pack into her stories and vignettes. In an inspired aesthetic move, Nieh used a series of key moments in modern Chinese history to indicate the protagonist’s fate and, through it, the Chinese people’s: again and again, China is poised on the cusp of change, but again and again, hopes for a better life are dashed (parts one through three), until, ironically, perpetual exile becomes the most appealing alternative for the Chinese people by sheer default (part four). In a 1980 essay entitled “The Wanderer’s Lament,” which serves as the preface to some of the Chinese editions of Mulberry and Peach, Hualing Nieh comments on the confinement imagery that occurs throughout the novel.10 In part one, the refugee boat is immobilized in the river gorge; in part two, the city of Beijing, shaped like the Chinese character for “return” (one square enclosing another), is surrounded by the Communist army; in part three, Mulberry and her family are immured in an attic, located on the island of Taiwan, encircled by water.

  In each part the confinement is broken, bringing with it promise for change: at the end of part one, rain and rising waters are about to free the stranded boat as victory over Japan is announced by Chinese airplanes; at the end of part two, the People’s Liberation Army is about to enter Beijing and “liberate” the entire country; in part three, Mulberry makes forays out of the attic, eventually making her way to the United States. Although Nieh’s essay does not analyze part four, it is clear that the theme of confinement—for example, the lumberjack’s water tower (113), the professor’s wife’s basement (184), or the Great Wall in the snow globe paperweight (172)—and then spurious emancipation—for example, Teng’s aimless speeding along the highway (172), or the moonwalking astronaut’s “giant step for mankind” as the sublunary realm hurtles toward insanity (170)—is carried through the American chapter as well.

  Throughout Mulberry and Peach Nieh meticulously alludes to specific events or issues in recent Chinese history. In part one, for example, the stranded boat represents the ship of state at a touch-and-go moment of suspension between survival and destruction, weakened after years of devastating war. The Refugee Student complains about the (Nationalist) government’s indifference to the common people’s welfare; he plans to start a signature campaign, hold a news conference, and buy a protest ad in the newspaper “as soon as we get to Chungking” (32). He also dreams of a rescue helicopter to airlift the passengers out of the gorge. The Refugee Student’s faith in the trappings of the modern nation-state and in the promise of technology is typical of generations of Chinese intellectuals dating back to the late Ch’ing Dynasty. Informing the young man’s indignant speeches are memories of national humiliation and an obsession with finding ways to save China. (“Mr. Democracy” and “Mr. Science,” for example, were two of the most touted panaceas in the 1910s and 1920s.) Juxtaposed against the student’s naïve optimism are the old man’s obdurate Confucian orthodoxy, the illiterate Peach-flower Woman’s indifference to politics, and the hardworking Boatman’s fatalism and quiet strength. The passengers constitute a microcosm of the contending social forces and perspectives present as China desperately attempts to shed its imperial and colonial past.

  In part two the revelations made by Mrs. Shen (the mother of Chia-kang, Mulberry’s fiance) in besieged Beijing may also be read as a historical allegory. For years Chia-kang has been presented as the legitimate heir of the once-wealthy Shen family. His older brother, Chia-ch’ing, the son of a family maid, Phoenix, and thus considered a bastard, has run away from home to join the Communist guerrillas; it is rumored that he is returning to Beijing as one of the victors. Mrs. Shen now reveals that “heir” and “bastard” are reversed. After the maid had given birth to Chia-ch’ing, Mrs. Shen, infertile thus far, feared her status threatened: in the traditional Chinese family, a woman’s power was dependent upon her ability to produce a male child. (Although both Nationalists and Communists made efforts to “free” women from such rigidly prescribed roles, such as passing laws to ban concubinage, this sexism still persists today.) Mrs. Shen sought help at a Taoist temple; Chia-kang, the product of a tryst between her and a Taoist priest, was then presented as the legitimate heir of the Shen family. (Though Chia-ch’ing was also born of an extramarital affair, Chia-kang, not sharing Mr. Shen’s bloodline, is the “real bastard” by patriarchal standards.) Mrs. Shen then murdered Phoenix to secure her own position, and Chia-ch’ing was driven out. With Mrs. Shen’s deathbed confession, all the sins of the old order are brought out into the open.

  While this appalling tale is comprehensible on its own as an expose of the patriarchal family’s atrocities, readers aware of the Communist-Nationalist conflict will find in it an allegory of the Communist Revolution. The oppressed and dispossessed of old China, whom Chia-ch’ing symbolizes, are implied by Nieh to be the legitimate future rulers of China—but only at this specific juncture in history, when the Communists had yet to commit their purges. Anyone familiar with the Communists’ ideological campaigns would hear ominous, ironic notes in Mrs. Shen’s expressed hope that Chia-ch’ing would protect them on the basis of family ties. In one Communist political movement after another, up through the Cultural Revolution, parent and child, friend and friend, were encouraged to turn against each other in the name of party loyalty. Rather than showing leniency, the returning Chia-ch ing mig
ht well be the first to persecute his family.

  The political allusions in part three of Mulberry and Peach are so powerful that, upon its first appearance in Taiwan, the novel was banned in mid-serialization. Chia-kang’s making his way south to Taiwan obviously parallels the Nationalist regime’s flight from the mainland. His embezzlement is a reference to the untold wealth amassed through corruption by Chiang Kai-shek and those in his circle of power—a corruption which impoverished the mass of the people of China. The Nationalists created and clung to the mythic conceit that they were the temporarily displaced representative of all China, recouping strength for the final restoration. In the name of anti-Communism, Chiang Kai-shek ruled his island refuge by martial law. Nieh responds to this history and myth with a macabre tale of chronic imprisonment in an attic punctuated by surprise security checks from the police. In this cramped space, people are afraid to speak, resort to communicating with their hands, and can’t stand up straight. The younger generation grows up distorted: “Eight-year-old Sang-wa can stand up. But she doesn’t want to. She wants to imitate the grown-ups crawling on the floor” (118).