Mulberry and Peach

by Hualing Nieh

  Although part four is geographically set in the United States, it is clear that the protagonist can never escape from the nightmare that is modern Chinese history. Part of that history is the Cold War: the Immigration Service agent’s interrogation of Peach obsessively revolves around the question of whether she and her family members and contacts are Communist or not. From Peach’s answers about her family background, it is clear to anyone familiar with recent Chinese history that, as a former warlord’s daughter and thus a target of class struggle, the protagonist would never have been able to survive under communism, even though she herself has been powerless and victimized by the “old society.”11 But to the Nationalists, as the wife of a fugitive, Peach is guilty by association: in a police state the individual has no rights under law. Thus her only alternative is to extricate herself from this Left-Right dilemma—ironically, by applying for permanent residency in America, a supporter of Taiwan. In the meantime, she is stateless—a wanderer cut off from homeland, family, and community, a representative of the Chinese in diaspora.

  In this context, the question of what Peach eventually does with her unborn baby—abortion? adoption by the professor’s American wife? adoption by a robotic/neurotic Chinese American couple oblivious to China’s tragedy? raising the baby by herself?—also becomes a question of whether the Chinese people will survive, and if so, on what terms.

  WOMAN, BODY, NATION, HISTORY

  But reading Mulberry and Peach as historical allegory is just one way to approach the text. In fact, if one believes that the writer’s creative genius always exceeds her ability to give analytic accounts of her work, one would find Mulberry and Peach to be a radically uncontainable text. Each scene, each dialog exchange, is laden with interpretive possibilities, some of them mutually incompatible.12 A reading frame centered on China actually obscures one of the most important facts about the novel: namely, that the embodiment of the fate of the Chinese people is a woman. The customary pattern in modern Chinese literature is to assign this role to a male, often a male intellectual.13 Certainly, Mulberry and Peach constitutes a conspicuous exception to this rule; yet many critics seem to have found this incidental. Once the protagonist’s female gender is taken seriously, however, widely received views on the meaning of the novel will be subverted, and other aspects of Hualing Nieh’s vision—notably feminist ones—begin to emerge.14

  In my feminist reading of Mulberry and Peach, the interests of nation and the interests of women are, more often than not, at odds with each other, and the crises of nation are typically a contest between patriarchal structures in which women have no say.15 A striking image from Refugee Student’s story about his family (in part one) sets forth the uneasy relationship between the lot of modern Chinese women and the historical injuries suffered by the modern Chinese nation-state(s):‘My father had seven wives. . . . Father treated his seven wives equally: all under martial law. . . . Their seven bedrooms were all next to one another, dark and gloomy, shaded by tall trees on all sides. When the Japanese bombed Nanking, a bomb fell right in the middle of the house, and blasted out a crater as big as a courtyard. When the bomb hit, it was the first time those rooms were exposed to sunlight.’(36)

  This image suggests that when the nation is intact along with all its cultural controls, the wives’ lives are “dark and gloomy.” When upheavals like Japan’s imperialist attack destroy China’s existing social structures—in particular, the polygamist patriarchal family underwritten by Confucianism—and maim with indiscriminate fury, they also expel oppressed woman from their prison/shelter and expose them to “sunlight.” This is, to say the least, an unorthodox view of what Pai Hsien-yung terms “the fate of modern China in all its tragic complexity.” 16 Thus when Nieh makes Mulberry/Peach the symbol of that condition, a contradiction is inevitably introduced: if an oppressed “part” is made to stand for the abstract whole, sooner or later the seams will show. And to a preternaturally observant artist like Nieh, the seams are everywhere.

  To take just a few more examples, in part one, when the Refugee Student advocates a signature campaign to protest government incompetence, Peach-flower Woman responds by saying that she cannot even write her own name. How this comes to be is explained by the old man when he recites a Confucian adage, “‘It’s a great virtue for a woman to be without talent”’ (33): the Chinese woman has traditionally been excluded from the nation’s political structure through imposed illiteracy. Though change has begun—Mulberry and Lao-Shih are students—the Chinese woman still commonly serves a metaphorical function for the nation. When the Refugee Student tries to rally his fellow passengers with a stirring anti-Japanese song, he hoists up one of Peach-flower Woman’s blouses, which the wind blows into a suggestive shape like ample breasts. This image recalls Cynthia Enloe’s analysis of how women, especially their sexuality, have typically been appropriated to support the nation-state at the expense of their own voices and welfare.17 As part one comes to a close with the news of Chinese victory over Japan, Nieh leaves us with a remarkable vignette of three generations of men clinging to, and gratifying themselves on, Peach-flower Woman’s reclining body: her baby sucking noisily at her breast, and the Refugee Student and the old man at her feet, each smoking a cigarette stuck between her toes (55).

  In another inspired image from part one, from the old man’s story about the Nanking Massacre, a Chinese man and a naked Japanese soldier, a would-be rapist, are shown tussling absurdly over a Chinese woman (the Chinese man’s newly wedded wife). The Chinese man yanks at the Japanese soldier’s tiny penis while the Japanese soldier bites the Chinese man’s neck, but the fight is broken up by a German member of the International Relief Committee in Nazi uniform, whose sleeve insignia sends the Japanese soldier fleeing (43—44). Thus the grand narratives of nation, stories capable of justifying world wars and rousing armies of patriots to action, are reduced to a farcical scuffle between inept and insecure men—men whose power is derived from accoutrements rather than from any inherent strength. National dramas are enacted upon the woman’s body, but the woman in whose name men fight fades from the old man’s narration. (She eventually becomes crazed from repeated trauma.)

  This episode is echoed in part four, when Teng, a young Chinese graduate student, tells Peach of a casual sexual encounter with an American girl. When the American girl exclaims, “‘This little Chinaman on me has a huge prick,”’ Teng suddenly goes limp (198). This association between China’s national honor and a Chinese man’s sexual performance not only makes a mockery of both “nationalism” and “masculinity” but raises a stark, fundamental question: Such conceptions of “nationalism” and “masculinity” are possible only by defining woman as lack; so in a world where political power and the phallus are conflated, is there any room for women at all?

  With clinical precision, Nieh details the process by which sexism assumes a neutral, innocent face: male desire is projected onto women, who are then held responsible for the welfare of the world. Woman is bifurcated into virgin and whore; victim and victimizer are reversed. Hence Mulberry’s unshakable sense of guilt: over and over, just to survive, she has to strike the only bargain allowed women—selling her body. But doing so automatically brands her as a ruthless seducer who sucks the strength out of men and causes the ruin of the world. Even her own young daughter has internalized this misogynistic view. When Mulberry makes daily excursions out of the attic to serve as the house owner’s mistress/servant, in exchange for him hiding her family, Sang-wa understands her as “[going] outside every night . . . to eat people” (142). In truth, Mulberry is not predator but prey. Read through a feminist lens, then, the protagonist’s split into Mulberry and Peach is a vivid literalization of the impossible split inflicted by society upon women.

  Though Nieh indicts Chinese sexism and patriarchy with passion, it would be a serious mistake to assume that she finds adoption of Western values a solution to the protagonist’s problems. As indicated above, there is little reason to believe that part
four, set in America, constitutes an exception to the novel’s gestalt of confinement followed by spurious liberation. By opening part one with references to the anti-Vietnam War movement, Nieh makes clear the continuity between the United States’s involvement in the Vietnam War and other imperialistic /colonial wars like those plaguing China’s past. She seems to take issue with some aspects of the feminism of the 1960s as espoused by middle-class American women: specifically, the aforementioned scene between Teng and the American woman suggests that Nieh may find its focus on female sexual gratification and personal fulfillment to be superficial and insensitive to questions of racial and cultural oppression. Without historical understanding, the sexually “emancipated” American woman is complicit in the history that has made “Chinaman” a term of insult. Mulberry and Peach is a text that resists being used to “prove” an ahistorical, universal sisterhood, or to define the “Third World Woman” solely through her difference.“18

  One of Peach’s graffiti in the prologue hints at an ideal of universal androgyny: “When women grow beards / and men bear children / the world will be at peace” (4). But to the extent that this vision is formulated in biological rather than cultural terms, one must consider Nieh’s sentiments on such possibilities to be pessimistic. Such an impression is confirmed by the lesbian character Lao-shih, runaway Mulberry’s traveling companion, in part one. A strong woman who scorns the title of “Miss,” Lao-shih understands the workings of patriarchy and empathizes with Mulberry’s pain. At a carnivalesque moment during a game of dice, Lao-shih, the winner, dresses Refugee Student in Peach-flower Woman’s clothes and makes him perform the “Flower Drum Song.” (One line in his well-known ditty makes fun of unbound feet, which in old China were considered undesirable in women.) But in the end Refugee Student grabs Lao-shih, forces a kiss on her so that she is “choking and can’t speak,” and all but rapes her (54). Perhaps it is no accident that Lao-shih literally means “old history”—what symbolic gender destabilizations cannot overcome.

  THE AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND AND THE NOVEL’S PUBLICATION HISTORY

  Mulberry and Peach is full of subversive potential, threatening political regimes Left and Right as well as cultural values East and West. It is not surprising that it has had a complicated publication history, one that resonates uncannily with the physical and psychological traversals experienced by the protagonist, which in turn echo the author’s own ordeals—partly in biographical detail but mainly in spirit.“19

  Born in Wuhan in Hubei Province in 1925, Hualing Nieh was uprooted numerous times during her formative years as a result of the unremitting Nationalist-Communist strife and the Japanese invasion and occupation. Her father was a minor Nationalist official killed when Communist troops on the Long March passed by the area under his control. Upon the fall of Wuhan to the Japanese in 1938, Nieh left her family at the young age of fourteen to attend high school and then college, first in Szechuan (Sichuan) Province and then in Nanking. In 1948, on the eve of the Communist victory, she fled with her mother and siblings to Taiwan. There, Nieh became the literary editor of a dissident publication, The Free China Fortnightly. In 1960 her colleagues were arrested and the journal closed down for criticizing Chiang Kai-Shek’s repressive rule; Nieh had a firsthand taste of Nationalist “White Terror.”20 After teaching literature in Taiwan for a few years, Nieh went into exile: hired by the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, she left Taiwan in 1964 and has lived in the United States since then. Mulberry and Peach was written while she was with the International Writing Program, which she and her husband, Paul Engle, founded at the University of Iowa in 1967. Many of her experiences were incorporated into the novel—artistically transformed, of course.

  Over the decades the International Writing Program has supported numerous writers from all over the world. In 1976 over three hundred writers nominated Nieh and Engle for the Nobel Peace Prize. Nieh is the author of nearly twenty books (novels, short stories, essays, literary criticism, translations) and the recipient of several honorary doctorates.

  Sangqing yu Taohong, the Chinese original of Mulberry and Peach, was first serialized in Taiwan’s United Daily News in the early 1970s. Upon the serialization of part three, however, the work had drawn such vicious political and moralistic attacks—for satire of the Nationalist regime and for “pornographic” accounts of Peach’s sex life—that the editors were forced to discontinue the serialization. The ban on this material was not lifted until after the death of Chiang Ching-kuo, Chiang Kai-shek’s son and successor, in 1988.21 It was left to Hong Kong, then a British colony caught in but not committed to either side of the Nationalist-Communist conflict, to provide the relative neutrality needed for Sangqing yu Taohong to first see the light of day in its entirety. Hong Kong’s Ming Pao Monthly, a journal for intellectuals, took up the serialization, and the novel finally appeared in book form in 1976 (published by Youlian chubanshe).22 The second edition was published by Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe in Beijing in 1980, after the resumption of diplomatic relations between the People’s Republic of China and the United States. But this edition was a drastically expurgated version, with a number of changes, including the deletion of part four, initiated by the press but acceded to by the author.23 (The United States setting in part four was deemed of little interest to mainland Chinese readers; the sexual content, inappropriate.) On the mainland, the unexpurgated version at last appeared in 1989 and again in 1995.24

  In 1981 the English translation by Jane Parish Yang and Linda Lappin, Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China, was simultaneously published by New World Press in Beijing and Sino Publishing Company in New York. Nieh added some clarifications to aid the English-language reader, such as the subtitle and dramatis personae-type lists introducing the main characters in each part.25 But unbeknownst to the author at the time, New World Press made some changes to the typescript (despite reassurances to the author that the project, which was intended for non-Chinese audiences, was politically “safe”).26 The altered version became available in Great Britain from The Women’s Press of London in 1986. In 1988 Beacon Press of Boston, using the typescript of the uncut translation, reissued Mulberry and Peach as part of its Asian Voices series (which included titles by both Asian and Asian American authors). This first U.S. publication earned the novel an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, which honors important works that advance cultural understanding. Beacon later dropped the title due to unsatisfactory sales. This Feminist Press edition follows the Beacon edition and is unexpurgated.

  As this brief publication history shows, Mulberry and Peach is not a single book but an unstable textual complex that traverses multiple national, political, linguistic, and cultural borders. Each component of this textual complex, each episode in its reception, says something about the historical and cultural forces that have shaped this work.

  Nieh’s investment in “Chineseness” is unquestionable: her desire to see her book published on the Chinese mainland was strong enough to override protectiveness toward her creation, leading her to reluctantly agree to the expurgation of part four. The fact that Nieh writes about things familiar to her—and that there are no direct portrayals of Communists in the novel—may have enabled some mainland critics to construct Mulberry and Peach as pro-People’s Republic of China, if somewhat short on revolutionary consciousness. Yet the unauthorized alterations made in the English translation suggest the ways in which Nieh’s novel questions, and perhaps threatens, Communist authority even as it critiques the Nationalists. Through its tense complexity Mulberry and Peach contests ideological and nationalist appropriation.

  The terms of discussion in this afterword have certainly been shaped by the Anglo-American feminist context of this publication, the centrality of translation in such a context, and by my position in the American academic world as a biliterate scholar of Asian American literature. But much lies beyond the scope of this essay. One would do well to remember that English is only one of the sev
eral languages into which Mulberry and Peach has been translated, and that readers elsewhere have their own standards of relevance and salience. Eastern European readers, for example, have found Nieh’s novel to be an especially compelling account of totalitarianism and exile.27

  An important revelation of Mulberry and Peach’s history is the importance of institutional mediations in determining access to and reception of a literary work, whether negatively (e.g., through outright censorship, editorial pressures, or commercial constraints) or positively (e.g., through sales promotion, teaching, library collections). A book unread is a book shorn of influence. The only way to render its due to a literary work as rich as Mulberry and Peach is to ensure that it is kept available, and that dialogs about it continue among readers from diverse perspectives and diverse places. In this, the Feminist Press’s decision to reprint the novel will play an invaluable role.

  Sau-ling Cynthia Wong

  Sunnyvale, California

  January 1998

  NOTES

  1 In addition to English, Mulberry and Peach has been translated in full into Croatian, Dutch, Hungarian, and Korean, while sections of the novel have been translated into Polish. The author’s name sometimes appears with family name first, in the Chinese manner, transliterated as Nieh Hualing or Nie Hualing.

  2 I am indebted to Jeannie Chiu for pointing out such Gothic elements in her dissertation-in-progress, “Uncanny Doubles: Nationalism and Humanism in Twentieth-Century Chinese American Literature and African American Literature,” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley).