by Hualing Nieh
3 This list is based on the discussion of classification in Kirk Denton’s review of Mulberry and Peach in Journal of the Chinese Language Teacher’s Association 24, no. 2 (1989): 135-38; on consultations with colleagues who have taught the book (Norma Alarcon, Genaro Padilla, Shu-mei Shih); and on interpretations of the novel made by some of the graduate students who worked with me at the University of California, Berkeley.
4 Each of Nieh’s chosen historical moments looks back to the past and forward into the future. Such pivoting allows Nieh to suggest enormous temporal and spatial reach, without being overburdened by the details of how the protagonist gets from point A to point B. In fact the gaps between the novel’s formal parts, which skip some key events in Chinese history and time periods in the protagonist’s development, are pregnant with meaning—and take on a special eloquence. These textual gaps also resist any easy interpretation of the connections between such events; the reader is challenged to forge connections between events, including piecing together the horrors that Mulberry/Peach has had to endure in order to escape her previous predicament.
5 For transliterations of Chinese names, versions that I judge to be most familiar to the contemporary American reader are given first, followed by alternative versions.
6 Yandi and Huangdi, associated with the elements of fire and earth respectively, are mythical early emperors of China. Yandi is usually credited with creating culture; Huangdi, with territorial conquest. The phrase yanhuang zisun (descendants of Yan and Huang) refers to the Chinese people. I thank Yum Tong Siu for his help with this note.
7 This is where the reviled Orientalist practice of translating Chinese names—Lotus Blossom and the like—would actually be more helpful!
8 See, for example, Nieh, “Langzi de beige” (The wanderer’s lament), preface to Sangqing yu Taohong (Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe), 1-7.
9 The phrase “obsession with China” is critic C. T. Hsia’s from “Obsession with China,” A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 533-54. The best known reading of Mulberry and Peach in this vein is offered by Pai Hsien-yung, himself a celebrated writer, in “The Wandering Chinese: The Theme of Exile in Taiwan Fiction,” Iowa Review 7, nos. 2 & 3 (1976): 205-12. The Chinese original probably influenced every subsequent Chinese critic on Nieh’s novel, including, for example, virtually all the authors in Nie Hualing yanjiu zhuanji (Anthology of studies of Nieh Hualing), eds. Li Kailing and Chen Zhongshu (n.p.: Hubei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1990); and Shiao-ling Yu, “The Themes of Exile and Identity Crisis in Nieh Hualing’s Fiction,” in Nativism Overseas: Contemporary Chinese Women Writers, ed. Hsin-sheng C. Kao (New York: State University of New York Press, 1993), 127-56. Leo Ou-fan Lee, “On the Margins of the Chinese Discourse: Some Personal Thoughts on the Cultural Meaning of the Periphery,” in The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today, ed. Tu Wei-ming (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 221-38, departs from Pai’s orientation by suggesting that a location ex-centric to China, such as that occupied by Peach in the United States, could actually help “decipher—and in a way to deconstruct—the master narrative of Chinese history” (230).
10 The translation of the title is mine; the original is “Langzi de beige” (see note 8).
11 “Old society” is a Communist phrase referring to Chinese society before “Liberation,” that is, before 1949.
12 Due to the particular emphases of this afterword, I will not discuss a variety of approaches, including “Asian American readings,” which stress the historicity of the protagonist’s United States experiences and downplay the novel’s Chinese elements. My understanding of Mulberry and Peach has certainly been influenced by the readings presented in dissertation chapters by Tina Chen, Jeannie Chiu, and Viet Thanh Nguyen, all at the University of California Berkeley, and by Monica Chiu at Emory University, as well as by comments made in class discussion by Eliza Noh, Marie Lo, Sandy Oh. I thank them for sharing their insights with me.
13 Some noted examples are Ah Q in Lu Hsun’s (Lu Xun’s) “The Story of Ah Q,” Wu Hanhun in Pai Hsien-yung’s “Death in Chicago,” and Mou Tianlei in Yu Lihua’s Again the Palm Trees.
14 Let me emphasize from the outset that by “vision,” I do not mean Nieh’s consciously held and rationally explicable views, which are, in any case, sometimes inconsistent. Instead, I am referring to the totality of presented details in the novel, which Nieh the artist realizes with a fullness beyond extractive summary. In other words, I consider Nieh in her “creative” mode more capacious, more inclusive of contradictions, than Nieh in a more “instrumental” mode. Although, in admiration of her artistry and for convenience, I often apply volitional terms to Nieh—indeed it is difficult to entirely avoid volitional terms in literary analysis—I do not subscribe to the belief that a writer can be in absolute, premeditated control over her work. Such seems to be the case with the feminist elements in Nieh’s novel. Hence my emphasis on reading—on what a reader from a certain perspective sees in what is shown.
15 This point, frequently made by postcolonial critics, is presented in an especially compelling form for Chinese readers by Lydia Liu, “The Female Body and Nationalist Discourse: The Field of Life and Death Revisited,” in Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, eds. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 37-62.
16 Pai Hsien-yung, “The Wandering Chinese,” 211.
17 Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 54. I thank Rachel Lee for drawing my attention to this analysis.
18 See the critique of Euro-American feminism in Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” boundary 2 12 (1984): 333-58.
19 The following biographical sketch is a composite drawn from various Chinese pieces written by Nieh herself and from Li Kailing, “Nie Hualing qiren qizuo” (The life and works of Hualing Nieh) in Nie Hualing yanjiu zhuanji (Anthology of studies of Nieh Hualing), eds. Li Kailing and Chen Zhongshu (n.p.: Hubei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1990), 3-13. Anglophone readers may be interested in Peter Nazareth, “An Interview with Chinese Author Hualing Nieh,” World Literature Today (Winter 1981), 10-18.
20 “White Terror” refers to terror committed by the non-Red, non-Communist, Chinese.
21 In 1988 Sangqing yu Taohong was published in full by Hanyi seyan chubanshe in Taiwan. Another edition was issued in 1997 by China Times Publishing in Taiwan. Ironically, these Taiwanese editions are Nieh’s favorites: they are unexpurgated and feature beautifully designed, high-quality covers and interiors.
22 In 1986 in Hong Kong the publisher Huahan wenhua shiye gongsi reissued the complete text of the edition published by Youlian chubanshe.
23 At the time, all the mainland publishers were under direct government control. In an interview with me (Iowa City, Iowa, 23 March 1996), Nieh noted that, given the political and cultural conditions in China at the time, it would have been impossible to publish Sangqing yu taohong without cuts. Her preface to the expurgated edition carefully avoids mentioning censorship but refers instead to issues of artistic restraint and targeted audience.
24 In her 23 March 1996 interview with me, Hualing Nieh informed me that the unexpurgated versions were published respectively by Dongfeng wenyi chubanshe and by Huaxia chubanshe as part of its “haiwai huawen zuojia xilie” (overseas Chinese-language writers series).
25 In her 23 March 1996 interview with me, Nieh expressed second thoughts about the lists of characters, but interestingly, the lists inadvertently reinforce the performative aspects of Mulberry and Peach, which are adumbrated in Nieh’s nonessentialist views on gender. I thank Tina Chen for her reading on this.
26 New World Press, which specialized in foreign-language publications, was under government control, like all publishers on the mainland at the time.
27 Pai Hsien-yung, “Shiji
de piaobozhe: chongdu Sangqing yu Taohong” (The wanderer of the century: Rereading Mulberry and Peach), Jiushi niandai yuekan (The Nineties Monthly) 12 (1989): 93-95. Pai’s piece is a revisiting of Nieh’s novel in a post-Tiananmen Square Massacre context.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am profoundly grateful to the author, Hualing Nieh, for so generously allowing me to interview her extensively in March 1996 and for sharing with me her collection of various editions of Mulberry and Peach, reviews and critical essays, and documents related to its publication history. I thank her especially for the honor of writing this afterword. Such a possibility was beyond my wildest dreams when I first read Sangqing yu Tuohong in Ming Pao Monthly—with dim comprehension and much bewilderment, I must say—over two decades ago.
Brief sections of the afterword are drawn from “The Stakes of Border-Crossing: Hualing Nieh’s Mulberry and Peach in Sinocentric, Asian American, and Feminist Critical Practices” in Disciplining Asia: Theorizing Studies in the Asian Diaspora, eds. Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming). I thank the editors for the opportunity to clarify my thinking on Nieh’s novel and to receive feedback on the essay.
Upon reading the above essay both Rachel Lee and Colleen Lye raised pointed questions about the significance of mediation by Anglo-American feminism (and its variety of internationalism). Their questions have helped shape this afterword, and for this I am most appreciative.
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Published by The Feminist Press at The City University of New York City College, Wingate Hall, Convent Avenue at 138th Street, New York, NY 10031
First Feminist Press edition, 1998
Copyright © 1981 by Hualing Nieh Afterword copyright © 1998 by Sau-ling Cynthia Wong
Lyrics to “Blackbird” © 1968, “Nowhere Man” © 1996 by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Reproduced by permission of Northern Songs. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or used, stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written permission of The Feminist Press at The City University of New York except in case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Originally published in 1988 as a Beacon Paperback by arrangement with The Women’s Press, Ltd. Translated from the Chinese Sangqing yu Taohong.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nieh, Hua-ling, 1926–
[Sang Ch’ing yü Y‘ ao-hung. English]
Mulberry and Peach : two women of China / Hualing Nieh ; afterword by Sau-ling Cynthia Wong ; translated by Jane Parish Yang with Linda Lappin.
p. cm.
Originally published : Boston : Beacon Press, 1988.
eISBN : 978-1-558-61731-5
1. Nieh, Hua-ling, 1926-—Translations into English. I. Yang, Jane Parish, 1946–. II. Title.
PL2856.N4 S213 1998
98-12259
895.1’352—dc21
CIP
The Feminist Press is grateful to Jane S. Gould, Florence Howe, Joanne Markell, and Genevieve Vaughan for their generosity in supporting this publication.
Printed on acid-free paper by McNaughton & Gunn, Saline, MI
Manufactured in the United States of America