by Hua Bai
In 1981 Zhan Chengxu and three other anthropologists
published the results of their investigations of the Mosuo community in a book titled Azhu Marriage and Matrilineal Family among the Yongning Naxi. In 1983 Yan Yuxian and Song Zhaolin published a similar book, Matrilineality in Yongning Naxi Nationality. Inspired by the matrilineal model described in these studies, Bai Hua made two visits to the Mosuo community along Lake Lugu in 1985 and
1986. “Even today,” he observes, “the Mosuo people still maintain a prehistoric family structure and marital form.
They regard the female as the root and trunk and the male as the branches and leaves.”
In The Remote Country of Women, Bai Hua “intended to use the past as a mirror to see the present,” that is, “to use the values of his matrilineal model to challenge our conven-tional evaluations regarding the primitive versus the modern, and the barbarous versus the civilized. After The Remote Country of Women, he wrote two other long novels, Xishui, Leishui (Streams, Tears) and Aimodala Xin Weisi (The Heart of Aimodala Is Not Dead), continuing his reflection on the future of humanity in the value conflicts between the primitive and the civilized. But The Remote Country of Women remains Bai Hua’s most significant work because of his
powerful recapitulation of Mosuo community—a utopia,
remote but in existence.
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Bai Hua.book Page 374 Friday, October 26, 2001 2:56 PM
Bai Hua.book Page 375 Friday, October 26, 2001 2:56 PM
About the Author
Bai Hua was born Chen Youhua in Xinyang, a small city of Henan Province, in 1930. He joined the People’s Liberation Army in 1947 and began to write poems, short stories, and screenplays in 1951. In 1961 he became an editor and
screenplay writer for the Shanghai Petrel Film Company. He started his career as a freelance writer in 1964 and has been residing in Shanghai since 1985.
An internationally renowned writer, Bai Hua has been a
cause célèbre because of his dissidence and his involvement in the human rights movement in China. As early as 1979, he used humanism to challenge Communist authoritarian-ism in his screenplay Bitter Love, which was made into the movie The Sun and Man in 1980. Consequently, Deng Xiaoping made him the chief target of the first post-Mao antibourgeois liberalization campaign in 1981. The Remote Country of Women, published in 1988, is Bai Hua’s first long novel, satirizing the warping banality of totalitarianism and establishing him as a pioneering and subversive writer of great power.
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About the Translators
Qingyun Wu is assistant professor of Chinese and director of the Chinese Studies Center at California State University, Los Angeles. Her publications include an English translation of Wang Meng’s “Anecdotes of Minister Maimaiti: A
Uygur Man’s Black Humor,” which first appeared in the
journal Translation and then was collected in Return Trip Tango and Other Stories Abroad (1992), and Transformations of Female Rule: Chinese and English Feminist Utopias, which devotes a chapter to the study of Bai Hua’s The Remote Country of Women.
Thomas O. Beebee is associate professor of comparative
literature and German at Penn State University. His full-length translation study, Clarissa on the Continent: Translation and Seduction, was published in 1990. He has published widely on modern Western literature and theory.
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Glossary
About the Mosuo Communities
About the Author
About the Translators