Another reason I had the confidence to serve as chief editor of An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Literature was also a result of my two trips to the States. When I looked through the stacks at the large libraries at the University of Michigan and Indiana University, I was unable to find a single work of real literature from mainland China since 1949. Both universities had outstanding history departments, and although some scholars had positive things to say about China’s “liberation,” when it came to literature written since the founding of the PRC, most would point to shelves of propaganda works such as Learn from Lei Feng, Hao Ran’s The Golden Road, Ding Ling’s The Sun Shines on the Sanggan River, and Lao She’s Dragon Beard Ditch, among others, and say, “Although Red China is closed behind the iron curtain, their ruthless political struggles and the sufferings of the people are known to all. But can we purvey this sort of propaganda in the classroom? How can we explain this nonsense to American students?” Then they would change the topic and ask me, “Does Taiwan have literature?”
Looking at the empty shelves set aside for modern Chinese writing, I thought to myself, Perhaps after I return to Taiwan, I’ll have the opportunity to say something concrete for Taiwan literature. With this long-standing idea, I undertook the task of seeing that Taiwan literature was translated into English.
That age saw a common search for identity, a time when we all seemed to be making our way through the fog, trying to define what was ours. The young writers and readers did not have a strong sense of provincial identity or separateness, and everyone grew up together reading the same textbooks. Memory of the Japanese occupation gradually faded; connections to mainland China and the sense of loss were laid aside, and people were able to calmly discuss the word “exile.” While editing An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Literature, I believed we had found common ground. Since the anthology was being published by the National Institute of Compilation and Translation, the selections had to be representative of all the people and the selection process had to be fair, with no discrimination. Of the five members in our small group, He Xin and Yu Kwang-chung had been among the earliest to take part in literary activities in Taiwan and had extensive materials upon which to draw, and since returning to Taipei, I had read extensively of the most important works. After I started teaching Advanced English, I made frequent trips to the bookstores, where I acquired the newest titles and was able to keep up to date on the latest research on important writers, the way I had done when I was studying in the States. Beginning then, my small study gradually filled with works of Taiwan literature. For example, my copy of Huang Chunming’s Gong with an inscription from the author sat next to my copy of Beowulf. My first-edition copies of Sima Zhongyuan’s Wasteland and Dawn Train, Zhu Xining’s Daybreak, and Bai Xiangyong’s Taipei People sat on the shelves with the copies of Shelley and Keats that I had brought from Shanghai. I particularly enjoyed the work of the young writer Xiao Sa, whose fiction I felt could stand with the work of American writers like Sherwood Anderson and Bernard Malamud. Moving back and forth between two languages was a great joy for me and helped me in terms of vision and arrangement when it came to writing literary criticism.
LITERATURE FROM BOTH SIDES OF THE STRAIT: THE SHOCK OF THE FIRST ENCOUNTER
Jeffrey Kinkley invited me to participate in a seminar on modern Chinese literature at St. John’s University in New York. It was my first encounter with writers from mainland China, and of their three or four representatives, I knew of Professor Le Daiyun of Beijing University and the well-known writer Wang Meng.
Since editing the anthology, I had attended a number of large literary conferences around the world, but it was at this impressive gathering at St. John’s University that I first saw how political snobbery was transferred to literary snobbery. It was also the first time I saw the devastating effects of the Cultural Revolution, which compelled me to consider the position and the name of “Taiwan literature” from a macro perspective.
It really was a grand meeting! Everyone was very excited and filled with curiosity; all eyes and ears were fixed on the writers from behind the iron curtain in this, their first appearance in the West. At lunch, I was assigned to the same table with them in what was probably a symbol of cross-strait exchange. And I seemed to be the least possessed of a combative spirit. Upon first meeting the people from the other side of the strait, I didn’t really know how to proceed. Knowing that I was from northeast China, they said, “Come back to the motherland for a look!” Everyone laughed foolishly. C. T. Hsia, who was in high spirits, said, “In America, you should see as much as you can!”
After lunch we resumed the meeting. While we were listening to a Chinese writer give a report on the current literary scene in China, there was a huge commotion at the door and in ran a tall and handsome young Chinese man. He ran directly at the Chinese writer, shouting: “How can you come and speak for that tyrannical government here?” Following that, he took control of the podium and shouted about the cruelty of the Cultural Revolution. It was with great difficulty that the organizing teachers and students were able to remove him. Even at the door, he continued to swear before being dragged away. Only after everyone had calmed down did we learn that the young man was none other than Liang Heng, the author of the Western best-seller Son of the Revolution, which exposed the tragedy of the Cultural Revolution. He had married the writer Judith Shapiro and had been given political asylum in the United States, where he wrote his book in English and had it published. Son of the Revolution narrates the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution, showing the West how China had become a living hell. Readers shuddered at the cold-blooded cruelty of the Red Guards. When reading it, I asked myself with sadness and indignity: Is this the motherland I can never forget?
By the time the disrupter left, the atmosphere of the meeting had entirely changed, the pure excitement and curiosity at the beginning had been ruined. The various positions in the talks and the superficially calm responses had disappeared. Regardless of efforts to maintain order on the podium, most of the members of the audience were whispering about the young man who had disrupted the proceedings and his complaints. Everyone’s curiosity about the mainland representative who now looked embarrassed became more complicated. At the time, nearly all of the new postwar generation of sinologists, who studied modern Chinese literature, were present. What were they thinking? But I, who was seeing writers from behind the iron curtain for the first time since I left mainland China thirty years earlier, felt agitated, as if I were watching history unfold and not reality mediated through film or fiction. It was sad indeed.
I remained in New York for several days after the meeting. One evening Lin Xinqin, who had been a student of mine at NTU and now worked as a reporter for The China Times, invited me to dinner. There were six guests, including the author of Son of the Revolution and his wife. After dinner, they invited me to their small apartment, where we talked late into the night. They became increasingly more excited as they spoke, describing things that were not found in books about the unspeakable betrayal and cruelty of some people toward their fellow human beings, which was more than shocking to hear. What was it that had turned this twenty-something Red Guard away from the tide of blood and cruelty and toward a more human shore to criticize the very violence he had participated in? How had several generations of young people—from the student movement to the Cultural Revolution—been hoodwinked into believing that a new China could only be built from turmoil and destruction? If their hearts were not made of wood, then they must be deeply scarred. How could they ever hope to return to a normal life? When they grew up and ruled China, what kind of country would it be?
Walking on the streets of New York on a summer night was like being in a different world! I could clearly remember when I was in my twenties, lying in my garret dorm room at Wuhan University looking up at the star-filled sky, listening to the flowing water at the confluence of three rivers, and crying because Elder Sister Hou had said I had no soul, simply because I
did not want to go to attend the reading group with her and read those Russian books about class conflict and sing those juvenile songs: “The East Is Red,” “The East Has Produced a Mao Zedong.” … I remembered the narrow streets of Leshan and the troop of student demonstrators, their faces twisted, shouting for revenge. If I had not gone to Taiwan in 1947 and instead stayed in mainland China, what might have become of me?
In the West in those days, two other books that gave a shocking picture of the Cultural Revolution were Chinese Shadows by Simon Leys and From the Center of the Earth by Richard Bernstein. It wasn’t until many years later that “scar literature” from mainland China was published in Taiwan.
REENCOUNTERING THE LITERATURE OF GREATER CHINA
Later I ran into Wang Meng five more times at international conferences and had a number of discussions with him. Although the literary arena in China is as vast as the land, Wang Meng was a prominent and representative writer. He not only possessed natural talent but also was perceptive and intelligent, which allowed him to survive such turmoil.
The second time I met him was in Berlin in 1985, but I was able to talk with him only many years later when we both served as fiction judges for the World Young Chinese Writers Award at the Chinese University in Hong Kong. He was invited to Taiwan in 1993 when the United Daily News hosted a conference titled “Chinese Literature: The Last Forty Years,” which was organized by David Der-wei Wang, William Tay, and me. He led a group of mainland writers for a first visit to Taiwan; another sixty people were invited from abroad, along with more than a hundred people from Taiwan. David Wang and I edited the conference proceedings, which were later translated into English and published as Chinese Literature in the Second Half of a Modern Century: A Critical Survey to provide a comprehensive commentary on Chinese fiction in the second half of the twentieth century. Indiana University published a third edition of C. T. Hsia’s History of Modern Chinese Fiction in 1993 and acquired our book as well, printing them simultaneously.
While in Taipei, Wang Meng invited a number of Taiwan writers to go to mainland China. In 1995, the Chinese Writers Association and the United Daily News Cultural Foundation arranged for fourteen writers whom I invited to attend a conference in Shandong organized by Wang Meng titled “Man and Nature.” It was an unprecedented conference in terms of size. Among the participants from Taiwan were Liu Kexiang, Hu Taili, Wang Wenxing, Li Fengmao, Chen Xinyuan, Li Mingde, Walis Nogan, Jin Hengbiao, and Yang Nanjun, all of whom are nature writers. Their papers were solid and of an international caliber, of which I was quite proud.
There were more than fifty mainland writers, the work of many of whom I had read. While changing planes in Beijing for Yantai, Wang Meng introduced me to some important writers, including the highly respected Zhang Xianliang, who, as uncontrollably as the fan of a singer, said, “Oh, I found your Greening Tree so moving!” I remember several of the other writers had surprised smiles on their faces. Only later did I gradually come to realize that the writers on either side of the strait had quite different ideas about works dealing with the sufferings of the Cultural Revolution, such as Greening Tree. Even though everyone in Taiwan knew about Ah Cheng, the author of the stories “King of Chess,” “King of Trees,” and “King of Children,” he was not necessarily held in the same high esteem by his peers. Whenever politics is involved, the distance between people grows.
At events like the opening ceremony and the many panels, we had hopes of sincerely sharing our views on literature. During the painful day we spent together at the Sino-Japanese War Memorial, Zhang Xianliang and I, as well as several other writers, had some deep discussions about the lot of the Chinese people over the last one hundred years. We took a small motorboat and made a slow trip around Bohai Bay where the huge Qing fleet had been defeated by the Japanese. The water was smooth and deep blue, and white clouds floated in the sky. Weihaiwei, which was once a national shame, had been changed to Weihai City and had been chosen as the cleanest city in China. It was a forward-looking, prosperous place with many plans for the future. We had several clear days and nights in a row, and those of us from Taiwan strolled by the sea every evening. Walking by the wave-lapped shore, we could see the skeletons of sunken ships from a hundred years ago. The beauty of the ocean was enough to make a person sigh and regret not being able to pack up the moon and take it home. A hundred years earlier, that moon had witnessed Taiwan being ceded to Japan.
A hundred years later, I found myself, an insignificant human being, standing by Bohai Bay looking north toward Dalian on the Liaodong Peninsula. If I crossed by steamship and took a train, I could be in Tieling, my old home, in a few hours. But all I could do was stand there foolishly for a moment and “gazing sadly, a thousand years, shedding a few tears,” for I’d be on the plane home via Hong Kong the following day. I had been in Taiwan for fifty years, married, had children, and had a career, but I was still a “mainlander,” and like the “Flying Dutchman,” I could never go home. I could just stand by the waves looking toward a land to which I could not return.
In Taipei in the late 1980s, publishing houses such as Xindi, Hongfan, and Yuanliu published the works of many mainland authors such as Ah Cheng, Wang Anyi, Mo Yan, Yu Hua, Su Tong, and Zhang Xianliang, among others. All of these authors attended conferences, large and small, in Taiwan. And although we made friends with whom we could converse, we were clearly aware that “our” road and “theirs” were different. Truly, the wounds could not be entirely forgotten, as E. M. Forster wrote at the end of Passage to India, “No, not yet.… No, not there.”
BERLIN KULTUR
“Going to Berlin” was something I must have longed for in a previous life.
When I was born, my father was studying in Berlin. In the ice-cold month of February at home, Berlin must have seemed like a place of dreams on the other side of the world. I spent nearly all of spring 1985 walking around the new Berlin, and I often thought of my mother’s old dream of sixty years before as having been revived and how today that weak daughter of hers, who had not seen her father, was now in the city as a guest professor.
Six months earlier, I had received a call from Director Hua Yan of the Ministry of Science and Technology. He said that the Free University in Berlin was searching for a professor to teach Taiwan literature and that he wanted to recommend me, and asked if that was okay. Holding the phone, what could I say? I could scarcely believe my ears, an invitation relayed from so far away to go to Berlin, where my father had been a lifetime before.
I arrived in Berlin in early April. All the trees were still leafless, but occasionally a clump of yellow flowers welcoming spring was seen. Guo Hengyu, who met me at the airport, took me to the university dorm and showed me how to get from there to the university by bus. I lived on Thielallee, which has a delightful sound, so I never got lost. The following day, I took the U-Bahn to the university and met the students in the department.
Humboldt University of Berlin was situated in East Berlin and was forced to follow the Soviet line. Three years later, most of the students and teachers met in West Berlin and decided to set up a new academic institution, and so in 1948 in the American sector, with the assistance of the Americans, the Free University was established. On the sixtieth anniversary of the founding in 2008, it had become the ninth of Germany’s premier universities, with more than thirty-one thousand students.
Two individuals were critical in establishing a regular course on Taiwan literature at the school. One was Dr. Dieter Heckelmann, who, in the 1970s, was a visiting professor of law at NTU for two years. He came with his wife and daughter and lived in faculty housing. A number of outstanding NTU professors had also gone to Berlin as visiting faculty. While in Berlin, I was frequently his guest; he often returned to Taiwan and got together with his old friends there, and he often went hiking in places outside Taipei such as Dadu Mountain. After German reunification, he served as head of domestic affairs for Berlin. The other was Professor Guo Hengyu, who was in charge of the Chin
a Research Institute. He was from Shandong and had come to Berlin from Tokyo University in 1960. He earned a Ph.D. in history from the Free University and stayed on to teach afterward. In 1990, he came to NTU as a visiting professor and taught German history for one year.
The China Research Institute of the Free University is housed in a famous five-floor mansion, which is bright and spacious and over a hundred years old. Bravely I set off from the spring flowers on Thielallee for the U-Bahn stop and from there to 42 Podbielskillee, where I stepped through a plain-looking gate and entered a different world.
The Great Flowing River Page 42