Translator, Traitor; Translator, Mourner (or, Dreaming of Intercultural Equivalence)

[A] process of systematic fragmentation . . . can . . . be seen in the disciplinary carve-up of the indigenous world: bones, mummies and skulls to the museums, artwork to private collectors, languages to linguistics, “customs” to anthropologists, beliefs and behaviours to psychologists. To discover how fragmented this process was one needs only to stand in a museum, a library, a bookshop, and ask where indigenous peoples are located. Fragmentation is not a phenomenon of postmodernism as many might claim. For indigenous peoples fragmentation has been the consequence of imperialism.

—Linda Tuhiwai Smith, “Imperialism, History, Writing, and Theory”¹

Since 1900 non-Western objects have generally been classified as either primitive art or ethnographic specimens.

—James Clifford,The Predicament of Culture²

Transacting Untimely Native Remains

Of the numerous memorable scenes in early twentieth-century Chinese literature, one holds a special tenacity for me, with a resonance that does not seem to diminish with the passage of time. Is it a coincidence that it happens to be a scene of mourning? This essay will be an attempt at probing this question.

Master Gao, the patriarch in Ba Jin’s classic Jia (Family, 1931), has just died.³ In keeping with age-old mourning rituals, the Gao family hosts an elaborate funeral, with a group of female mourners present at the funeral parlor, collectively performing the customary mournful wailing whenever guests arrive to pay respects to the dead. In a novel of substantial length, such a narrative detail seems rather insignificant,⁴ but what makes it remarkable is the manner in which it is described:

The women behind the curtains were having a hard time. Since guests kept arriving, the number of times they had to wail kept increasing too. At this point, wailing had turned into an art; it had, moreover, the function of socializing with guests. For instance, if, while the women were chatting or eating, the musicians started playing [to signal the arrival of guests], they would have to burst into a loud cry instantaneously—and the more sorrowfully, the better, of course. But most of the time they were simply shrieking as there were no tears. There had also been farces, as when signals of guests arriving and departing were confused. Mishearing “guests departing” for “guest arriving,” the women would wail for a long time only to discover that it was unnecessary; or else, not knowing that guests had come, they remained utterly quiet until the master of ceremony prompted them, whereupon they would all of a sudden explode into a wailing noise. (327; my rough translation)

Inserted in the midst of a family saga that was based on autobiographical elements and that has been viewed, in the decades since it was first published, as an allegory of China’s difficult transition into modernity (replete with melodramatic tensions and conflicts among different generations in the Gao family), this tonally derisive portrayal of mourning is, to say the least, evocative. At the simple level of the plot, the incident signals the much longed-for passing of an older era: with the death of the beloved but intransigent patriarch, who has so dominated the entire clan, including the life choices of its youngest members, there can now, perhaps, be hope for a different kind of future. This gradual drift of the story from a close-knit community mired in a privileged semifeudal past (the old China) toward what may be deemed an enlightened collective way of life—one that may not be immediately accessible but is at least constitutive of an imagining of the decades ahead—indeed characterizes Ba Jin’s entire narrative action. In this vein, the gesture of taking leave of the family (whether ideologically or physically), as personified by two of Master Gao’s grandchildren, Juemin and Juehui, ultimately brings the narrative to a meaningful close. In retrospect, we may say that Ba Jin’s fictional plot stands in effect as a political wish, a will toward a realm of potentiality that was, at the time of the novel’s writing, equated with modernization and its progressive rationality (or requisite disenchantment).

Against this idealistically plotted...