Red Is not the Only Color: Contemporary Chinese Fiction on Love and Sex between Women, Collected Stories (review)

In Red Is not the Only Color: Contemporary Chinese Fiction on Love and Sex between Women, Collected Stories, Patricia Sieber has edited a timely and readable translation volume that helps readers to situate the rise of same-sex and lesbian discourses in the Chinese-speaking world. To the editor, "red" has been politically and socially associated with two grand narratives in China, one dealing with political revolution and the other with women's roles. While "tapping into the two dominant connotations of red," the editor "seeks to tease out what's located between the interstices of such epic ... rhetoric" (p. 17) and to explore "the inter-subjective space" among women. Being the first English-language anthology of its kind, this lucidly translated collection opens a window for its readers to get a glimpse of a rarely observed emotional world inhabited by women with a same-sex affective orientation. It includes short stories written by eight Chinese women writers from different parts of the Chinese-speaking world. In putting together this volume, Sieber engages with a significant project in expanding and enriching our understanding of contemporary Chinese novels and an emerging generation of women writers.

The stories included are (in the order in which they appear): from Hong Kong, Wong Bikwan's "She's a Young Woman and So Am I" ("Ta shi nüzi, wo ye shi nüzi") (1994); from mainland China, Chen Ran's "Breaking Open" ("Pokai") (1995), Zhang Mei's "A Record" ("Jilu") (1995), and Wang Anyi's "Brothers" ("Dixiongmen") (1989); from Taiwan, Liang Hanyi's "Lips" ("Chun") (1986), Hong Ling's "Fever" ("Fashao") (1995), Chen Xue's "In Search of the Lost Wings of the Angels" ("Xunzhao tianshi yishi de chibang") (1995), and He An's "Andante" ("Ruge de xingban") (unpublished manuscript). To Sieber, these stories deal with issues ranging from "local and global commercialization, utopian social aspirations, the problems and possibilities of historical memory, [and] the lure of sexual desire" to "the question of self-realization." They not only "use same-sex intimacy to explore a variety of contemporary issues," but also "explore alternatives to the familiar plot of female doom and destruction" (p. 18). The editor's selection of stories is defined, and to certain extent limited, by her agenda of avoiding stories "playing up violence and suffering" (p. 18): While other anthologies of Chinese fiction may focus on aesthetic experimentation" (p. 28), "I selected stories that explore alternatives to the familiar plot of female doom and destruction, while at the same time avoiding a programmatic cheerfulness" (p. 18). If the editor's goal is to provide texts appropriate for the exploration of "the forms of social contestation that challenge both dominant Chinese and Western conceptions of gender, sexuality, and the political" (p. 28), she may have also sacrificed several important texts that are, in my view, instrumental to the exploration of the formation of a self-identifying subculture, an essential part of the contemporary Chinese urban culture that this anthology grew out of, and speaks to. Among them, for example, are the works of Taiwan women writer Qiu Miaojin.

Sieber's lucid Introduction, on the other hand, helps us to place the portrayal of a range of different kinds of intimacy between Chinese women in the larger context of the sociopolitical changes in contemporary China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. In the Introduction, she lays out a list of ambitious goals for her book. Seeking "to get out from under the heroics of the grand narratives" (p. 17), namely those that speak of the political and the personal or of individual relationships and revolution, Sieber invites readers "to consider ... the transnational forces of flux that conspire to pull the proverbial rug out from under everyone's political, social, and sexual certainties" (p. 19). Therefore...