Rewriting Exile, Remapping Empire, Re-membering Home: Hualing Nieh's Mulberry and Peach

He says he still must continue investigating my case if they decide I am an undesirable alien they must deport me, where do I want to go? I say I don't know. He says he doesn't know what's the matter with Chinese all the Chinese people he's investigated answer the same way, the Chinese are foreigners who haven't any place to be deported to, this is a difficulty he's never encountered in investigating other aliens. I ask when they will decide he says he doesn't know. He tells me to wait wait wait wai . . . .

My finger tips hurt suddenly I realise that the cigarette I'm holding is burning my fingers my shoes are splattered with mud on the table beside the bed there's a half-drunk Bloody Mary. What's happened to me. I never touched alcohol cigarettes or mud. The calendar on the wall reads 2 September I only remember 30 August when the man in dark glasses questioned me at the Police Station everything after that where I was and what I did I don't remember at all.

My god there's a huge penis drawn in red in the mirror and there are some words scrawled. Mulberry is dead. I have bloomed. I hate Mulberry.

I wipe out the obscene picture and the words whose joke is this.

It was my joke. You're dead, Mulberry. I have come to life. I've been alive all along. But now I have broken free. You don't know me, but I know you. I'm completely different from you. We are temporarily inhabiting the same body. How unfortunate. We often do the opposite things. And if we do the same thing, our reasons are different.

Hualing Nieh, Mulberry and Peach ([1976] 1998, 182-83)

Modernism, Imperialism, Immigration: Rewriting Exile in the Contexts of the Post-World War II China-Taiwan-U.S. Triangle

Winner of the 1990 American Book Award, Hualing Nieh's Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China narrates a Chinese woman's forced flight across China, Taiwan, and the United States between 1945 and 1970. This journey is set against the background of social unrest in the United States and incessant wars in Asia, including demonstrations against the Vietnam War, rising anti-Communist and xenophobic sentiments in the United States, China's battle against Japan during World War II, and the Chinese civil war followed by the divide between "two Chinas":¹ the People's Republic of China (PRC) on the mainland established by the Communist regime and the Republic of China (ROC) in Taiwan under the rule of the Nationalist government.² As the protagonist moves from one place to another to take refuge from life-threatening circumstances, she is constantly confined to closed spaces: when escaping from Japanese invasion in a boat, she is stranded in a river gorge in inland China; when fleeing the Communist takeover, she is trapped in her fiancé's house raided by refugees as the Communist Army besieges Beijing; when hiding from the police in Taipei, she is imprisoned in an attic; when dodging U.S. Immigration Service officers, she is confined in cars, a ruined water tower, and a messy apartment. Her precarious existence in these various temporary shelters is overshadowed by ever-present Chinese, Japanese, and American male violence: she is attacked by a fellow passenger on the boat during Japanese bombing; she is subjected to coerced intercourse with her husband in the house in Beijing and in the attic in Taipei. In the United States, she is sexually harassed by a stranger when hitchhiking on the freeway, interrogated by the Immigration Service officer in her own apartment, and forced to have an abortion by a Chinese professor with whom she has an affair. As she manages to escape from confinement and...