A Voice Silenced and Heard: Negotiations and Transactions Across Boundaries in Ling Shuhua's English Memoirs

Among all Chinese women writers of the 1920s and 1930s, Ling Shuhua (1900-1990) is probably one of the most frequently anthologized. However, due to a marginalization of modern Chinese women writers in the study of Chinese literature, up to now scholars have not paid sufficient attention to her writings. Aggravating the difficulty of producing a comprehensive assessment of her writing career is Ling's use of both Chinese and English in her writings, her low-profile and peripatetic lifestyle, and the antileftist political stand of her husband, Chen Yuan (1896-1970), who wrote under the pen name Xiying. Though recent years have witnessed the republication of many of her works in China, in particular her short stories, few scholars have paid attention to her 1953 English memoirs Ancient Melodies (published under the name Su Hua Ling Chen). In fact, these memoirs did not appear in China and in Chinese until 1994 when the Overseas Chinese Press in Beijing published them. It is sad and ironic that decades after she disappeared from China's literary scene, she had to rely on her identity as an overseas Chinese to secure the publication of her memoirs in her homeland.

In the English-speaking world, the past two decades have seen only a few English studies on Ling Shuhua. These include Rey Chow's 1988 essay "Virtuous Transactions: A Reading of Three Stories by Ling Shuhua" and half of a chapter in Shu-mei Shih's 2001 monograph The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937.

Chow's essay is inspiring in that it provides us with a new way of looking at modern Chinese women writers and their very act of writing. At the outset of her essay, Chow attacks commonly adopted criteria for evaluating women writers, formulated by patricentric critics. According to these critics, Chinese women writers of the 1920s and 1930s lack "the balance, the mature detachment, the finality, that make for great works of literature." Chow relentlessly repudiates gender-blind criteria like these, which require that a writer "transcend the circumstances of his or her own life into a vision that is larger and only thus meaningful" and by which Chinese women writers are predetermined to be failures.¹ In instituting these criteria, patricentric critics have substantially overlooked the powerful presence of patriarchy in China up to the first half of the twentieth century as well as the invisible ideological imprints it has left on women's psychic life. Under this patriarchal code, women are assigned the role of domesticity and self-sacrifice, which, Chow argues, should be "seen as a predominant, if not the only, paradigm under which many Chinese women's thinking operates."²

In addressing the question of gender and Ling Shuhua's fiction, Chow's essay has, on the one hand, called our attention to the (local) patriarchal milieu in which Chinese women writers of the 1920s and '30s found themselves. On the other hand, it also makes the case for examining Chinese women from other perspectives. Since China was semicolonized by Western imperialists throughout the first half of the twentieth century, to examine Ling and her writing more thoroughly and comprehensively requires that we historicize and contextualize her writing by viewing it through the lens of imperialism, colonization, and semicolonization.

From a gendered perspective, Chow examines three of Ling Shuhua's short stories illustrating Chinese women's "virtuous transactions" with patriarchy. In Chow's view, Ling's choice of ostensibly nonthreatening subjects such as women and their emotional life betrays her acceptance of a contract as a woman writer with patriarchy. However, on the other hand, through her subtle exposing and critiquing of patriarchal oppression of women in her writings, Ling breaks the binding contract, which translates into a subversion of patriarchy.

Picking up from where existing scholarship leaves off, this article focus on Ling's memoirs, both on how they came to be and on their profeminist standpoint. I contend that far from a conventionally labeled narrow-minded "boudoir writer" ("guixiu pai zuojia"), Ling was a...