Toward a New Narrative About China's Anti-Japanese War: Reading Bodily Anxiety in Ba Jin's Cold Nights

During China's second war with Japan, Chinese writers produced abundant literature. Most of their narratives served the national will to fight the Japanese by focusing on the heroic resistance of the Chinese. Ba Jin's novel Cold Nights offers an alternative narrative about wartime China that takes the theme of bodily anxiety as a vehicle to represent wartime experience. In many ways, the novel shows how ordinary Chinese people were anxious about basic survival needs, over-work, and the degradation of their physical health. Consequences were the shattering of the self, the dismantling of prewar values, and conflicts between the individual and the social environment in wartime China. Contrary to the dominant politicized wartime narratives, these anxieties offer a different narrative about the war. Ba Jin's decision to represent war indirectly ends up producing a more meaningful and universal contribution to representations of war experience.