Family Revolution: Marital Strife in Contemporary Chinese Literature and Visual Culture

3. Utopia or Dystopia?: The Sisterhood of Divorced Women

85 c h a p t e r t h r e e Utopia or Dystopia? The Sisterhood of Divorced Women Gender biopolitics has been reimagined in multiple ways through literary representations of divorced women’s intersubjective sisterhood. On this topic, no literary critic can dismiss Zhang Jie’s “The Ark.”1 Hailed as “touchstone fiction for feminists in the 1980s,” this work has been read as a protest against “the profound alienation from sexual life and heterosexual norms” imposed by the Cultural Revolution .2 What marks this novella’s breakthrough is an audacious fantasy of a matriarchal commune composed of three middle-aged divorced women living together in a small apartment in 1980s Beijing. A comparative reading of “The Ark” and Zhang’s earlier work “Love Must Not Be Forgotten” will aid in better understanding the literary representation of the divorced women’s utopia.3 Both pieces are connected by a central issue: What does the sisterhood mean for divorced women in renegotiating their gender identities outside of the heterosexual matrix? Particularly worth noting is the deployment of the narrative mechanism of speaking bitterness, which, at the same time, sets limits for the ambivalent homosocial structure of feelings and intersubjective sisterly solidarity in Zhang’s writings. In the essay “Dare Not to Cry Together with You—to Zhang Jie (Bugan yu ni tongku—zhi Zhang Jie), written in 1994, Chi Li, a younger woman writer, talks about her awestruck reaction to the unprecedented portrayal of divorced women in Zhang Jie’s “The Ark” when she first read the novella in 1982. Probably intended to be both a tribute to and a parody of Zhang’s groundbreaking fiction, Chi Li’s novella “Good Morning, Miss” (Xiaojie, nizao; 1998) is a Utopia or Dystopia? 86 contemporary fairy tale about the sisterhood of a group of divorced women allied against a newly rich man who commits adultery. The novella was adapted into a TV serial, Beyond Romance (Chaoyue qinggan). Chi Li then expanded the novella, using the series script as an outline, and published Good Morning, Miss as a script novel (juqing xiaoshuo) in 1999. The first 100,000 copies sold out quickly. The original novella, which has been included in various anthologies and collections of Chi’s works, is analyzed in this chapter. In contrast to Zhang Jie’s emphasis on women’s yearnings for romantic love and career success, “Good Morning, Miss” associates women’s essential identity with their reproductive power and maternal sentiments. Such an idealization of sentimental motherhood can also be found in Chi Li’s earlier works. In her 1990 story “Sunrise” (Taiyang chushi), the last installment of her well-known Life Trilogy, motherhood becomes the only sacred ideal that provides salvation in an increasingly commercialized world. In such a mercantile society, a good mother should make every possible emotional and financial investment so that her only child can climb the evolutionary ladder and grow up with “a first-class body and a first-class brain,” which will enable him or her to survive in the intensely competitive environment of post-revolutionary China.4 All the conflicts and problems, trials and tribulations of history depicted in Chi Li’s Life Trilogy are resolved not through state intervention or social movements but by an idealized maternal figure who gives birth to the future generation within a modern nuclear family. Although recent scholarship in Chinese literature and history has paid increasing attention to the study of sisterhood,5 few studies show any critical concern for the alliance of divorced women within the larger sociocultural context of post-revolutionary China. This chapter expands the critical scope of intersubjective sisterhood by drawing attention to this marginalized social group and discovers new meaning in the female-female bond, a bond that opens up new possibilities of resistance against patriarchal hegemony and heterosexual marriage. A series of important questions will be addressed: How do women’s divorce narratives wrestle with the misogynist rhetoric in male writers’ divorce narratives? How does the imagination of a utopian sisterhood of divorced women negotiate with the socialist legacy of women’s liberation and the emerging discourse of domestic interiority ? What kind of spatiotemporal order and gendered biopolitics are established, stretched, and contested in this historical process? Utopia or Dystopia? 87 “love must not be forgotten” Born in Beijing in 1937 and raised by a single mother, Zhang Jie is a highly controversial Chinese woman writer...