Writing Lives in China: the Case of Yang Jiang A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY ...

364 Pages·2012·18.49 MB·English

by  Jesse Field

Writing Lives in China: the Case of Yang Jiang

A DISSERTATION
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
BY

Jesse L. Field

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Paul Rouzer

June, 2012
© Jesse Field 2012
i
Acknowledgements

My advisor, Paul Rouzer, introduced me toT an yi lu (On the art of poetry, 1946) and
Guan zhui bian (Chapters on pipe and awl, 1978) by Qian Zhongshu (1910-1998). I was
fascinated, puzzled and intimidated by these strange and difficult texts. When I looked
up Qian Zhongshu, I found that his wife Yang Jiang (b. 1911) had penned a memoir
called Women sa (We three, 2003), about Qian’s death and the life he, she and their
daughter Qian Yuan (1937-1995) had had together. I read the text and was deeply
moved. Moreover, I was struck that Yang Jiang’s writing was a kind of contemporary
manifestation of classical Chinese poetry. I decided to take a close rlook.

Thanks to Ann Waltner, Wang Liping, and my classmates in the 2006-7 graduate
seminar in Chinese history for discussions and encouragement to begin this project. My
first paper on Yang Jiang received invaluable feedback from participants in the 2070
“Writing Lives in China” workshop at the University of Sheffield, especially Margaretta
Jolly and Wu Pei-yi. A grant from the CLA Graduate Research Partnership Program
(GRPP) in the summer of that year helped me translateW e Three.

Parts of this dissertation underwent discussion at meetings of the Association for Asian
Studies in 2009 and 2011 and, perhaps even more fruitfully, at the Midwest and
Southwest Regional conferences for Asian Studies in 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011.
Thanks to Sherry Mou, Yang Xin, Shannon Canella, Steven Day, Jeffrey Kinkley,
Charles Laughlin, and Claire Conceison for their gracious friendship and helpful
feedback on work in this period. Charles also organized the 2009 meeting of the
Association of Chinese and Comparative Literaut re (ACCL) in Beijing, where I spoke
on Yang Jiang in Chinese and was soundly criticized by Chen Xiaomei. I feel a deep
sense of gratitude for that experience, too .

A major boost to this project came in the form of the workshop “Celebrating 100 Years
of Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang,” hosted at the University of British Columbia and
organized by Christopher Rea. My work benefited enormously from the community,
structure and support of that Vancouver gathering, which included Chris Rea, Wendy
Larson, Theodor Huters, Alex Huang, John Weinstein, Amy Dooling, Yaohua Shi,
Judith Amory, Ronald Egan, Ji Jin, Wang Yugen, Tiziana Lioi, Carlos Rojas, Zhang
Enhua, and Wang Yao.

As a direct result of the workshop, my translations of Yang Jiang’s works appeared in
the winter 2011 issue of Renditions. The rigorous and detailed editing of Christopher
Rea, Theodore Huters, Sheldon Ip and other staff members ofR enditions was truly a
revelation. Thanks so much to Chris, Ted andR enditions for including me in their
pages.

The University of Minnesota department of Asian Languages and Literatures has been a
gracious and patient institutional home. With their support, I created the course
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“Writing Lives in China” and taught it twice, in 2009 and in 2010. I owe a debt of
thanks to the students of this class. Their discussions and writing about Yang Jiang’s
Gan xiao liu ji (Six Records of a Cadre School, 1981) helped shape the readings in
these pages.

In 2011-12, I had the opportunity to teach courses at the University of Minnesota,
Duluth, thanks to a UMN Pre-Doctoral Diversity Fellowship awarded by the Graduate
School Diversity Office. The support of this office, especially supervision and
mentorship from Noro Andriamanalina, was of crucial importance in bringing this
project to a close. In Duluth, I found a welcome home in the UMD department of
English, and weekly meetings Prof. Krista Twu provided excellent advice for writing,
teaching, and pursuing a career in the field of higher education. I shared my office with
three classmates, and we formed a little community of dissertation writers who propped
each other up, discussed our writing and ideas, and made each other some very
impressive gourmet meals. Thanks so much, George Hoagland, Jessica Nammakal, and
Eli Meyerhoff!

Over the course of the busy spring of 2012, members of my committee read the draft
chapters of this dissertation and provided me with detailed suggestions for
improvement. Thanks very much to Paul Rouzer, Ann Waltner, Jason McGrath, and
Simona Sawhney for their time and patience.
iii

To Carol Gene Field (1933-2010)
iv
Abstract
This dissertation is about the writer Yang Jiang 杨绛 (b. 1911). It opens up new
intellectual territory by bringing together many forms of Chinese writing to describe the
common influence of xie renwu or ‘writing the person.’
Though best-known for Gan xiao liu ji (Six records of a cadre school), Yang Jiang’s
memoir of experiences in a labor camp for intellectuals during China’s Cultural Revolution
(1966-1976), Yang Jiang’s career as a whole testifies to the living value of story and
portraiture manifested in plays, personal essays, literary criticism, translation, short stories,
novels and biographical literature. Moreover, Yang Jiang’s readership runs the gamut from
enthusiastic welcome, in 1940s Shanghai, to rejection and silencing in the 1950s and 60s,
and rising sharply upward again to iconic status in the 1990s and 2000s. Applying the terms
and propositions of the interdisciplinary study of life writing, I identify the unity of Yang
Jiang’s writing in its focus on the person, and in particular the constant return to discourses
of self, identity, subjectivity and social value entwined around traditional Confucian terms
of personhood – especially qing, the sublime connection between persons based on feeling.
Critics inside China call Yang Jiang one of the best prose stylists of her time; general
readers call her life story inspirational; in 2011, newspaper reports identify in Yang Jiang
the moral and aesthetic qualities most recommended for China today. And yet, her work has
received scant attention from scholars outside of China. My dissertation begins the project
of filling in this lacuna through historical contextualization and close readings centered on
her post-Cultural Revolution writing. The aesthetic qualities of Chinese rhetoric, the
classical and romantic qualities of Yang Jiang’s prose, and the deeper political and social
implications of her writing since the late 1970s are major topics of the chapters.
Throughout, I focus on gender and class, arguing that Yang Jiang deploys traditional
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exemplary life writing (the image of the “good wife and model mother,” for example) to
build up a discourse of personhood that contains a renewed version of traditional Chinese
cultural values.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................ i
Abstract.........................................................................................................................iv
Table of Contents ............................................................................................................ vi
List of Figures................................................................................................................. vii
Chapter One: Yang Jiang and Literary Affect.................................................................. 1
Chapter Two: The Literary Criticism of Yang Jiang...................................................... 41
Chapter Three: “Reflections in Reverse,” Yang Jiang’s Short Fiction, 1979-1981....... 79
Chapter Four: Six Records of a Cadre School.............................................................. 111
Chapter Five: Baptism and the return of Enlightenment-Confucian Structure of Feeling
...................................................................................................................................... 147
Chapter Six: “About to Drink the Tea”: Yang Jiang’s Essays, 1981-1991.................. 178
Chapter Seven: “All Alone, I Think Back on We Three”: Yang Jiang’s New Intimate
Public............................................................................................................................ 208
Conclusion.................................................................................................................... 240
Appendix I: “On Qian Zhongshu and Fortress Besieged”........................................... 244
Appendix II: We Three, Parts I and II .......................................................................... 288
Appendix III: Arriving at the Margins of Life: Answering My Own Questions: Excerpt
...................................................................................................................................... 336
Bibliography ................................................................................................................. 344
vii
List of Figures
Figure 1: Idealized intimacy between peasants and intellectuals undermined inS ix... 123
Figure 2: A properly managed household, here illustrating opportunities fors hen jiao 身
教 (“teaching of the self”), from the Jiating quanbao shu (Household
encyclopedia)..................................................................................................... 192
Figure 3: Interior of the Qian Zhongshu Historic Home, a museum operated by the
Wuxi Municipal Government............................................................................. 213
Figure 4: "I saw Mister Zou standing beside the street hawker quickly eating
shajiaomai." "I start school at Qimeng," illustration by Gao Mang.....................217
Figure 5: Yang Jiang on the website of theP eople's Daily......................................... 229
Figure 6: Cover slip of the Taiwan edition ofL istening to Yang Jiang Speak of the Past
...........................................................................................................................233
Figure 7: Zhang Xiaogang, Bloodlines: Big Family, 2003 series ................................237
Figure 8: Cover photo used for We Three (ca. 1946)..................................................238
1

Chapter One: Yang Jiang and Literary Affect

Personality and Prose Style: The Case of Yang Jiang
Yang Jiang (b. 1911) is likely the only Republican-era writer to restart her career
in the twenty-first century. “As an intellectual of the old school (lao pai zhishifenzi),”
reads the back cover of the Taiwanese edition of her 2003 memoir, “her words are
imbued with inner reserve and decorum (jiezhi); between the lines there is an air of
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intimacy and sorrow that leaves the reader visibly moved.” The connection between
“inner reserve” and “intimacy,” and the expression of “sorrow” with “temperance,”
calls to mind traditional Chinese poetics, with its moral connection between poetry and
personality. The habit of pronouncing moral authority upon Yang Jiang by the evidence
of her prose was already established by 1980 when, reviewing the collection of short
fiction Yang Jiang had written and published following the end of the Cultural
Revolution (1966-76), critic Tian Huilian wrote that the collection’s “overall style
demonstrated a tone that was gentle, even and refined. This is precisely what it means to
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say that the writing (wen) is like the person (ren).” The literariness of Yang Jiang’s
work is bound up in its representation of the personal.
This dissertation examines the literary and the personal in the criticism, fiction,
memoir and essays of Yang Jiang. Throughout, I refer to a sense of the personal as
proposed by Wang Lingzhen: “a material site where diverse historical forces – political,

1
Yang Jiang 杨绛, Women sa 我们仨 [We Three] (Taipei: Reading Times Press, 2003).
2
Tian Huilan, “Jiu Zhongguo dushi yijiao de sumiao: Yang Jiang Dao ying ji man ping 旧中国都市一角
的素描-杨绛《倒影集》满评 [Perspective sketches of old Chinese cities: A critical essay on Yang
Jiang’s Reflections in Reverse],” in Yanjiu ziliao ji, ed. Tian Huilan 田蕙兰, Ma Guangsu 马光裕, and
Chen Keyu 陈轲玉 (Wuhan: Huazhong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1997), 658.