Book review: Selected Writings of Ding Ling (1904-1986). Reviewed by Susan Brownmiller (1989)
I MYSELF AM A WOMAN
Selected Writings of Ding Ling.
Edited by Tani E. Barlow with Gary J. Bjorge
Reviewed by Susan Brownmiller
(Scroll down for a brief historical account of Ding Lings' experience as a writer in 1940's Yenan)
A model of the modern
emancipated woman in prerevolutionary Shanghai, and an author of scandalous
romantic fiction, the Chinese writer Ding Ling joined the Communists in Yanan
in the 1930's and edited the literary columns of Liberation Daily, the party
newspaper. At a critical juncture in party affairs, she allied herself with Mao
Zedong's famous dictum that all art must hasten the revolution. Despite her
efforts at political rectitude, she was hounded, exiled, and periodically
imprisoned from the late 1950's onward.
''I Myself Am a
Woman,'' augmented by a long interpretive essay by Tani E. Barlow, an assistant
professor of history at the University of Missouri, is the most comprehensive
selection of Ding Ling's work yet published in America. We now can ponder at
close range the literary progression of a tempestuous rebel caught up in a
revolution she believed to be necessary and good, who willingly sacrificed her
ironic detachment and subtlest perceptions to the Maoist principle of ''serving
the people.''
It is easy to see why
the audacious stories from the 1920's established Ding Ling's literary
reputation.
In ''A Woman and a
Man'' (1928) the newly married, bored and provocative Wendy (she has dropped
her Chinese name) arranges an assignation with Ouwai Ou, a pretentious,
dissipated poet who has given himself a Japanese nom de plume. Ouwai Ou, alas,
finds easier sexual satisfaction with Aijin, a back-alley prostitute who is
grateful for his money. Her chastity, if not her feelings of sexual
desirability, intact, Wendy returns to her husband armed with the small crumb
of insight that Ouwai Ou is ''afraid of me! Afraid of me!''
This delightful piece
of fiction, which skewers the superficial bourgeois-intellectual circle that
Ding Ling had come to detest, mixes a fine sense of place and a minute
dissection of her characters' inner feelings with her inimitable signature from
that era: a frisky, satirical poke at the double standard. The author of ''A
Woman and a Man'' could be a spiritual sister to Jean Rhys.
In the winter of 1930,
the father of Ding Ling's child and 23 other Communist activists and writers were
executed by Chiang Kai-shek. Her response was swift and irrevocable: she joined
the revolutionary struggle. ''Net of Law'' (1932)
shows the effects of her Marxist transformation. The condition of woman is
still close to her heart as she attempts to enter the world of China's
proletariat. Alcoholism, wife beating, even murder, are rife in the slums of
Hankou, a factory town, but the enemy is plainly the viperish capitalist
system. An opaque veil hangs over the inner life of her characters; she prefers
to show that the masses are in motion.
''When I Was in Xia
Village'' (1941) demonstrates the transmogrification of Ding Ling, now a high
Party functionary, into Maxim Gorky. Zhenzhen, a poor peasant raped by the
Japanese, has contracted a venereal disease. When she returns to her backward
village, she is ostracized by the elders. But there is hope for Zhenzhen: the
Communist Party arranges for her to go to Yanan for treatment.
Innocuous on the face
of it, this story was apparently a factor in Ding Ling's subsequent trouble.
Ms. Barlow says that it ''upset literary policy enforcers because it reverted
back to Ding Ling's earlier preoccupation with sex and justice. It also placed
a woman seeking social redress at the center of the plot.'' I would offer a
slightly different emphasis. More likely, Ding Ling's specific ideological
heresy lay in placing an individual's social redress at the plot's center; in
just such hairsplitting distinctions a generation of Chinese writers was
destroyed.
In any event, the
details of Ding Ling's fall from grace are still murky. Her class background,
stormy personal life and high visibility were sufficient grounds for suspicion.
A victim of the 1957 antirightist campaign, she was exiled to Manchuria, where
she managed to continue writing under the patronage of some old friends in high
places. She and thousands of other intellectuals fell into the hands of the Red
Guards in 1966. Ding Ling underwent the ritual humiliations of the Great
Cultural Revolution - the dunce cap, the public confession - and spent most of
the next decade in solitary confinement. She was rehabilitated in 1978 under
the aegis of Deng Xiaoping.
''Du Wanxiang,'' the
final story in this collection, dated 1978 but written more than 10 years
earlier, is a stolid parable about the hardships of a poor, industrious peasant
with minimal skills (actually they are the feminine skills of cooking and
cleaning) who triumphs in her desire to serve the people in a development
outpost. The last lines read, after the fashion of the day, ''Du Wanxiang is
our frontline soldier. We must learn from her. We must go forward with her.''
Officially restored to
a position of eminence, Ding Ling was granted a trip to the United States in
1981, where she visited the University of Iowa's writing program and met with
Arthur Miller. A new generation of Chinese writers, impatient for change and
disappointed by her continued defense of literary censorship, took to calling
her Old Shameful. She died a natural death in 1985.
Ms. Barlow's valuable
though overly academic introductory essay proposes that Ding Ling's early
feminist ideas were imported from the West, and thus were inevitably doomed in
the larger context and priorities of the 1949 revolution. But most liberation
theories - Marxist, feminist, anarchist, democratic - were imported from
elsewhere to feudal, Mandarin China. The forcible suppression of the student
rebellion this past June reminds us that feminism was not the only idea that
lost out.
Extract from Rana
Mitter, Forgotten Ally_China s World War II 1937-1945; chapter 15
Mao’s declaration of
the Rectification Campaign in Yan’an in 1942 manifested his wish to ‘demonstrate
his dominance over Wang Ming and the other Communist leaders who had spent time
in Moscow (known as the “Twenty-eight Bolsheviks”). But there was a wider
target too: the individualism and lack of discipline exhibited by so many of
the party’s prominent intellectuals. The romantic era of joining the
underground and running off to Yan’an in protest against China’s ills was over.
Instead, party membership meant building a machine to rule China.
Among the prominent
intellectuals who took issue with Mao’s declaration was Ding Ling, the writer
whose frank short story “The Diary of Miss Sophie” had caused a literary
sensation in 1920s Shanghai. After a long and dangerous journey, Ding Ling had
arrived in Yan’an in January 1937, and she became one of the region’s
best-known literary figures. Her fiction combined revolutionary conviction with
skepticism about the party’s commitment to the ideal of women’s emancipation,
an issue that always seemed to take a backseat to class struggle in CCP
rhetoric. Her short story “When I Was in Xia Village,” published in 1941, had a
highly ambiguous character at its center, a young woman named “Purity” who
becomes a prostitute behind Japanese enemy lines as a cover for espionage. When
she returns to her home village, her sexual history leads the locals to freeze
her out for her “immoral” behavior. The story’s power lay in its nuance and
refusal to conform to black-and white moral categories.
After Mao’s speech
inaugurating the Rectification Movement, Ding Ling responded with an editorial,
published in March 1942, entitled “Thoughts on March 8,” the date of
International Women’s Day. In her essay she pointed out that even in the
revolutionary atmosphere of Yan’an, women were judged differently from men.
“Women cannot transcend their times,” she pleaded. “They are not ideal, they
are not made of steel . . . I wish that men, especially those in positions of
power would see women’s shortcomings in the context of social reality.”.. Another
young writer and translator, Wang Shiwei, wrote an essay entitled “Wild Lily”
which also criticized smug attitudes in Yan’an and accused senior cadres of
having lost their true revolutionary spirit.
Mao did not take long
to react. In April, Ding Ling was fired from her position as literary editor of
the Yan’an party newspaper, Liberation Daily.34 Other refugee
intellectuals would also discover that their reception in Yan’an had grown
chilly. On May 2, three months after the Rectification Movement had been
formally launched, over a hundred writers and artists gathered on wooden
benches in the Yangjialing district of Yan’an. They were awaiting Mao, who was
due to open that day’s event: the Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature. Ever
since they had arrived at Yan’an, leftist thinkers and writers found themselves
torn between their loyalty to their hoped-for revolution and the party they
admired, and their convictions that as artists they must be true to their own
visions.
Mao’s opening comments
were punctured by the sound of gunfire from Nationalist positions nearby, but
he made himself perfectly clear nonetheless: artistic vision must be
subordinated to the needs of the war—and the revolution. In Yan’an the audience
for literature and art consisted of “workers, peasants, soldiers, and
revolutionary cadres,” and it was time for artists to “learn the language of
the masses” rather than indulge in “insipid” and “nondescript” works that
favored self-indulgence over political robustness. The three conferences that
followed this introduction over the next few weeks marked a powerful change in
the relationship between the Communist Party and the intellectuals who
supported it. Speaker after speaker stood up to harangue, repent, and denounce.
Hu Qiaomu, who would later become the chief propagandist for the party in the
1970s, declared that the great Chinese writer Lu Xun, who had died in 1936,
should have accepted the formal leadership of the party (he had been a fellow
traveler but never joined): that he had not been was “not to his credit.”…
