Remembering Herself, Remembering the Nation: The Autobiographical Writings of Xie Bingying

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Remembering Herself, Remembering the Nation:

The Autobiographical Writings of Xie Bingying

Hans Kristoffer Andersen Graff

Master’s thesis in East Asian Culture and History

EAST4591 – Master's Thesis in East Asian Culture and History (60 credits) Spring 2019

Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages (IKOS) UNIVERSITY OF OSLO

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Remembering Herself, Remembering the Nation: The Autobiographical Writings of Xie Bingying

Hans Kristoffer Andersen Graff

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Remembering Herself, Remembering the Nation: The Autobiographical Writings of Xie Bingying

Hans Kristoffer Andersen Graff http://www.duo.uio.no/

Printed by: Webergs Printshop

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Abstract

This thesis deals with the autobiographical writings of the Chinese writer Xie Bingying (謝冰瑩, 1906-2000). Xie rose to fame after she published her War Diaries (congjun riji 從軍日記) in 1929, a short series of letters Xie wrote while participating as one of the first Chinese women soldiers in the National Revolutionary Army (guomin gemingjun 國民革命軍) during the Northern Expedition (beifa zhanzheng 北伐戰爭). This and later autobiographies assured her place in both history and scholarship as a representative of the May Fourth generation of radical women writers.

However, this thesis shows that her later move to Taiwan has been completely neglected by western scholarship. In Taiwan, Xie significantly rewrote important parts of her life story, creating a narrative that downplayed or removed her early radicalism, and conformed to the national memory which was being constructed in post-war Taiwan under the Kuomintang’s rule.

By looking at Xie’s writings through the lenses of autobiographical theory, the concept of national memory, and the question of personal agency, this thesis sets out to explore how Xie’s writing of her life story developed, and how it changed from the portrayal of a decidedly leftist self, to a nationalist self.

This thesis finds that in Xie’s major rewriting of her life story, she switches gradually from a leftist discourse of the “masses” (qunzhong 群眾) and “society” (shehui 社會) to one of

“nation” (minzu 民族) and “country” (guojia 國家). However, equally important, the emphasis on revolution (geming 革命) and rejection of feudal society (fengjian shehui 封建社會) is present throughout Xie’s writings. This thesis argues that in contrast to the predominant image of the Kuomintang as primarily a conservative, traditionalist political force, through Xie Bingying’s writings, one can see the construction of a Kuomintang as a modernizing, and anti- feudal party which glorified revolutionary rhetoric, and fought for women’s liberation.

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Acknowledgments

I was often told I was lucky to have professor Halvor Eifring as my supervisor, and now I know why. Those lucky enough to have him as their advisor after me will surely hear the same words from me. His always thoughtful comments and ideas, and his patience as supervisor is what made this thesis possible.

I also have to extend my gratitude to professor Mei Chia-ling, who graciously accepted to help me during my five-month research stay in Taiwan while preparing to write this thesis.

Her expertise in the subject has been extremely helpful. Additionally, the thesis, and especially its discussion on the question of historical contingency versus personal agency benefited hugely from comments and suggestions offered by professor David Der-wei Wang at the 2019 Harvard East Asian Society graduate student conference, where I was lucky enough to present parts of the work included in this thesis.

Zhao Xuebing, in addition to friendship, helped me get access to Chinese books not available to me in Oslo. Tsai Sheng-chi helped me consult the overview of banned books in the Martial Law era, providing much help for my study. Our excellent librarian Øystein Johan Kleiven at the University of Oslo library has been extremely helpful in helping me get a hold of most other books I have needed.

All my fellow students from IKOS deserve their own thanks, and will get so in person, but a few deserve special mention here. Guttorm Gundersen, in addition to being a constant inspiration, encouraged me to attend the aforementioned conference, for which I am very grateful. Henrik Nykvist provided valuable feedback to this paper, and has been a great friend and mentor since my very first semester as a student of Chinese. Rebekka Sagild has been a ceaseless source of inspiration, good conversation, and poor coffee.

My family have been a constant reassuring presence throughout all my (now many) years in university. The support they have offered, and their unwavering confidence in me, even when I have been in complete lack of it myself, has been more valuable than I can express here.

Although I have had the privilege of the support and help from the above, I acknowledge the possibility of faults and errors in the following pages. For these I take the sole responsibility.

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Xie Bingying (謝冰瑩, 1906-2000) became famous and launched her career as a writer in 1927, when she wrote a series of diary entries during her time as a soldier in the Northern Expedition (beifa zhanzheng 北伐戰爭, 1926-1928). These diary entries were first published in the Wuhan newspaper Central Daily News (zhongyang ribao 中央日報) from May to June, 1927, and then collected and published as the book War Diaries (congjun riji 從軍日記) in 1929. In one of the letters collected in the book,¹ A Gratifying and Funny Story (yi ge kexi er you haoxiao de gushi 一個可喜而又好笑的故事), Xie writes about some of the Hunan farmers she encountered:

When it comes to the local tyrants and evil gentry (tuhao lieshen 土豪劣紳), they care only about

‘beating them to death,’ ‘shooting them to death,’ or ‘stabbing them to death,’ every day we often hear voices calling for the killing of people (sharen de jiaohan sheng 殺人的叫喊聲), and the sounds of guns firing, in our small village the worthless lives (gouming 狗命) of eight or nine local tyrants have already been ended, how joyful (hao tongkuai ya 好痛快呀)! (Xie 1933a, 7-8)

The leftist revolutionary spirit hardly needs pointing out, and as will become clear in my thesis, Xie remained committed to a decidedly leftist political project well into the 1930s.

Having lived through some of the most tumultuous and volatile periods in modern Chinese history, in September 1948 Xie Bingying moved to Taiwan after having accepted a job offer at what is today National Taiwan Normal University, one year before the Kuomintang (Guomindang 國民黨; KMT) suffered defeat in the mainland against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and relocated their government to Taipei. She never returned to mainland China, and in Taiwan she continued to write and publish, and also involved herself in high levels of some of the KMT supported cultural associations. In the time immediately before 1949 and for some time after, more than a million people left the mainland and settled in Taiwan; in this sense her move there is hardly unique. What is unique is her earlier life as a committed leftist revolutionary, who still managed to maintain a place in the literary establishment of the highly anti-communist culture of post-war Taiwan. As I will show in my thesis, this aspect of her past is almost entirely cut from anything she publishes after arriving in Taiwan.

How does Xie Bingying write, and then rewrite and update the story of her life? How does she place her life stories within the grander memory of the nation? And to what extent does the national narrative control her individual one?

1 See chapter 3 for a discussion on the compilation and publication of War Diaries and other works.

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By asking these questions, I will look at how Xie Bingying through her writings places her own life within that of the ever-changing one of the Chinese nation. The first question takes up the genre and form of arguably the most significant writings produced by Xie Bingying: the autobiography. As mentioned, it was her War Diaries² which first gave her fame. Following this, she wrote and published her Autobiography of a Woman Soldier (yi ge nübing de zizhuan 一個女兵的自傳, hereafter just Autobiography) in 1936. This was subsequently updated, and significantly edited, and published again as Nübing zizhuan (女兵自傳) in Shanghai in 1948, before being reworked again and published under the same name in Taiwan in 1956. She further wrote several autobiographical essays and memoirs which she published in various collections in Taiwan. Based on this, I identify three main phases in Xie’s writing: (1) the pre-1937 phase, of which the representative works are War Diaries and the 1936 edition of Autobiography of a Woman Soldier, which is characterized by clear leftist sympathies; (2) the post-1945 phase, which is represented by the 1948 edition of her Autobiography, and is characterized by a significant distancing of the most radical elements of her earlier writing; and (3), the post-1949 phase, represented by the final edition of Autobiography, and a number of memoir collections, and characterized by a further distancing, and in some instances, outright rejection and denial of her earlier leftist radicalism. How does she use the autobiographical form to create new selves as time progresses? As I will show, in Xie’s various life stories, the self she presents can vary considerably depending on which piece of writing one reads. For whom is she creating these selves, and why?

This question leads us to my second central question, that of the national memory vis- à-vis her individual one. What is the place for the individual’s memory in the grander national memory? How does Xie approach and appropriate the “orthodox national memory” in the recreation of her own? And what does this tell us about the kind of national memory which was being created first in Republican China, and then in post-war Taiwan? The crushing defeat in the Civil War, the questionable legitimacy of the KMT-led Republican government this led to, and the aim to retake the mainland and reinstate the Republic of China, meant that the establishment of precisely this orthodox national memory was an important task for the KMT regime. What role could Xie, whose decidedly unorthodox role (from the KMT’s point of view) in the Northern Expedition points out many of the contradictions in the KMT-Nationalist

2 See the section on autobiography in chapter 2 for a discussion of the definition of “autobiographical writing.”

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narrative, play in the construction of this national memory? And, indeed, what role was it possible for her to play given her past?

Which leaves us at my final question, in the face of the historical contingencies of modern Chinese history, what room was there for personal agency? When Xie rewrites her earlier writings, and removes significant leftist references, to what degree is this due to external imperatives, the result of censorship and/or pressure by the KMT government; or the result of a change of heart, the internal wish to forget certain experiences and remember others? Should we read the changes we discover as the proof of the oppressive political situation of post-war Taiwan? Or should we consider also the private lives and personal reasons that might continue to exist, no matter the externalities of this particularly tumultuous time in history? As I will argue, the case of Xie Bingying shows how both readings might give valid answers.

These three questions, those of autobiography; of national memory versus personal memory; and of personal agency versus historical contingency, and the theoretical considerations they lead to form the second chapter of my thesis. In the third chapter I begin by providing a short biography and overview of Xie Bingying’s life and work, with an emphasis on her autobiographical writings, before I provide a literature review of the current scholarship on Xie. The fourth chapter explores and compares a selection of Xie Bingying’s autobiographical writings published from the 1920s until her death, focusing on the three questions above.

The questions, and the case of Xie Bingying specifically, have significance for our understanding of the history, development, and ultimate fate of the so-called “women’s literature,” funü wenxue (婦女文學), of the May Fourth-era, of which Xie Bingying is often considered to be a part.

“Funü wenxue” and feminist politics in modern Chinese and Taiwanese history The early 1920s, and the time period surrounding the May Fourth-era and New Culture Movement, is still largely considered a watershed moment in the history of Modern China, especially in literary, cultural, and intellectual history. The period, referred to later by Hu Shi as the “Chinese Renaissance,” saw a huge rise in diversity in who was writing, what they were writing about, and the way in which they wrote. Classical and literary varieties of written Chinese, wenyan (文言), were replaced by what began as vernacular experiments, and then became the more and more standardized written vernacular, baihua (白話). Personal experience, often the experience of encountering this “modern age” and its political consequences, became

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a popular topic for many. Modern literature production, while still largely dominated by sons of the literati, now also happened by the hands of people with different backgrounds, and of a different gender. Indeed, as the role of women in Chinese society saw increasing debate and change, many women writers were to publish their first works during the period. Works by women writers were often particularly concerned with the self, both as a person, and as a woman.

Ever since, May Fourth-era women’s writing has become a label meant to describe a type of writing focused on women’s subjectivity, critique of patriarchal structures in Chinese society, coming to terms with new, liberal gender ideals and the trope of the “new woman” (xin nüxing 新女性), and the role of women at the intersection between the old and new China.

It was precisely this practice of writing about the self and “feminine subjectivity” which eventually caused women writers to face criticism as the 1920s progressed, and literature became increasingly politicized. Often judged to be trivial, women’s literature was, just as it had started to establish itself, to be relegated to a place of less importance as China saw an increasingly violent divide between right and left, only to be briefly united by the even grander mission of national survival in the War of Resistance (kangri zhanzheng 抗日戰爭). Then, as the Civil War drew to a close and the KMT escaped to Taiwan, feminine writing was further proscribed, as the entire cultural field was mobilized to create the new proletarian dictatorship of the People’s Republic of China. With this, as famously argued by Wendy Larson, came “the end of funü wenxue” (Larson 1998, 1993).

While the above generally holds true for the vast majority of people who remained on the mainland, this brief history of modern Chinese women’s writing ignores the still substantial amount who chose to leave for Taiwan. If the end of funü wenxue in the PRC is brought on by an “equal” gender ideology “that posits the equality between men and women by depriving the latter of their difference (and not the other way around)” (Liu 1993, 35, emphasis original), we should perhaps then ask what happened to those women writers who ended up in Taiwan.

Where it is largely acknowledged that women writers in the People’s Republic had to drastically alter their writing, with Ding Ling being perhaps the most well-known and discussed example, how women writers adapted (or, failed to adapt) to the new reality of martial law Taiwan has received far less scholarly attention. What was the cultural policies of martial law Taiwan? While the imperative to write proletarian literature effectively marked the end of gender as an acceptable literary theme for writers in the PRC (unless subservient to the grand narrative of class struggle), how did cultural policy affect women writers in KMT Taiwan?

What was their place in the nationalist cultural project led by the Kuomintang? Whereas the

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consequences of Mao’s Yan-an Talks for cultural policy in the PRC are famous (Goldman 1967), less attention has been given to Chiang Kai-shek’s (Jiang Jieshi蔣介石) ideas about a cultural policy based on the People’s Livelihood (minsheng zhuyi yule liang pian bushu 民生主義育樂兩篇補述) (Chiang 1984). In perhaps surprisingly many ways similar to Mao’s, it was a call for arts to serve politics, and in the hands of Zhang Daofan (張道藩) it was made the basis for the subsequent period of KMT-led anti-Communist cultural production in Taiwan.

In the anti-communist literary culture which established itself immediately following the KMT move to Taiwan, it is commonly argued that while a distinct women’s literature did emerge, it was also largely apolitical, or conservative. It is for this reason, Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang argues, that a writer like Zhang Ailing emerged as a popular model for some of the women writers in Taiwan (Chang 1993b, 217). However, as she shows, even in these writers’

works, there exist themes of women’s resistance against patriarchal society (ibid, 233). Fan Ming-ju has shown that even at the peak of the Anti-Communist literary movement, women writers often subtly undermined the dominating discourse of “retaking the mainland” by instead presenting Taiwan as a “new homeplace” (xin guxiang 新故鄉) (Fan 2002, 15-16). After democratization, as I will discuss below, feminist politics have been remarkably successful in Taiwan, and many of these later developments are traced to the democratization process.

However, as I will show, in Xie Bingying’s works, calls for women’s liberation, and resistance against feudal and patriarchal values were not only present, but featured prominently in her writing, throughout the martial law era too.

Probably due to the CCP’s infamous attacks on tradition and “old” culture during certain parts of PRC history, the KMT’s status as the traditionalist, conservative party has been emphasized in the writing of the history of modern China. Perhaps for this reason, the notion that Taiwan represents the “real, traditional China” is still prevalent among many, even (or perhaps especially) among China and Taiwan “watchers.” This view of the KMT as an unequivocally traditionalist force neglects the modernizing, and indeed revolutionary side of its double identity, which a look at recent developments in Taiwan should cause us to reconsider.

Today, women are represented in Taiwanese government, including high-ranking positions (significantly, including the KMT), in numbers that far exceed the rest of East Asia, including China with its supposedly gender-revolutionary past (Huang 2016). While it used to be the case that it was the PRC that was seen as progressive in the question of gender politics, Taiwan has emerged as one of the most popular study destinations for the current generation of Chinese feminists (Fincher 2018, 110). With Li Ang as probably the most famous example,

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feminist writers have long since carved out their place in Taiwan’s literary culture (Chung 2000, Sung 1994).

In politics, Annette Lu (Lü Xiulian 呂秀蓮) – the “mother of Taiwanese feminism” – and the first DPP government did much to help the situation. But even before they began, elected women already occupied a significant portion of Taiwanese government: the 1946 ROC constitution – which the KMT introduced – stipulated that at least 10% of elected officials should be women (Clark 2000, 62). Where does this progressive tradition come from? Recently, Yang Rubin has suggested that the liberal/progressive legacy of Republican China has been largely overlooked (Yang 2015, 34-38).³ While gender politics and feminism is just one of many aspects that could and should be a part of a reevaluation of historical and political legacies in contemporary Taiwan, for the present purposes I limit my discussion to some central issues of gender and feminism in the history of the KMT.

The women’s quota stipulated in the 1946 constitution was in no doubt brought about in no small part due to a number of wealthy, so-called socialite, women in Republican China, many of whom had studied in the US and been influenced by early 20th century American feminists. First Lady Song Meiling was chief among them, and was quick to organize and head many women’s groups after the KMT relocated to Taiwan: the support and political engagement of women was, at least on paper, important even in the years prior to the more comparatively liberal 1970s and 80s (Chang 2009, see especially chapter 2).

Furthermore, women’s liberation occupies an important role in the official KMT historical narrative, like it indeed did in many of the emerging “liberatory” nationalisms in the 20^th century (Jayawardena 1986). Qiu Jin, the famous female revolutionary martyr, continued to be revered by the KMT in Taiwan, and her bust is still found in the National Revolutionary Martyrs’ Shrine in Taipei. The women’s division trained at Whampoa and included in the nationalist Northern Expedition was an important signal that the Chinese nation, including its women, would stand up and fight together for a “new China.” Additionally, opposition to foot- binding, and eventually polygamy and other “feudal” gender practices were important parts of the gradual modernizing program of the KMT government prior to 1949.

3 I share the opinion that Republican legacy (especially the liberal and revolutionary aspects of the KMT) is overlooked in studies of modern and contemporary Taiwan. Nevertheless, I think Yang Rubin in his argument that it was the ROC government that brought over the largest cultural institutions (e.g. the university system, the National Palace Museum) and as such created “high culture” in Taiwan, almost completely neglects to ask and consider what these institutions replaced, and the kind of cultural institutions that could have arisen in their place. See Lin (2017a) for a more in-depth criticism.

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Still, as I will show in my thesis, the issue of gender remained fraught with contradictions during KMT hegemony. While Taiwan today has women at all levels of government, women long remained outside positions of power at high levels, in spite of the 10% quota afforded to women (Clark 2000, Huang 2015, 2016). The National Assembly system and Martial Law (which limited democratic elections to the local level) co-worked to ensure that real power remained in the hands of the same group of (mostly) men. Qiu Jin’s role as national revolutionary outshone that of her role as revolutionary feminist (e.g. leaving her children and husband to go abroad to Japan to study). The New Life-movement helped cement the new traditionalist social ideology of the KMT (Diamond 1975, 6-8), and when the Anti- Japanese War broke out, women were now relegated to civilian support groups, helping with nursing and propaganda efforts, rather than actual fighting. Before and after relocating to Taiwan, KMT anti-communist propaganda often featured at the same time the “sexlessness”

(i.e. the lack of distinct femininity), and sexuality (i.e. promiscuity) of women in CCP society (Croll 1978, 164, Gilmartin 1994, 224).

Xie Bingying was one of the women writers who ended up in Taiwan. Her main claim to fame, and her status as “woman soldier” (nübing 女兵), was forged under political and historical circumstances which became problematic for the KMT as they attempted at the same time to claim status as the “free,” (i.e. modern) and “real” (i.e. traditional) China. Xie Bingying’s early writings showcase both radical, and reactionary (or conservative?) actions of the KMT, and are as such sympathetic neither simply to a traditionalist nor a revolutionary reading of Kuomintang history: They show a Kuomintang that both champions and fights against women’s movements. Xie herself became one of the first female soldiers of a (nominally) national army when the KMT established her division. She also had to flee when the KMT then reversed, and disbanded and persecuted those who had been part of this very division. With a personal story so tightly interlinked with that of the nation, what does her life and writings tell us about the legacy and development of the so-called May Fourth-era feminism of which she is often described as being an important figure? In the volatile period of Chinese and then Taiwanese history from the 1920s to the 1950s, how does Xie Bingying’s writing change and adapt to new political and historical circumstances?

These questions shed light on one of the issues of modern Chinese intellectual, political, and feminist history, namely the fate of the dissidents (of any variety) in modern Chinese and Taiwanese history. They bring attention to those, like Xie Bingying, who had to continuously renegotiate their place in social and political, even national circumstances which seemingly

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changed from day to day. As I will discuss in my thesis, Xie seems to have avoided the political persecution suffered by countless people on both sides of the Taiwan strait after 1949, but at significant emotional cost. Furthermore, these questions help us consider Chinese historical legacies in Taiwan, and they contribute to filling in the lacuna that exists in scholarship about the fate of the writers of the May Fourth funü wenxue in Taiwan, and martial law-era women’s writing and feminism, shedding light on what came after May Fourth and before Li Ang.

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2: Autobiography, memory, agency

What kind of questions should we ask, and what sort of considerations do we need to make when studying a life of writing? This chapter will focus on the three central issues outlined in my introduction. First is the issue of form or genre. What is autobiography and autobiographical writing, and how do we understand the process of writing autobiographically? Because this thesis concerns itself with Xie’s autobiographical writings, these questions very much form the basis of my undertaking. Below, I discuss the basic functions of autobiographical writing, first by looking at the notion of how autobiographies are used by authors to construct and make sense of one self, and whether the narrative process this requires means that autobiographical writing is essentially an exercise in fiction. Arguing that discerning between fact or fiction is not the main task of the study of autobiography, I suggest instead that one should rather look at how something is presented as fact, in order to build an understanding of how an author uses autobiography to make sense of and present life. Then I turn the object of my focus towards the author’s surroundings, and discuss how autobiographies should also be understood as a kind of social document in which writers not only makes sense of their lives for themselves, but also in front of their imagined audience.

The question of the social aspect of autobiography leads me to my second central issue, that of national and personal memory. If autobiographies should be understood also as a social document, to what extent can we consider them as sites for the construction of national memory?

What role do they play? What are the considerations writers have to make when they make a public display of their lives and memories? How does the national and the individual memory intersect, converge, and conflict? After discussing these questions, I consider some central questions that influenced and occupied writers in modern China and post-war Taiwan. What kind of national memory was being forged and contested while Xie was writing? How did the Chinese Civil War and the “national split” of 1949 engender and force new ways of remembering modern Chinese history? What is the place of the individual in the tsunami of history that unleashed itself at this point in time?

The historical and political forces at play leaves me at my third and last issue, the question of individual agency versus historical contingency. How do we explain the actions and decisions made by the subject of my study? Indeed, what does it even mean to be a subject?

How do we explain that Xie, who is still largely remembered as a representative of the radical,

“new women” of the May Fourth-era, went to what is often thought of as “conservative” Taiwan?

How do we study her change? Faced with the major rewriting of her life story, how do we

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understand the difference between being forced by circumstance, and choosing freely, and can we even neatly separate the two?

Autobiography

When Xie Bingying writes her autobiography, what kind of story-writing is she participating in? Do we understand autobiographies as the writing of history? What about when this history is changed? What does this tell us about the place of autobiographies in the writing of national history? Xie Bingying’s autobiographies feature heavily in studies on the lives of women during the Republican era (1911-1949), but, depending on which edition one reads, the life she has lived varies substantially, giving readers or researchers different answers to what her life, and the nation’s story, was “actually” like.

My study of Xie Bingying is focused on a selection of her so-called “autobiographical”

writings, in which I include diaries, memoirs, self-titled autobiographies, and even some letters.

Autobiography has proven itself hard to define, but, while having endured much criticism, Philippe Lejeune’s “autobiographical contract” still seems to come close to a working definition (Lejeune 1989, 29). According to this “contract,” readers of an autobiography acknowledge that there is “identity between the author, the narrator, and the protagonist” (Anderson 2011, 2), a reading which enables the inclusion of the aforementioned categories. Such a reading lends itself not necessarily to take the autobiographer’s word as the whole truth, but rather see the autobiography as the writer’s “sincere effort to come to terms with and to understand his or her own life” (Eakin 1989, ix). This, however, is no easy task, and leads us to a central issue not only in the task of the autobiographer herself, but also – and no less so – in my task as the biographer of the autobiographer: the creation of the narrative of a human life. The autobiographer has to create and present a narrative which convincingly paints a picture of who they are, and how they came to be the very person whose name is now on the title page of the autobiography. As has been pointed out by Walter Benjamin, someone “who died at thirty-five will appear to remembrance at every point in his life as a man who dies at the age of thirty-five.

In other words, the statement that makes no sense for real life becomes indisputable for remembered life” (Benjamin 1968a, 100, emphasis mine).

In Xie Bingying’s case, when she writes her autobiography, she is always doing it from the point of view of someone who “knows where the story is going.” In real life, Xie only becomes “woman soldier” once she decides to enroll in the military. For the readers of Autobiography of a Woman Soldier, Xie appears instead from the first page, indeed the very title page, as someone who will become a woman soldier. Significantly, the Xie who then

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rewrote her life in 1956, did so from the perspective of someone who knew the ultimate fate of the CCP-KMT struggle, who had at once been on one side, and now was on the other. In doing so, I will argue, she was creating a story in which she plausibly appears at every point in her life as someone who would end up in Taiwan.

It is this that causes us to consider the – at least to a certain extent – fictionality inherent in the creation of autobiography. As Paul John Eakin remarks, the creation of the narrative “of the self and its history, poses the question whether the very idea of autobiography is not in its deepest sense a fiction, some wish or dream of a possible unity of personality underlying the apparent accidents of an individual life” (Eakin 1985, 36). This notion, that autobiographical writing is essentially a practice in fiction, “tends to make us uneasy, for we instinctively feel that autobiography is – or ought to be – precisely not-fiction” (ibid, 19). He is not alone in making such observations. Joan Scott notes that it is often precisely personal experience which tends to hold the most weight among many people, for, she writes, “what could be truer, after all, than a subject's own account of what he or she has lived through?” (Scott 1991, 777).

Similarly, Xie herself was clear in her view of the demands placed upon the writer of (auto-) biographies, writing that “when it comes to biographical writing, it needs to be one hundred percent true for it to have any value; if not it becomes biographical fiction” (Xie 1966, 151).

However, when the subject’s own account is subjected to scrutiny and questioning and found to be “less than true,” the status of autobiography as a genre anchored in truth becomes questionable.

Are we then to dismiss the entire undertaking of the autobiography (or writings of experience in Scott’s terms) as “merely” fiction? Neither Scott nor Eakin really suggest so.

Rather, Eakin writes that we should see autobiography as a “a ceaseless process of identity formation” (1985, 36), and suggests that we use this process to “approach knowledge of the self through scrutiny of its acts of self-expression” (ibid, 24), because “autobiography offers the individual an opportunity to reify, to constitute, to create an identity precisely because referentiality is the sine qua non of such texts” (ibid, 26). What the study of autobiography should do, then, is not the confirmation or disproving of the narrative presented by the autobiographer, but attempt to analyze the ways in which the author creates this narrative in order to present the self. On this note, Joan Scott tells us that

The study of experience, therefore, must call into question its originary status in historical explanation. This will happen when historians take as their project not the reproduction and transmission of knowledge said to be arrived at through experience, but the analysis of the production of that knowledge itself. (Scott 1991, 797, my emphasis)

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What I aim to do in my thesis, therefore, more than to discover what “actually” happened in Xie Bingying’s life, is the analysis of her continually changing presentation of what happened.

In the discussion above, the understanding of autobiography, the “autobiographical act,”

as Eakin terms it (1985, 6), seems to be primarily an internal undertaking; something which creates and negotiates the self vis-à-vis the self. What this neglects is who are the audience for whom the “act” of the autobiographical act is played? In other words, what is the social dimension of the autobiography, what role does the reader (as imagined by the writer) play in its construction?

For this, I suggest that we might turn to and consider what Charlotte Linde has termed

“life stories.” She writes

Life stories express our sense of self: who we are and how we got that way. They are also one very important means by which we communicate this sense of self and negotiate it with others. Further, we use these stories to claim or negotiate group membership and to demonstrate that we are in fact worthy members of those groups, understanding and properly following their moral standards.

Finally, life stories touch on the widest of social constructions, since they make presuppositions about what can be taken as expected, what the norms are, and what common or special belief systems can be used to establish coherence. (Linde 1993, 3)

Because life stories according to Linde are continuously made and re-made, and do not appear as a single, constructed narrative, she writes that they are fundamentally different from autobiographies (ibid, 39). However, the case of Xie Bingying proves, as will become clear in my thesis, that this might as well also be the case for autobiographies, seeing as her autobiographical writings (including various memoirs) are numerous and completely new ones appear at different stages of her life. As noted by Linde, “in order to exist in the social world with a comfortable sense of being a good, socially proper, and stable person, an individual needs to have a coherent, acceptable, and constantly revised life story” (ibid, 3, my emphasis). The rapid and at times violent changes and breaks that happened in China from the May Fourth-era through the War of Resistance and the 1949 split, would certainly only serve to strengthen the need to maintain the “correct” life story at any given time. Autobiography in this sense offers both a solution and a complication: it allows the writer to craft a “correct” life story and broadcast it, but also leaves evidence which might be used against the autobiographer once what constitutes a “correct” life story has changed. The autobiographer then faces a choice, if the earlier life story significantly deviates from the later, they have to either rewrite their earlier story into one that is coherent with the later or explain the incongruence. An important part of my thesis will be to explore what Xie chooses to rewrite, and what she chooses to explain, and how this helped create coherence in her life stories.

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It is important, however, also to note that while life stories are fundamentally social, an individual might very well have several life stories of more or less private nature. While Xie published an abundance of autobiographical writings, ranging from autobiography, to memoir, to diary, and even letters, we must also assume the existence of private versions of these stories, which may or may not differ from those published. They might be purely individual, as in the case of a private diary, or they might be shared with friends, with different versions “belonging”

to different groups of friends. Significantly, Xie kept personal diaries, and frequently exchanged letters. Of these, at least two collections of letters have been published, in addition to some individual letters being included in various other publications. The first of these collections is The Letters of Bingying (Bingying shuxin 冰瑩書信) from 1991, which must be considered part of Xie’s “public life story.” Another collection has also been published, but it was done so posthumously, and by the recipient, Wei Zhongtian (魏中天) (Qin 2000). While these letters can be considered as part of a life story in Linde’s terms, they are not published by the author as autobiographical, and must therefore be treated differently in a study of Xie’s “public self- presentation.” Rather than show us what kind of public self Xie was trying to create and maintain, they give us clues as to how the maintaining of a public image might differ from that of the private.

As previous studies of the emergence of autobiographical writing in modern China have emphasized, autobiography began to develop at the same time as the Chinese intellectual world started to concern itself with the notion of the individual and of the self in society. While studies have shown autobiography to be present all throughout Chinese history (Bauer 1990), from Sima Qian’s famous Shiji (Larson 1991, 13-15), even hitting a “golden age” according to Wu Pei-yi around 1600 (Wu 1989, xii), and continuing to develop in the autobiographical fictions of the Qing (Huang 1995), it is in the period around the May Fourth era with its rise of

“subjectivism and individualism” (Průšek 1980, 8) that autobiographical writing came to represent a significant part of the literary output. Autobiography, particularly for women writers who were often chastised by male writers for being overly self-obsessed, sentimental, and not concerned enough about society, allowed writers to write about their own personal experiences, and link these to the larger context of society (Ng 2003, 16, Wang 2008, 30-31, 40). Especially in the context of the Northern Expedition, women like Xie played an important role, because she along with her fellow female cadets symbolized to the world the modernity of China, liberating herself from the shackles of both imperialism and warlords. As has been remarked

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by Nira Yuval-Davis, the military participation of women has been a common feature in many national struggles for liberation, and has granted legitimacy to the leaders of the army as modernizers, while allowing women to “establish for themselves new identities, skills and respectable social positions, as well as to struggle for causes they believe in” (Yuval-Davis 1997, 101-102).

Autobiographical writing, or at least autobiography-inspired writing, has furthermore continued to be a significant part of how female writers have expressed themselves literarily in Taiwan. Chen Xue’s (陳雪) Letters of a Deplorable Woman (enü shu 惡女書) (Chen 2018), Qiu Miaojin’s (邱妙津) Letters from Montmartre (Mengmate yishu 蒙馬特遺書) (Qiu 2006b), and Lin Yihan’s (林奕含) Fang Siqi’s First Love Paradise (Fang Siqi de Chulian Leyuan 房 思齊的初戀樂園) (Lin 2017b) have all been remarkable examples of strongly autobiographical writings which highlight the often precarious situation of women in Taiwanese society. We might do well to also consider Li Ang’s biography-as-fictional-autobiography Zizhuan no Xiaoshuo (自傳の小說) (Li 2000), in which the “disgraced” memory of Taiwanese communist and independence activist Xie Xuehong (謝雪紅) is re-membered and thus re-validated in the new era of a democratized Taiwan. In considering the legacy of Republican China, Lung Ying- tai’s part-biography of her mother, part-autobiographical Great River, Great Sea: 1949 (da jiang da hai yi jiu si jiu 大江大海一九四九) is another example of autobiographical writing which deals fundamentally with the fate of individuals in a time of national upheaval (Lung 2009). Xie Bingying, having risen to fame after the so-called May Fourth-era ushered in subjectivism and individualism in modern Chinese writing, belongs to a generation preceding the Taiwanese writers above, but her significant output of autobiographical works might give future students of autobiographical writing in Taiwan an interesting and significant link between the eras represented by the May Fourth-generation, and that of democratizing and democratized Taiwan.

While writing about the Northern Expedition thus lends Xie Bingying the opportunity to link her personal life story to the grander narrative of the nation, this then causes a problem when the Northern Expedition is mythologized, creating an orthodox place for it in national history, which might very well conflict with the way it is narrated by Xie Bingying. Looking back on her writing career, Xie once remarked that “I think the saying ‘the writing mirrors the writer’ is more or less correct. In my attitude towards life I follow only three words:

‘straightforward,’ ‘true,’ and ‘honest,’ and my writing is also like this” (Xie 1966, 11). This

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insistence on writing “the truth,” which was an overwhelming trend in the literary culture in general (Chow 1991, 95-96, Lee 1993, 364), and certainly no less so in historical writing (Li 2013), creates a problem when there is disagreement about what this truth is really supposed to be. The creation of a national memory highlights the contradictions that show themselves in trying to create a seamless amalgam of national and personal memory.

National memory

Above I make the case that we should not neglect that the “act of autobiography” is a kind of storytelling. Stories are, as I have also noted, social. Walter Benjamin aptly tells us that “the storyteller takes what he tells from experience – his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale” (Benjamin 1968a, 87). This ability to transfer experience is precisely what might make the storyteller so useful in the creation of national memory, but only if their story does not conflict with that of the nation. As Pierre Nora has remarked, writing about his concept of “realms of memory” (lieux de mémoire), memoir writers (and by extension autobiographers) can serve as useful objects in the study of national memory. Nora writes that

“The memoir writer must be aware of other memoirs. He must be a man [sic] of the pen as well as a man of action. He must find a way to identify his individual story with a more general story.

And he must somehow make his personal rationale consonant with public rationality. Taken together, these characteristics of the genre compel us to think of its exemplars as lieux de mémoire.” (Nora 1996, 17)

If, as Linde suggests, we can extrapolate from someone’s life story the more general state of social conditions, Nora’s “public rationality,” then a study of Xie’s writings might help us see and understand the contours of the national memory as it emerged and developed in post-war Taiwan.

In Rescuing History From the Nation, Prasenjit Duara writes “that national history secures for the contested and contingent nation the false unity of a self-same, national subject evolving through time” (Duara 1995, 4, emphasis mine). Keeping in mind the notion of life stories as narratives that attempt to establish coherence out of the lives of individuals, Duara’s view of national historiography shares a fundamental similarity in how it is seen as essentially an attempt to create out of a series of events across time a coherent story of a subject. As I will attempt to show, both Xie Bingying and the KMT have to tackle with the issue of how to create

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a “coherent,” or “self-same” subject in their attempt to establish their own (mutually connected and contradictory) legitimacies.⁴

There has in fact been, both in Chinese literature and in Chinese literary studies, many attempts and a general tendency to link the personal and the national in writing. Lu Xun, in what is almost as famous a story as any of his fictional writings, wrote in the preface to A Call to Arms (nahan 吶喊) that his reason for having become a writer was his conclusion that nothing would be better at “changing the spirit” of the nation than the literary arts (Lu 1967, 8). Lu Xun had come to this conclusion having seen his father suffer and die under the incompetence of a traditional Chinese doctor, and then having seen China seemingly without struggle succumb to the colonial and imperial powers of the West and Japan, illustrated most famously by the picture he allegedly saw while a medical student in Japan of a crowd of Chinese witnessing the beheading of one of their countrymen. In this way Lu Xun, often regarded as the “father” of modern Chinese literature, opens his first book by linking the self, writing, and the nation. Thus, as Jing Tsu has elegantly written, “the nation as a collective identity is accomplished by coalescing the individual’s trauma with the nation’s trauma” (Tsu 2005, 15).This identification of the (Chinese) individual with the (Chinese) nation would soon become a trend so widespread among writers that C.T. Hsia would famously argue that most Chinese authors for the following years suffered from an “obsession with China” (Hsia 1971).

The tendency for Chinese writers themselves to explicitly devote themselves to the nation has probably been a contributing factor to the tendency to treat Chinese literature as national allegory. Most famous is Fredric Jameson’s concept of the national allegory of third world literature (Jameson 1986). In his response to this article, Aijaz Ahmad argues forcefully that even if one could easily identify a work as belonging to a “third world literature,” such a blanket-treatment of works as national allegories inevitably leads to us neglecting other aspects and themes that might be just as important (Ahmad 1987). I argue that in reading Xie Bingying’s life stories, we should not adopt fully as our method the “national allegory” of Jameson, nor reject it wholly. Indeed, as we shall see in my analysis below, a significant part of the shift in Xie’s writings is an increasing tendency to speak in terms of nation (minzu 民族) and country (guojia 國家). Nevertheless, as Ahmad points out, to treat her works as simply

“national allegories” neglects the perhaps equally significant theme in her life writings, which is her relationship with her family and home, especially her mother. Indeed, a significant theme

4 For Xie, “female soldier”; for the KMT, “unifiers and (thus) legitimate government of the whole of China.”

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in Xie’s writings from the very beginning is her navigation between her desire for freedom, her love for her parents, and her sense of duty towards the nation.

If, as Pierre Nora writes, “we speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left”

(Nora 1989, 7), then certainly memory would have to be spoken of a lot in post-1949 Taiwan.

While the issue of Taiwanese nationalism is getting more and more attention both in scholarship and in general, Chinese nationalism in Taiwan seems to rarely get treated. When Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities was translated into Chinese and published in Taiwan, it was done by anti-Kuomintang, Taiwanese nationalist Wu Rwei-ren (Wu Ruiren 吳叡人), with slight rewriting and repurposing for a Taiwanese context (Anderson 2006, 222). But, if any one case could be an ideal case study for the creation of an imagined community, perhaps it should rather be that of the Chinese nationalism of KMT in post-war Taiwan? Having lost the mainland, the KMT retreated to Taiwan, and now had the task of creating a national memory for the island’s inhabitants, most of whom had been disconnected from mainland Chinese history for most, if not all, of their lives: they had no “Chinese-national” memory. Since, as Walter Benjamin reminds us, “memory creates the chain of tradition which passes a happening on from generation to generation” (Benjamin 1968b, 98), the creation of a new national memory became top priority in Taiwan, where large parts of the population, on account of their colonial-induced historical amnesia, needed reminding of whose history they were supposed to be a part. Xie, one of only a handful of famous women writers who went to Taiwan during the civil war, could be one of the people whose personal memories could be made the basis of a new, national memory for all the people who lacked her experiences. To borrow the words of Jeffrey K. Olick, for the KMT in Taiwan, “memory is now a matter of explicit signs, not of implicit meanings.

[Their] only recourse has been to represent and invent what [they] can no longer spontaneously experience” (Olick 2003, 3).

Additionally, the ROC’s future on Taiwan was far from secure, at least until the outbreak of the Korean War led to military agreements between the ROC and the US (Lin 2016).

Even in Taiwan, the ROC government were presented with several problems. Even if we ignore the Taiwanese independence activists, the KMT itself seemed to rip at the seams, with Chiang Kai-shek’s rule far from as certain as it might seem in most history books. Chiang, having lost the mainland to the Communists, had suffered also a terrible loss of face. It is interesting to note then, that when arguing for his place as leader of the army, he referenced his status as

“revolutionary leader” when arguing for his place as national leader in a meeting in Taiwan in

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1949 (ibid, 96), and even considered establishing the “China Democratic Revolutionary Party,”

(emphasis mine) in order to consolidate his powers, safe from potential enemies within the old KMT (ibid, 135).

The revolution to which he refers is the Northern Expedition (beifa zhanzheng 北伐戰爭). After the failure of the Xinhai-revolution in producing a stable government, China had in reality been split into several more or less autonomous regions, each controlled by what has since been called “warlords” (junfa 軍閥). Sun Yat-sen, with Soviet support, began a military expedition from his base in Guangdong, aiming to unite the country under republican, KMT- led rule (Wilbur 1983, 1-4). By the end in 1928, China proper had ostensibly been united,⁵ Sun Yat-sen had died from cancer, and Chiang Kai-shek had risen as the new leading figure of the KMT. However, during the course of the expedition, the KMT had also suffered a violent internal split following the power-vacuum left by the death of Sun, and Chiang’s Nanjing-based government had begun a violent persecution of leftists all over China, leading to a split between the CCP and the KMT which would never truly mend, despite a temporary and problem-filled period of cooperation during the anti-Japanese war.⁶

Hans J. van de Ven in his study War and Nationalism in China 1925-1945 points out how the Northern Expedition was really

a contingent product of the broader military situation in China, the Soviet Union’s geo-political strategy, the military and financial weakness of the Canton National Government, the rivalry between Chiang Kaishek, on the one hand, and Wang Jingwei and the Soviets, on the other, and last but not least, the initiatives of warlords … (van de Ven 2003, 129)

Despite the dubious claim that the KMT in the Northern Expedition had truly united China under its government, it remained an important event to the KMT as a national unification myth.

Especially so to Chiang Kai-shek, who was the leader of the National Revolutionary Army (guomin gemingjun 國民革命軍) during the expedition as it succeeded in retaking Beijing, and for whom it made possible the claim that the KMT was the rightful government of modern China. His invocation of this piece of history as proof of his legitimacy as leader proves its central importance. It is also the seminal event in Xie Bingying’s life, the event which launched her literary career and made possible her status as “woman soldier.” Xie, if her version of the

5 Areas outside the Yangzi-Nanjing area still remained largely in the control of regional warlords who pledged at least some allegiance to Chiang’s government, and Communist activities were still going on with varying strength around the country. Control over the “national territories” as designated by for example an official map by a single government, has happened only comparatively recently in the PRC, and even then with notable border issues, and still contentious off-shore disputes.

6 See Wilbur (1983) for an in-depth study on the Northern Expedition and the Nationalist revolution.

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Northern Expedition corroborated Chiang’s, could therefore prove herself valuable to one of the most fundamental events in the KMT’s history.

Eventually, Chiang was able to consolidate his power within the party, and as the Korean war ensured US support of Chiang’s government and thus made a Communist invasion unlikely, Chiang was able to begin reorganization efforts within the KMT that would further cement him as the unquestionable leader of the ROC (Lin 2016, 180). In their effort to build a strong party-state, the KMT also attempted to take a leading hand in cultural production to ensure that a “correct” and “healthy” culture would be formed.

The Kuomintang, Yvonne Sung-sheng Chang argues, established itself in the early 50s as cultural hegemon: it “endorsed” anti-communist literature (fangong wenxue 反共文學), and

“tolerated” apolitical literature, and, “in due course,” she writes, “the dominant culture’s pressures and limits were internalized by writers and ... a conservative literary culture was formed” (Chang 2004, 9). Fangong wenxue has since become almost “a synonym for 1950s literature,” and due to its perceived formulaic composition, has been dubbed “anti-communist eight-legged essays” (fangong bagu 反共八股) (Mei 2001, 36).

The anti-communist literary movement, Cheng Ming-Lee argues, can in many ways be seen as an answer to Mao’s famous Talks at Yanan. But where Mao and the communists made the claim that the “source” of cultural production should be the “realities of those at the lowest level of society,”⁷ the Kuomintang gave the role of “instructor” (dao 導) to the party-state (dangguo 黨國). Whereas the CCP ostensibly attempted to create proletarian arts and culture, the main architect behind the KMT’s cultural policy, Zhang Daofan, wanted to create a cultural policy capable of creating a “Three Principles of the People-culture” (sanmin zhuyi de wenyi 三民主義的文藝) (Cheng 1994, 13).

Part of this attempt was the almost complete denouncement by the KMT of modern Chinese literature, leading to the common assumption of a major breach in Chinese literary history after 1949. Tang Xiaobing makes the point that during the literary debates surrounding the question of the “Chineseness” of Taiwan in the 1990s,

an intellectual affinity with the modern Chinese literary heritage would become less obvious or acknowledged, and the assumed discontinuity between the May Fourth literature and Taiwan literature, a direct product of the Guomindang cultural policies, added ideological fuel to the discourse on literary originality or self-determination. The historical irony, as the critic Lü

7 The definition of whatever constituted the “lower level of society,” and what their “reality” was supposed to be, was of course up to the CCP to decide.

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Zhenghui points out, lies in the fact that official suppression of the May Fourth literary tradition on Taiwan finally succeeded in reducing all mainland literature to an ‘alien’ and incoherent entity.” (Tang 2007, 56).

Contemporaneous with these debates, in her study of Taiwanese Modernism, Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang nevertheless comments that “while the arbitrarily created breach in modern Chinese literary history is regrettable, placing too much weight on the apparent discontinuity between literature in Taiwan and pre-1949 traditions sometimes unduly lures our attention away from certain consistencies in Chinese intellectual attitudes” (Chang 1993a, 7).

Locating the notion of such a “breach” or “divide” to a Cold War rhetoric of dichotomy, Wang Xiaojue forcefully argues that we should attempt to “imagine the nation across the 1949 divide.” She writes that the Cold War-influenced discourse of modern Chinese literary history regards the divide as bringing an abrupt end to the development of Chinese literary modernity and initiating an epoch of literary aberration brought about by political authoritarianism on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. Such a conceptualization not only writes off mainland and Taiwan writers of this transitional period as purely political victims but also consigns writers in Hong Kong and other Sinophone regions into complete oblivion. (Wang 2013, 5-6)

In studying pre- and post-1949 writing, we should therefore perhaps follow the lead of scholarship on the May Fourth-era, which has recently led to the era being “dethroned from its position as the event that ushered in twentieth-century Chinese modernity” (Chow et al. 2008, 7). Remaining aware of the importance of 1949 both as a temporal event and as an important symbol in the years after, we would be wise to follow Wang Xiaojue in her attempt to “to bridge the 1949 divide in Chinese literary study” so that we can attempt to provide the “missing link in our understanding of Chinese literary modernity in terms of the relationship between poetics and politics, nation and narration” (Wang 2013, 6).

To see the “1949 divide” as an event which separated Chinese and Taiwanese history into unbridgeable periods of pre- and post-1949, and thus to ignore the impact of the post-May Fourth literature on post-war Taiwan literature, is likely to hinder a better understanding of this era. David Der-wei Wang has argued that “mid-century literature in Taiwan, as in mainland China, cannot be appreciated without referring to the legacy of the May Fourth tradition” (Wang 2004, 152). After all, even though the majority of modern Chinese literature was banned in post-war Taiwan, in the years immediately following 1949, the majority of active writers were those who came from the mainland, benefitting both from their superior command of the new national language, as well as a personal understanding of the travesty that had just befallen the KMT government and the Chinese nation. Clearly, a post-war Anti-Communist literary

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movement only makes sense if there was at one point a Communism to be against. A “Cultural Cleansing-movement” (wenhua qingjie yundong 文化清潔運動) only makes sense if it has been deemed that something has been “soiled.”

In this sense, while the vast majority of pre-1949 writers might have been banned, they still occupy an important kind of negative space in post-war Taiwan literature. Thus, while Lu Xun, elevated to the “sage of Modern China” in the PRC (Davies 2013, 1), and the ultimate criminal in the eyes of the KMT, was banned and thus might not have been available as a source of direct inspiration, knowing to avoid Lu Xun-esque styles or themes would have been necessary. For while the works of Lu Xun and others like him were banned, their names were still public knowledge, and especially in the case of Lu Xun, functioned as a kind of symbol of what went wrong. For example, in the foreword to a collection of essays and opinion pieces published during the Lock of the Heart controversy, the publishers note that “twenty or thirty years ago, Lu Xun’s writings were seen by the majority of young people as holy scriptures … but today, we already know he was nothing but an instigator of hate between people” (Yu 1963, 1). Thus, in noting what is lacking in postwar Taiwanese writing, one does not discover the non-existence of lineage and legacy, but a sort of “reverse” legacy; the attempt at the creation of a kind of negative image of what had come before. Yomi Braester has noted how

“During the dictatorial rule of Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan, from the takeover by the Guomindang in the late 1940s, a Taiwanese identity has formed around silenced testimony and repressed memories. The official narrative glorified the battles fought by the GMD on the mainland before 1949, at the expensive of accounts of the former soldiers’ present plight, and censored references to Chiang’s policy of oppression on the island, especially the executions and arrests associated with the clashes on February 28, 1947, known as the White Terror. In both cases, neither mainlanders nor native Taiwanese were able to express their personal suffering.” (Braester 2007, 213, my emphasis)

Modern Chinese literature of the 1920s to 1940s would arguably be an important example of these repressed memories.

Significant to my thesis, in Xie Bingying’s (re-)writing, the editing and removal of certain sections often only makes sense and is only significant if compared to what was there before. Like how anti-Communist literature should arguably be seen in comparison to the supposed Communist literature, in Xie Bingying’s writings, the later re-membering of certain events, while also significant in itself, is opened to new and interesting interpretations when compared with earlier versions of that same memory. Xie Bingying had risen to fame during the era, and in the literary culture that was now deemed suspect by the KMT. Still, her presence

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lent a certain amount of cultural capital to the KMT. One of very few women writers active in the 1930s who came to Taiwan, Xie could represent a kind of continuity through 1949 for the regime, but only if her writings adhered to a narrative close enough to the orthodox one being created and promoted by the KMT.

Being in opposition to both communism and capitalism, as well as feudalism (Cheng 1994, 19), post-war KMT cultural policy in Taiwan, took aim at portraying a KMT-led, Three Principles-based government as both modernizing, and traditional. One area in which this, and the contradictions that come with it, is especially clear is in how gender roles are constructed in literary works and propaganda of the anti-communist heyday.

In her study of the recipients of the “Chinese Literature Award” (CLA), an award given to anti-communist literary works, Mei Chia-Ling argues that in Anti-Communist (i.e. party- state endorsed) literature, there is a definite tendency for works to play up to traditional gender concepts such as “men are outside [of the home], women are inside” (nan wai nü nei 男外女內), which characterize men as “valiant and strong” and women as “pure and tender” (Mei 2001, 57). Additionally, Christina Gilmartin writes that in general “the charge of sexual immorality was an extremely effective weapon for discrediting Communist party organizers, particularly women” (Gilmartin 1994, 224), and in the ROC, anxieties about “outspoken girl ‘agitators’”

being communists were high (Croll 1978, 164). The perceived importance of the defense of the purity of women and the nation, and of “our women” as pure, and “their women” as deviant is indeed a common trait among many nationalisms (Mayer 2000b, 10).

At the same time, the KMT also saw itself as a liberator of Chinese women, as well as the whole Chinese population, from feudal society:

Despite the repression of the women’s, peasants’ and workers’ movements, the reputation of the Guomindang (Kuomintang) Party, as a nationalist revolutionary party dedicated to the rebuilding of a united China and the emancipation of women, largely remained intact. The Guomindang Party never ceased to talk about revolution and emancipation, it simply redefined the terms. (Croll 1978, 153)

Xie Bingying definitely broke severely with the stereotypical image of a Chinese woman, and, remembering her life after arriving in Taiwan, gave much of the credit for her ability to do so, and the opportunity for other women to follow her example, to the KMT. Throughout Xie’s writings, from the earliest to the latest, one of the constants is her vehement rejection of so- called “feudal society” (fengjian shehui 封建社會). The emergence of a discourse on

“feudalism” as the Other of modernity emerged, according to Murthy Viren, during the New Culture Movement (Murthy 2008, 171). The term then “merged with the Marxist concept of

Remembering Herself, Remembering the Nation: The Autobiographical Writings of Xie Bingying

Remembering Herself, Remembering the Nation:

The Autobiographical Writings of Xie Bingying

Remembering Herself, Remembering the Nation: The Autobiographical Writings of Xie Bingying

Hans Kristoffer Andersen Graff

Abstract

Acknowledgments

Contents

1: Introduction

2: Autobiography, memory, agency