while it may be coincidental that a female cigarette
vendor was beaten by the authorities, thereby opening a floodgate
of Taiwanese discontent and Nationalist brutality, women and the
images of women have often played a crucial role in times of crises in
both actual national politics and popular imagination.In“The Female
Body and Nationalist Discourse: Manchuria in Xiao Hong’s Field of
Life and Death,” Lydia Liu examines the co-optation of Xiao Hong’s
work by male critics throughout modern Chinese literary history.
Beginning with Lu Xun and Hu Feng, Xiao Hong scholarship has
been subsumed into a national discourse that insists on interpreting
her novel as an anti-Japanese allegory while obscuring or ignoring the
plight of rural women.1
In a way, by refusing to acknowledge that the
women in Xiao Hong’s novel are women first and Chinese second,
these critics (most of them male) deny them a gendered victimhood
and actually inflict a second (albeit symbolic) victimization. Using a
rape scene in Xiao Jun’s Village in August as a contrast, Liu is critical
of this patriarchal national consciousness: “As a sign of symbolic
exchange, the raped woman often serves as a powerful trope in antiJapanese
propaganda. Her victimization is used to represent—or more
precisely, to eroticize—China’s own plight.”2
Liu’s now classic essay reveals, among many insights, the contestation
over the representation of women and the interpretive ownership
of the symbol of the female body vis-à-vis foreign aggression at a time
of national crisis.This is by no means unique to China; similar battles
were waged over women’s veils in colonial Algeria and the practice
of sati (suttee) in British-ruled India. In “Algeria Unveiled,” Frantz
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Fanon describes the changing role of the women’s veil in colonial
Algeria.“If we [the French colonial government] want to destroy the
structure of Algerian society, its capacity for resistance, we must first
of all conquer the women; we must go and find them behind the
veil where they hid themselves and in the houses where the men
kept them out of sight.”3
Owing to the veil’s metonymic nature, the
French colonizers believed that unveiling the women would lead
to the total subordination of the Algerian (male) population. During
Algeria’s struggle for independence, many women unveiled and
reveiled themselves in their participation in the revolutionary action.
Whether the aim was total subjugation or independence, the Algerian
women, both veiled and unveiled, were called to perform for colonial
conquest and later national salvation. Ironically, as Winifred Woodhull
points out, the postindependent Algerian government demanded the
reveiling of the women because it was essential to recovering Algerian
traditional culture and uniting a nation that would otherwise be torn
apart by economic disparity and political struggle.4
The imposed reveiling
exposes the high stakes and underlying anxiety at issue when
colonial or nationalist patriarchal narratives address the place,function,
and symbolic value of women.
Similarly,sati,the self-immolation of widows,took on overcharged
religious, nationalistic, and colonial implications in British-ruled
India. Lata Mani investigated how the image of self-immolating widows
was manipulated by the British colonial government to solidify
and substantiate its authority: “The widows were presumed to be
uneducated and incapable of both reason and independent action.”5
What necessitated this denigration of Indian women in general was
an imperialistic desire to demean the colonial subjects through a convoluted
route of reasoning:“Officials in favor of abolition argued that
such action was in fact consistent with upholding indigenous tradition.And
indeed this was how the regenerating mission of colonization
was conceptualized by officials: not as the imposition of a new
Christian moral order but as the recuperation and enforcement of the
truths of indigenous tradition.”6
In other words,the Hindu intelligentsia
was considered ignorant of its own culture, hence their endorsement
(active or passive) of sati.The widows were double victims of
such ignorance, so it is not surprising that “the widow was often
described as a ‘tender child.’”7
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This is not to say that all Indian male intellectuals defended the
practice; many were passionate and eloquent opponents of sati.What
is of interest here is the exploitation of the widows’ will—that is,
whether or not they willingly immolated themselves along with their
husbands.The proponents of sati emphasized women’s will, but “the
petition [against the prohibition of sati] seeks to demonstrate that
the East India Company’s criminalizing of sati is based on an erroneous
reading of the scripture.”8
Women receded into the background
but at the same time were turned into a battleground, where the
colonial authority and indigenous intelligentsia vied to prove each
other wrong in their interpretation of the Hindu tradition. In short,
a debate on a practice that is cruel beyond measure became a competition
for the authoritative reading of scripture, and the contest
between indigenous sovereignty and colonial domination remained
the underlying subtext.
In these three regions, women at various times in their nation’s
history were classified and then declassified as victims of the conquest
of imperialism, and they were simultaneously the manifestation
of indigenous tradition and the embodiment of the inferiority of
their culture.To be sure, Xiao Hong’s text differs from the other two
because it is fiction, but the subject matter and decades of scholarship
point toward a similar tendency to exploit women in the name
of nationalism, even though women often exist on the margin of
national discourse. By looking at these regions together, I am not
suggesting that the issues facing the women in China, Algeria, and
India were necessarily identical or even comparable. Rather, a brief
consideration of the complexity of interpreting the place of women
in the nation’s discourse in these three regions gives us a multifaceted
point of departure for our inquiry into the interplay between women
and the representation of victimhood inTaiwan.What we have seen is
the nation’s (that is, men’s) changing demands on women at a time of
colonial domination and national crisis and how unstable the sign of
victimhood has been.A similar trajectory can be detected in Taiwan
after martial law when the crisis is long over and has been obscured
for decades and the image of women as victims figures prominently in
the recuperation of that critical moment.This chapter examines several
literary texts featuring women in the representation of national
(domestic) atrocity.
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the literature of atrocity and women
The four decades following the 2/28 Incident were marked by a government-imposed
collective amnesia.9
Essential to the Guomindang’s
government’s successful domination of Taiwan, this amnesia is similar
to what Homi K. Bhabha calls “the obligation to forget”:
It is through this syntax of forgetting—or being obliged to forget—
that the problematic identification of a national people becomes
visible. The national subject is produced in that place where the
daily plebiscite—the unitary number—circulates in the grand narrative
of will. However, the equivalence of will and plebiscite, the
identity of part and whole, past and present, is cut across by the
“obligation to forget,” or forgetting to remember.10
To defy this obligation and dismantle the nation imagined by the
Nationalist government, writers have tried to reconstruct history by
creating stories and attempted to recoup theTaiwanese past and redefine
Taiwanese culture.
In the literary recuperation of Taiwan’s forbidden history,women are
often, and unavoidably, portrayed as victims. But the discussion would
go no further if writers did little more than repeat the common trope of
woman as victim, which is a well-worn discursive device found in the
scholarship on Xiao Hong’s The Field of Life and Death or the debates
about self-immolated widows in colonial India.For theTaiwanese writers,
the choice has been virtually obligatory, since the men were either
executed or imprisoned and women were the actual victims, not just
a symbol of victimhood.As a scholar pointed out,“For the men who
died in the 2/28 Incident,the day marked the end of their stories,while
for the women they left behind the 2/28 Incident was the beginning of
theirs.”11
Although women can serve as a powerful metaphor for government
violence against its people,Taiwanese women were victimized
twice in the 2/28 discourse:they were expected to represent themselves
as women bereft of loved ones and,often,economic means while signifying
something larger than themselves.
In most of the current scholarship on and in witnesses’ accounts of
2/28,women are simply called forth to recount the men’s stories,with
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their own stories receding into the background.12
It is as if the sole
significance of their existence is to bear witness to the fact that atrocious
acts have been committed, their own victimization obscured.
An example is Jiang Biyu, Zhong Haodong’s widow. In “Song of the
Covered Wagon,” Lan Bozhou’s employment of eyewitness accounts
accentuates Zhong Haodong’s importance while eclipsing the roles
played by other equally significant characters, particularly Jiang Biyu,
who was summoned only to bear witness to Zhong’s heroism. Moreover,
such a monolithic rendition reduces her to a mere skeleton of
ideology (and a simplistic ideology at that). In GoodWomen of Taiwan,
Lan Bozhou ascribes the following epitaph to Jiang Biyu:
The seventy-four years of Jiang Biyu’s life are a perfect illustration of
how a patriotic generation selflessly devoted its youth to the survival
and continuation of the nation [minzu], and what historical rewards
its members received in a chaotic, orderless and uncertain time for
their effort to “help the flowers of peace and democracy bloom.”13
Although any critique,no matter how carefully and thoughtfully constructed,of
the portrayal of Jiang’s suffering and achievement can easily
be construed as belittling criticism,we must be careful not to subsume
the real-life Jiang Biyu under the grand scheme of national salvation.
As Gu Erde commented about Jiang Biyu as represented by Lan,
Strictly speaking, Jiang Biyu was not someone deeply involved
in politics, as she never led any political movements. Her political
aura came from two men. In “Song of the Covered Wagon,” the
first sentence Jiang Biyu uttered by way of introducing herself is,
“I’m Jiang Yunyu [the name she was given at birth]; I’m Zhong
Haodong’s wife and Jiang Weishui’s daughter (adopted daughter).”
Her connection to politics originated from her father and husband,
one of them a leader of the opposition movement in colonial Taiwan,
the other a political victim of the White Terror Era.14
If we read between the lines, we detect a subtle criticism in Gu’s
comment,which contradicts Lan’s original intention.That is,not only
is she represented as playing a minor role in two very political families,
but she is stripped of her subjectivity when her self-identification is
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contingent on her relationships with the two male figures in her life.
In the grand scheme of things, Jiang Biyu as a victim of the White
Terror pales in comparison with her role as the wife of a victim of the
White Terror.
Other literary works dealing with the 2/28 Incident and theWhite
Terror present a much more complex and controversial portrayal of
women as victims. But here too is a problem with the literary project
of restoring history. History, as Jacques Le Goff explained, is related to
seeing: “This conception of vision as the essential source of knowledge
leads to the idea that istor, the one who sees, is also the one
who knows, istorien.”15
In the Taiwanese situation, it is unclear how
women, who usually were not present at the scenes of atrocious acts
and who therefore did not see them, can claim legitimate representational
authority and to what extent their absence from this history
can restore that history.
“The Mountain Road” and Revictimization
Chen Yingzhen’s “The Mountain Road” is one of the earliest and
best-known stories about the effects of theWhiteTerror.16
Written in
1983, before martial law was lifted, the story is significant on at least
two levels. Historically, its subject matter is audacious, as Chen’s own
personal life can attest to the intolerance of the ruling Nationalist
government of any dissenting or critical views.17
Structurally, “The
Mountain Road” sets an example for a narrative style of retelling a
past that can never be complete, as opposed to the straightforward,
linear narration that Lin Shuangbu used in “A Minor Biography of
Huang Su,” also published in 1983.18
“The Mountain Road” is told from the perspective of Li Guomu,
whose sister-in-law, Cai Qianhui, is hospitalized at the beginning of
the story. Doctors at various hospitals have not been able to diagnose
the cause of her illness.When asked whether Cai has recently experienced
any great sadness, Li Guomu recalls how his sister-in-law
wept over a newspaper report of the parole of four political prisoners
who were arrested in the early 1950s, along with her husband,
Li’s older brother, Li Guokun, who was executed.The report marks
the beginning of the deterioration of Cai’s health. After Cai wills
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herself to die, Li finds among her effects a letter to one of the newly
released prisoners,Huang Zhenbo,with whom she had had a romantic
relationship.The letter reveals that not only was she not married
to Li’s brother, but she did not even know him well. In the early
1950s, when the government conducted massive arrests of left-leaning
intellectuals, her parents had secretly arranged for her brother to
cooperate with the government and turn in his comrades.Although
he had complied, he still was arrested with those he betrayed. Guilt
and shame over her family’s action prompted Cai to pretend to be
the wife of Li Guokun and to work for the Li family for the next
thirty years.
David Der-wei Wang, reading Chen’s story as an illustration of
Communist hunger politics, observed that “Chen Yingzhen has
invested the story of this enigmatic figure with a touching allegory
about political idealism and its betrayal.”19
A similar observation can
be found in Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang’s analysis of Chen’s works:
“ChenYingzhen’s stories are despondent, lamenting the fate of idealistic
individuals betrayed by the unpredictable course of history.They
also condemn contemporaryTaiwanese society for its rampant materialism
and devotion to creature comforts, products of the capitalist evil
corrupting people’s lives.”20
Indeed,as the letter discloses,Cai Qianhui
castigates herself for abandoning her ideal and indulging in material
comfort. But Chen Yingzhen creates the figure of a self-sacrificing
woman in order to indict capitalist society, in contrast to the idealism
and self-devotion of young men like Li Guokun and Huang Zhenbo.
In the process, Chen describes the inhumane and lasting effects of
the White Terror: a family sacrificing other families in order to save
their son; a woman sacrificing her own youth as a form of reparation;
and a younger brother’s inability to face the past resulting from many
decades of self-censorship.
Examining Chen’s story for the ways that literature bears witness
against history,Yomi Braester argues that “‘Mountain Path’ [sic] points
to literary testimony as always-already belated, addressing either the
mute dead or the deaf living.The author cannot recover a voice free
of the doubts—his own and his readers’—that have been ingrained
during years of oppression and suppression.”21
A literary recuperation
of a historical past by its very nature cannot but remain fragmentary
at best. In Braester’s view, such a characteristic in fictional works by
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Chen and others “is a sign of Taiwanese writers’ recognition of their
inability to redress past wrongs and rewrite history into a narrative of
progress and redemption.”22
We can take Braester’s argument a step further and examine how
Chen’s story exemplifies the effects of the White Terror, by applying
Maurice Halbwachs’s notion of autobiographical memory as the
memory of events that we have personally experienced in the past.
It may also serve to reinforce the bonds between participants. . . .
It stands to reason, however, that autobiographical memory tends
to fade with time unless it is periodically reinforced through contact
with persons with whom one shared the experiences in the
past. . . . In any case, autobiographical memory is always rooted in
other people.23
The power of suppression affects people not solely by the loss of their
historical memory (the “forgotten” 2/28 Incident) but also by the
more sinister effect of isolation, of which Cai Qianhui is the prime
victim.Without periodic reinforcement through contacts with other
participants,because they either were killed or are still imprisoned,she
loses her memory of the past until the day she reads about the release
of the one of the political prisoners, a coparticipant.
Conversely, the author exploits the fading of Cai Qianhui’s autobiographical
memory, even though it serves the purpose of protesting
government suppression, in his attack on the detrimental effects
of capitalism, which, in turn, questions the portrayal of the victims,
particularly women,of atrocity.Like Li Guomu,whose brother is executed,
Cai Qianhui, whose brother also was arrested, is a victim herself,
although she may not consider herself one, for she believes that
by collaborating with the government to save her brother, her parents
have deprived her family of the status of victim.The development of
the story suggests that there can be only one kind of victim, and, in
a perverse way, this story calls into question the definition of victimhood.What
constitutes a victim of political persecution seems to be
self-determined in Chen’s story. Cai’s own brother indeed betrays his
comrades,but is the betrayal not a result of the suppression of dissident
and persecution? Does his right to claim victimhood stop once he is
coerced into collaborating with the government? As her letter reveals,
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“Six months later Hanting [Cai Qianhui’s brother] returned, pale and
exhausted. . . .Unable to endure the pangs of conscience,he started to
drink, and on several occasions when drunk he admitted to me that
he had implicated many people who were later arrested.”24
Would
repentance alleviate his guilt? Although it is not meant as an apology
for her brother’s action, my contention focuses more on the effects of
the White Terror, which, not unlike the cruel conditions during the
Cultural Revolution on the mainland, twisted humanity and stripped
many people of compassion and conscience.
Moreover, what is particularly disturbing about Chen’s story is the
double victimization the author inflicts on Cai Qianhui in order to
convey his well-known opposition to capitalism. As Braester points
out, “her survival seems immoral when compared to the fate of the
long-imprisoned and the dead.”25
To put it more bluntly, ChenYingzhen
criticizes the Taiwanese people’s complacency and indulgence
in material comforts by having Cai Qianhui confess in her letter to
Huang Zhenbo:“Your release from prison has shocked me into awareness.I
have been tamed by the capitalist commodity society,have been
so well nourished that I have become a sort of domestic animal.”26
Cai
Qianhui not only is a woman-cum-domestic animal who betrays the
idealism of her younger days,but also represents the kind of Taiwanese
who pursues sensual enjoyment.
“Feminists can charge Chen Yingzhen with indulging the idea of
female self-effacement in support of a male-centered revolutionary
cause,” David Wang writes. “I suspect, nevertheless, that Chen Yingzhen
is no more an ideological fanatic or a misogynist than he is
a modernist informed by the (anti-)heroism of the absurd.”27
While
some may argue that Chen is likely more an ideologue than a misogynist,
we cannot help but question the employment of women as the
embodiment of comfortable domesticity and,more important,Chen’s
portrayal of a self-sacrificing devotee to the dissidents’ cause, particularly
because her redemption is denied to her twice. Cai Qianhui
willingly turns herself into a de facto servant of the victim’s family
to redress a crime committed by her family.“When the men [in her
life] are imprisoned or die for righteous causes and justice,the women
have to take care of their offspring, but when the women accumulate
a bit of wealth as a result of their hard work, they are condemned as
domestic animals.”28
She slaves away for the victim’s family,not only to
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compensate the family whose son was implicated by her own family,
but also as a way to punish herself:“I worked extremely hard.I worked
myself as though I were being driven by a cruel and abusive master,
making myself a slave physically and emotionally.”29
But her labor only
leads to the enjoyment of a comfortable life (albeit self-proclaimed),
from which she needs to be redeemed once more, this time, by her
death.On the narrative level,when her mission of atoning for a crime
she did not commit is accomplished, the author has Cai Qianhui will
herself to die in order to deliver his political diatribe.We are reminded
of the Algerian women who were unveiled and veiled at the whim of
the male colonial and Algerian governments in their effort to recoup
(male) dominance and authority.
On the surface, Cai Qianhui appears to be a positive, sympathetic
character, a figure like Mother Earth, but in fact, she is a triple victim:
of the White Terror, of her own convictions, and of the author’s need
to condemn capitalism. Her death “is a necessary means for filling in
the blanks in history.”30
We could even argue that her death is inevitable,
for the author needs her to die in order to make a point. David
Wang put it most succinctly by contending that “‘Mountain Path’
faces the challenge of recalling,elegiacally,the bygone days of political
fervor amid the ruins of revolutionary praxis”31
and that after atoning
for her brother’s failure to be a true revolutionary, Cai Qianhui now
has to redress the failure of a whole generation.
Moreover, this narrative strategy renders her a powerless woman
who seems to live in the past and for the past.The occasions in which
we see her speaking are mostly taken up by reminiscences of the past
and often in fragments, as she lacks contact with her coparticipants
in the past. A similar view can be found in Lucien Miller’s analysis
of Chen’s works:“For many of [Chen Yingzhen’s] characters, this
contemplative mode of participation and transcendence is difficult
to achieve because too often their reflection is carried out in a selfenclosed
world of their own making.”32
The last instance of Cai Qianhui’s
inability to speak for herself is the letter, unsent and discovered
posthumously. The mystery of the cause of her death and the reason
for her self-sacrifice are finally solved by the male narrator, who
refuses to share the letter with anyone, including his wife, who also
is portrayed as a caring, hardworking woman. The textual violation
and narrative violence in the way that female victims are presented
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is disturbing and reflects the problems with Chen Yingzhen’s gender
politics:“It is the effect of a male-centered historical view to have a
female protagonist as the one who transmits and forgets the memory
of the White Terror, and it is undoubtedly an ‘example’ of ‘ideological
predetermination.’”33
“A Minor Biography of Huang Su” and Madness
Compared with the other works analyzed in this chapter,Lin Shuangbu’s
story falls into a category all by itself.Whereas all women in the
other stories are guilty by association,“A Minor Biography of Huang
Su” places the female victim directly at the scene of the massacre. In
other words, the female victims in other stories suffer because men
in their families (parents, brothers, or husbands) are implicated or
involved. By contrast, rather than characterizing these women as victims
of family connections, Lin’s story describes the firsthand experience
of an innocent victim who happens to be at the wrong place at
the wrong time.
“A Minor Biography of Huang Su” is the story of nineteen-yearold
Huang Su, who, in the space of a single day, changes from a
happy bride-to-be into an accused murderer and eventually into a
madwoman.The story opens on a spring day in 1947, as Huang Su
awakens at the crack of dawn, filled with excitement. She is getting
married in two weeks, and her mother is taking her shopping in
town. After making purchases at a fabric store, Huang Su and her
mother arrive at a sundry shop,where her mother picks out a cleaver
for Huang Su just as a commotion breaks out on the street. Two
crowds of angry mobs attack each other with clubs, bricks, and broken
liquor bottles. Huang Su, separated from her mother, is carried
along with the mobs and eventually falls down on a corpse when
she is hit on the back.The cleaver,intended as a domestic instrument
for her wifely duties, is mistaken as a weapon in the public outcry,
and Huang Su is arrested, imprisoned, and sentenced to death. But
she then is proclaimed not guilty at the execution ground, at the
moment the executioners are about to shoot her. She is literally
shocked out of her wits and goes mad.When she returns home, she
learns that both her parents have fallen ill during her imprisonment
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and that the marriage proposal has been withdrawn.After both parents
die, Huang Su is neglected by her brothers and sisters-in-law
and wanders around the village aimlessly as an aging madwoman.
The story ends with her walking down a railroad track as a train
bears down on her.
Scholars who have examined Lin Shuangbu’s story inevitably mention
his revelation of its background. According to Lin himself, the
character of Huang Su is based on the image of a madwoman in the
village where Lin attended middle and high school. But the story
would lose its significance if it were not for another extratextual figure:
Lin’s high-school English teacher, who somehow let the words
“2/28”slip into his lecture one day.Lin claimed that he raised his hand
to ask the meaning of 2/28, but the teacher, in a state of panic, adamantly
denied that he had said anything.The author continued with
his questions after class, and finally the teacher, speaking Taiwanese,
told him the first thing Lin had ever heard about the 2/28 Incident.
The teacher also mentioned the madwoman in town and explained
why she had gone mad.34
It was not until many years later that Lin
Shuangbu finally decided to write the story.
It is difficult, perhaps pointless, to determine the veracity and credibility
of the extratextual story, but the author’s intention to re-create
history is clear, as Lin himself explained:“A concrete individual case
in a historical event emerges and the cold setting now finds a lively
protagonist.”35
In a way,we can argue that the re-creation of history—
the story of Huang Su—is the joint effort of a high-school English
teacher, his student, the adult author, and the madwoman and that the
story would probably have been much different if even one of the
participants had been omitted.The creation of this story mirrors the
unearthing of the 2/28 Incident’s history: from ignorance (the young
author) and self-imposed silence (his teacher) to inquiry to finally
naming the victims.Although we may fault the author for exploiting
the image of a madwoman, we could make an equally valid case for
the author’s attempt to redress historical wrongs and for his giving a
name to the madwoman.
Both Xu Junya and Jian Suzheng consider the story to be an example
of gender stereotyping by a male writer. Lin Shuangbu “employs
a gender conception based on a patriarchal value system and turns
women into a symbol of Taiwan. When the country is in turmoil,
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women cannot help but be dragged in to become the most innocent
victims.”36
Echoing Xu Junya’s reading, Jian Suzheng adds that what
truly concerns the author is not the experience of women but the
destiny of the collectivity. Indeed, what can better represent the ultimate
effect of the 2/28 Incident than an innocent woman,particularly
one who is just about to be married? We also recall that the widow
destined for sati was often portrayed as a “tender child,” invoking a
pathos in the contrast between the young woman as the epitome of
innocence and the injustice inflicted on her.
Different from the rhetoric of anti-sati discourse are the metonymic
characteristics of this betrothed madwoman. On a textual level, the
marriage proposal is withdrawn because of the possibility of contamination
(which also appears in Yang Zhao’s story “Yanhua”). Her
fiancé’s father has told her mother that his son cannot marry a former
political prisoner (not a madwoman). Her mother retorts,
“You know fully well that Asu [Huang Su] isn’t one.”
“What does it matter whether I know or not,” Wang Jinhai’s
father sighed.“People’s words are poisonous.”37
Even though Huang Su is released, she will have to carry the stigma
with her for the rest of her life. In accordance with the politics of
representing atrocity, we detect in the fiancé’s father’s words a slippage
from the actual, physical disability of mental illness to the abstract,
amorphous but omnipotent stain of having been a political prisoner.
Needless to say,the latter is more pernicious and pervasive in its power
to terrorize and thwart any hint of dissent.
Following this line of reasoning, we find that Xu’s and Jian’s critiques
seem incomplete, if not misapplied altogether.What is at issue
in this story is not merely a helpless woman representing a powerless
Taiwan at the mercy of the Nationalist government, but the trope of
a betrothed woman plus madness. In her analysis of Jane Eyre, Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak suggests that the function of the madwoman,Bertha
Mason, is “to render indeterminate the boundary between human
and animal and thereby to weaken her entitlement under the spirit
if not the letter of the Law.”38
In a similar vein, it is only through his
description of the subhuman figure of Huang Su that the author can
convey a sense of outrage over injustice and senseless killing.39
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A novel published in 1989, Chen Ye’s Muddy River, also features
a woman gone mad after her fiancé is arrested and executed. But
madness alone cannot and does not adequately represent the severity
of suffering endured by the Taiwanese. Interestingly, Chen Ye’s madwoman,Yinchai,
like Huang Su, also loses her fiancé, which leads us
to wonder whether the combination of a marriage proposal,a woman,
and her madness is the most effective means of representing state terror
(we will see that both Cai Qianhui and the nameless woman in
Yang Zhao’s “Yanhua” are unmarried, and, as my analysis shows in
the last section of this chapter, even though the Grieving Founding
Mother in Li Ang’s “The Devil in a Chastity Belt” is married, she is
rendered sexless by the demand of opposition politics).The ending of
Huang Su’s engagement resulting from her madness means that the
possibility of childbearing is forever denied her. If we consider her a
sort of “everywoman” of Taiwan, then Huang Su and her madness are
far more significant than merely serving as a symbol of indiscriminate
violence,for her childlessness mirrors the absence of the localTaiwanese
elite for the first two decades after the incident.
Furthermore, a fundamental difficulty of this kind of representation
can be surmised from the suspended ending, when Huang Su is
standing on the tracks and facing a fast-approaching train.That is, if
the protagonist were to be hit by the train, would her death intensify
or lessen the senseless and indiscriminate persecution that starts
Huang Su’s journey down the road from madness to death? Would it
be more tragic? Whether intentional or not, Lin Shuangbu’s portrayal
of Huang Su’s uncertain fate alerts us to the issue of effectively representing
tragedy.
“Flower in the Smoke” and QuestionableVictimhood
In an essay on women, provincial origin, and history in 2/28 fiction,
Jian Suzheng delineates three stages in the fictional representation of
women in 2/28 literature: the period between retrocession and martial
law (1945 to the early 1980s), the years shortly before the lifting
of martial law (in 1987), and the post–martial law era.This periodization
helps illustrate the changing portrayals of women, from innocent
victims to ameliorating and unifying figures of provincial divisions to
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personifications of the complexity between public/national history
and private life.40
The lifting of martial law in 1987 was indeed a watershed
for Taiwanese literature. Before that year, writers understandably
practiced self-censorship, whereas the period after martial law
ushered in a cacophony of literary subjects, including political satire
directed at the president, and female sexuality. Hence, periodization
encompasses this subgenre of 2/28 literature both synchronically and
diachronically, although the expansion of topics and the increasingly
transparent references to 2/28 have been contingent on the gradual
relaxation of government control. While it is not my intention to
conduct a survey of Taiwan’s literary works on this subject, let alone
their periodization,it is important to examine how the representation
of women evolved.To do that, I look at a 1987 story by Yang Zhao
entitled “Yanhua.”41
Narrated by an omniscient “third” person, “Yanhua” describes an
encounter between a young woman and Jin Hongzao, a friend of
her father’s. The young woman’s father, a member of a committee
investigating the bloodshed caused by the illegal cigarettes incident
and later a member of a settlement committee, was arrested and then
executed.The wife of Jin Hongzao, a mainlander, also died during the
incident when a group of angry demonstrators stormed the police station
where she had sought refuge.The intertwined past of the story’s
only two characters is revealed through their conversation.The story
does not contain much action until one day the young woman invites
Jin to her house, where she asks him in and guides his hand in touching
her naked body. Shortly after that night, which appears to be the
climax of the story, Jin is arrested and dies in prison.
Jian Suzheng places Yang Zhao’s story in the second period, with
the following justification:
2/28 fiction written toward the end of the martial law era was
gradually divested of its angry, dark accusatory tone, and the indiscriminate
antipathy toward the Mainlanders slowly dissipated.
Most of the works now took into serious consideration the fact
that the Mainlanders were also victims of political persecution.
Yang Zhao’s “Yanhua” . . . , though also using female characters to
describe the fate of theTaiwanese, broadens the definition of “Taiwanese”
to include the Mainlanders and eliminates the dichotomy
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of“self”and“other”that in earlier 2/28 fiction placed theTaiwanese
at the center. Moreover, the kindness and tenderness of female
characters was also used as a medium of communication between
provincial groups.42
Jian’s characterization ofYang’s story emphasizes the common features
of fictional works written during this period.43
Without a critical analysis
of this approach, Jian gives the impression that she is satisfied with
merely pointing out similarities. A closer examination of the story,
however, exposes the fallacy of using women as a trope for harmony
among provincial groups.
What immediately attracts an informed reader’s attention is the fact
that the young woman does not have a name, whereas the mainland
man does: Jin Hongzao. At one point, the young woman is referred
to as Wang Heshun’s daughter. The lack of a name symbolizes the
absence of a discernible individuality, which may signal the author’s
intention to present her as the quintessential Taiwanese woman, the
“everywoman” of Taiwan. Moreover, it underscores the double victimization
derived from the contaminating effects of the 2/28 Incident,
as evidenced in the withdrawal of the marriage proposal in “A Minor
Biography of Huang Su.” For many members of the victims’ families,
the 2/28 Incident was a contagious disease; they were shunned by
society and harassed by the military police or the secret service. In the
young woman’s own words,
Except for the closest relatives, “none of his friends, colleagues,
supervisors and subordinates dared come [to pay respect at his bier].
Not a single one of them dared to come.”All of a sudden,[the family]
was isolated,like being quarantined during the plague. . . .From
then on, she felt that she herself was like a plague. Shunzi’s [Heshung’s]
daughter.That was Shunzi’s daughter. Occasionally someone
would sneak something to her or help her secretly because she
was Shunzi’s daughter, but in public every one of them stayed clear
of her, absolutely clear of her.44
Her profession seems to confirm the author’s intention.Although
nowhere in the story does the author explain how she became a prostitute,
it requires little imagination to deduce that after her father’s
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death, the girl’s family fell on hard times and she turned to prostitution
as a way to survive. Prostitution, like rape, is a well-worn
metaphor for the injustice inflicted on the subjugated.45
In this story,
prostitution has an additional significance and serves an important, if
disturbing, narratological function.That is, the woman has sex with
American GIs,notTaiwanese men.Although we could read too much
into this trope, it is impossible to avoid discussing the meaning of
such a choice of profession (albeit by the author). Is prostitution the
only weapon in the author’s narratorial arsenal to portray the devastating
effects of the 2/28 Incident? He appears to be convinced that
no other line of work could adequately convey the sense of injustice.
But in the process of personifying the atrocious crimes of the 2/28
Incident, the author symbolically victimizes the victim’s daughter a
second time.
The young woman’s profession also serves to criticize the absurdity
of provincial differences. She reveals to Jin Hongzao that after
her father’s death, her grandmother made every child in the family
swear never to marry a mainlander, and her romantic relationship
with a mainlander is therefore forcefully terminated by the elders in
the family: “‘I cannot marry a Mainlander,’ she said, giving him an
eerie but enchanting smile, ‘but I can sleep with foreigners.’”46
Jian
Suzheng reads this passage as a stricture against control of the female
body:“The female body becomes a battleground for political struggle;
women, under the domination of family clan and provincial groups,
lose autonomy and control over their own bodies and sexuality.”
Earlier in the essay, Jian described Yang Zhao as a male writer
with a feminist consciousness, and the comment just quoted suggests
a positive reading of Yang’s condemnation of the Taiwanese people’s
irrational hatred for mainlanders.Although we may find it difficult to
disagree with Jian’s estimation ofYang’s endeavor, we must also question
whether the juxtaposition of provincial divides and nationality
differences is itself also biased and why provincial disharmony must
be censured in terms that further emphasize the division between self
and other. In other words,Yang seems to be implying that having sex
with foreigners is a more serious violation of Taiwanese individuality
and supremacy than is marrying a mainlander. He has found it necessary
to articulate the narrowly defined provincial identity through a
nationalistic paradigm.
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Jian Suzheng approaches this issue from a drastically different perspective,particularly
in regard to the scene in which the young woman
asks Jin Hongzao to touch her:
His hand shook slightly as it rested on her gaunt, bony shoulder.
He wanted to remove his hand, but he couldn’t. . . .Taking a deep
breath, he let his hand slide along her shoulder, her right arm, her
right elbow, her right wrist, and her right palm. Her hand grabbed
his and put it on her neck. . . . Carefully he moved his hand along
the space between her breasts all the way down to her abdomen
and her navel.He realized it wasn’t as difficult as he’d imagined,but
she suddenly grabbed his hand again, this time to place it on her
right breast. . . . She took a deep breath and placed his hand on her
private part while opening her legs slightly. . . .
Shaking his head,he said,“No,we can’t.”She said insistently,“You
promised.” His hand touched her hair, very very gently caressing the
most sensitive area. He arched his upper body to look at her.The
expression on her face was not the kind of flushed beauty or charm
associated with sex; instead it was more like peace from redemption.
She nearly jumped up to grab hold of him.Choking on tears,she
said,“I always felt that my body was so filthy I could never cleanse
it no matter how I tried.” Her tears dripped onto his body through
the open collar of his shirt.“Last night thatWhite GI pushed down
hard on me and kissed every part of my body, including. . . . I hate
him. It’s fine now; now I feel fine. My body is mine again.” 47
In Jian Suzheng’s view, the young woman’s action represents a new
attitude toward provincial identities:
The contradiction that [the young woman]“cannot marry a Mainlander
but can sleep with foreigners as a prostitute” can be resolved
only after the barrier between provincial groups is dismantled and
the provincially based labels of “self” and “other” are peeled off.
There is nothing sexual about the young woman playing an active
role and guiding Jin Hongzao to caress her body. First of all, it is a
symbolic gesture of the mingling of theTaiwanese and Mainlander,
and secondly, it represents a female resistance to political struggle
and demand to take back the control of her own body.48
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Jian’s well-intentioned reading notwithstanding, it is difficult not
to consider this passage an expression of male fantasy, as it remains
unclear how a young woman guiding an older man, her own father’s
friend, to touch her naked body constitutes the elimination of provincial
differences. Jian and perhaps the author seem to be suggesting
that the mere fact that the young Taiwanese woman asks a mainland
man to touch her is evidence enough for the emergence of a new
attitude toward provincial differences.Such a reading/writing inevitably
elides the issue of victimhood and simplifies the cause of the 2/28
Incident.That is, by using the intimacy between a Taiwanese woman
and a mainland man,both of whom are victims of 2/28,to suggest the
elimination of provincial hatred, Jian and Yang imply that provincial
differences were the sole or primary cause of the incident.Although I
will not present historical research to refute such a simplistic explanation,
the many works by historians and scholars clearly point to far
more complicated causes.
How the young woman’s action can represent resistance to political
struggle remains unclear as well, both logically and narratologically.
This reading likely comes from the fact that at her grandmother’s
request and at her father’s bier, she swore not to marry a mainlander,
so that actively seeking body contact with Jin, a mainlander, and thus
disregarding her earlier promise can be considered a defiant act. But
the passage just quoted displays at best a crude understanding of female
subjectivity vis-à-vis ethnic conflict. If indeed the young woman is
motivated by a desire to defy familial control over her body, then
doesn’t Jian Suzheng’s idea of symbolic attitude toward provincial harmony
mean a different kind of ideological yoke? Once again, female
subjectivity has been subsumed under ethnic politics.
Who Is theVictim in “The Devil in a Chastity Belt”?
“The Devil in a Chastity Belt” is the first story in Li Ang’s famous
and,to some,infamous collection Everyone Sticks Incense into the Beigang
Burner. Criticism of the collection following its publication is well
known and not particularly relevant to my study.49
Suffice it to say that
the story and others in the collection explore the relationship between
sex and politics and the means by which women gain power inTaiwan.
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The debates and scandal, however, have obscured the aspect of the
female victim of an authoritarian government and Li Ang’s subversion
of the definition of victimhood.The stories examined in this chapter so
far have focused on female victims who suffer either because of family
members (father or brother) or because of an untimely presence at the
scene of a massacre,all of them“guilty”by association.Common among
such literary works, women appear innocent even by today’s standard;
that is,none of them is portrayed as a member of the Communist Party
or as a left-leaning intellectual, even though there were a few female
activists and Communist Party members.50
Furthermore, these women
are usually presented as passive recipients who atone for other’s crimes
or are simply incapable of living on their own. It is in this discursive
milieu that Li Ang’s story becomes poignant and meaningful.
The nameless protagonist, later nicknamed the “Grieving Founding
Mother,”comes from aTaiwanese middle-class family,which gives
her an education in music,Japanese tea ceremony,flower arrangement,
and literature. As a high-school music teacher, her only connection
with politics at first is her husband, “Cannon,” a legislator who was
arrested during a crackdown on political dissent. After her husband,
whose only crime was meeting with foreign observers, is sentenced
to fifteen years in prison, she is elected as a people’s representative and
later becomes a legislator.
Similar to other female protagonists in stories dealing with the
2/28 Incident or the White Terror, the nameless Grieving Founding
Mother is an involuntary participant in politics. In this way, Li Ang
underscores Taiwan’s gendered political arena, in which women are
not expected to and are usually discouraged from playing an active
political role.51
Unique to Taiwanese opposition politics, however, a
few women, like the protagonist, gained visibility and political positions
when the men in their lives were arrested and imprisoned during
the White Terror. The irony of the Grieving Founding Mother
is that it is precisely her husband’s arrest that gives her the opportunity
to become active in politics. Accordingly, if active participation
in politics is a form of female empowerment, then Li Ang has completely
subverted the definition of a female victim by problematizing
the meaning of victimhood.That is, without her husband’s arrest, she
would never have become a victim, but her victimhood, in turn, has
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given her political resources unavailable at the time to many other
Taiwanese, men and women alike.
Nonetheless, the author refuses to pin down the definition of victimhood
by making her protagonist’s participation dubiously motivated.
The Grieving Founding Mother has gone into politics not because she
is interested in opposition’s cause but because she believes that it is the
only way for her to be reunited with her husband.Even she herself,after
a remarkable performance in the congress,intimates to a woman writer
that “there is nothing great or admirable about me; I didn’t choose to
make this sacrifice willingly.All I want is to go back to the life I had
before, with my husband back beside me, and a home of our own,
and our two children.”52
Her confession may read like a glorification
of motherhood and wifedom, but a sense of irony is discernible if we
contrast the emphasis on her role as a mother/wife with the grandiose
nickname/title, the Grieving Founding Mother, bestowed on her.That
is, she would rather be a full-time mother than the founding mother
of the nation, but circumstance and the political realities of Taiwan
demand that she forgo the former and adopt the identity of the latter.
Li Ang also seems to be proposing a different kind of victimhood,
one derived not from the imprisonment of her husband but from
the unbearable burden of martyrdom. In contrast to the ambiguity
concerning the force behind the protagonist’s transformation from a
graceful music teacher into a political activist, Li Ang explicitly portrays
her as a desexualized being: “Her romance and her love-life as
a woman had forever ceased to be in her thirty-second year, on the
Christmas Eve of the Big Arrest.”53
From then on, frozen in time and
space, she can only be the “grieving mother of the nation,” leading a
life of “forced celibacy and repressed sexuality,”54
not a woman with
feelings and desires.The process and function of defeminization call to
mind Ban Wang’s discussion of the sublime and gender:
Sublimation is a transformation from a lower to a higher, purer
state of existence. In psychoanalytical terms, this would mean a
transformation of instinctual and libidinal energies into “higher,”
culturally sanctioned and valued activities. In the light of the tension
between the masculinist sublime and the feminine detail, this
implies that culture is a process of overcoming and sublimating the
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feminine. It is a constant vigil to defend against those disruptive,
feminine elements.55
In the masculine world of opposition politics, the feminine is indeed
considered disruptive, and sexual desire must be suppressed in order
for the grieving mother to complete her induction into the hall of
(male) politicians.
But more important, the grieving mother stops smiling after she is
forced to send her children abroad to avoid discrimination. In other
words, the formation of the Grieving Founding Mother is completed
by her separation from her children, not by her husband’s arrest.Thus
we must ask,for whom is the founding mother grieving? As a mother,
she grieves for the loss of her children, but she is not simply a mother;
she is the mother of the country (guomu). A different, higher meaning
is ascribed to her, a simple woman with a simple wish for a happy
family life,and she is doomed to play the greater role.Appealing to her
motherly role in the family (jia) to counter the political persecution
from the nation (guo), she nevertheless falls into the trap of a depersonalized
identity, because the meaning of her existence, not unlike
that of Cai Qianhui, is contingent on the rhetoric of family.
This kind of victimhood is gender specific and is inflicted on the
woman not only by an oppressive government but also by men in the
opposition camp. In order to exploit the image of a political prisoner’s
wife, the men in the party prescribe a rigid quasi-widowhood, and her
career as a public figure is forever clouded by suspicion regarding her
ability to fully participate in opposition politics:56
“Since women were
defined in terms of reproductive and caretaking functions for which
they were assumed to be suited by nature, they were excluded from
full participation as citizens.”57
Ironically, it is precisely this function of
caretaker that is exploited by the opposition camp.That is,the image of
a mother grieving for her fatherless children (not for her loss of a husband)
serves as the ultimate accusation against government oppression.
Also noteworthy is Li Ang’s moniker for the female protagonist:the
Grieving Founding Mother (of the Nation), or Beishang de guomu.
Quoting John Schaar’s writing on authority, Kathleen Jones observed
that“the founding of communities constitutes a symbolic birth unique
among all births: it is a birth without mothers.”58
But the birth of an
imagined Republic of Taiwan is a birth by mothers alone.Whether by
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serendipity or by design, Li Ang creates a guomu not only to counter
the dominant discourse of the Guomindang, whose iconic founder,
Dr. SunYat-sun, is the founding father, guofu, but also as a gesture to
reclaim authority in the ambivalent status of women in the opposition
camp. Consequently, the grieving mother in Li Ang’s story operates
in a narrow space cracked open by the unique political conditions of
Taiwan,but she is forever walking a tightrope that is the very embodiment
of such ambiguous victimhood.
At the beginning of this chapter, I introduced women from three different
regions and the pivotal roles they played (willingly or unwillingly)
in shaping their nations’ tradition at a particular historical
juncture. In colonial Algeria, the unveiling of the indigenous women
became a civilizing project for the French, and the reveiling by the
Algerian male authority represented a sign of recovered Algerian cultural
heritage. Indian widows and sati were turned into a virtual site
of immolating Indian tradition in a contest of scriptural interpretation.
In both countries, women were marginalized, set aside as trophies to
be claimed by the victors. Similarly, in their readings of Xiao Hong’s
novel about women and suffering, Chinese male intellectuals chose
to view them as victims of foreign aggression rather than as women
oppressed by Chinese culture and poverty.
It is no coincidence that women inAlgeria,India,and China gained
such discursive attention at similar junctions of their history:the birth
of a new nation, which was carried out through the contestation of
traditions and the creation of new historical narratives.59
Not dissimilarly,Taiwan
after martial law witnessed the birth of a new nation
with a new historiography, particularly in the literary field. Writers
are re-creating scenes in and the impacts of various events to fill in
the gaps in history, and a new Taiwan is being written into existence.
In this body of literature,women as victims are clearly considered one
of the most powerful tropes to convey a sense of injustice.What I cite
as examples in my examination of the literary employment of female
victims can be considered as quasi-archetypes: self-sacrificing wife,
madwoman, prostitute, and grieving mother.This obviously is not an
exhaustive list of female victims in reality, for, as mentioned earlier,
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literary works generally exclude female activists and Communists.
We read about fictional re-creation of Zhong Haodong’s unflinching
walk toward the execution ground, but we cannot find a literary
portrayal of female victims in such a circumstance.60
This sort of selective,
somewhat narrow, roster is politically motivated because writers
need a particular type of victim to advance their agenda, whether
to condemn moral degeneration and a loss of ideals or to indict the
pernicious effects of the White Terror.
Yet as I have shown in analyzing Li Ang’s story, the definition of
victimhood is in fact never transparent. Such equivocal portrayals of
women as victims not only indicate an evolving understanding of Taiwanese
history but also become a crucial narrative device that helps
avoid what was best summed up by David Wang: “A ritual account
of the most repugnant crime can degenerate into a most boring pastime
and ultimately trivialize the crime itself.A literature of constant
engagement will produce the effect of a literature of alienation.”61
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