Patricia Laurence
Beyond the Little Red Book: Contemporary Chinese Women WritersBrief description Given the surveillance of the National Chinese Union of Writers, some Chinese writers and intellectuals hide their meanings in labyrinths of metaphor, surrealism and ellipsis. Excerpt from article Wang Anyi, one of China’s leading novelists, best captures the swift evolution of Chinese fiction since the death of Mao in 1976. In a dialogue in her 1985 novel Baotown, a grandfather, Bao Yanrong, is speaking to his grandson, Bao Renwen: Son, you’re putting so much time into this…what are you really after? Bao Yanrong was genuinely puzzled. I want to write a novel, Bao Renwen answered. A novel? That is to write a book. Government ask you to write it? No. Commune ask you to write it? No. Then who are you writing for? This question of audience amounts to asking the purpose of literature. Answered more or less routinely in the West, in China, twenty-four years after the demise of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, the question is newly minted. As China moves toward the development of a free-market economy and entrance into free-trade agreements (while shops in Shanghai and Beijing expand with consumer goods and cities grow dense with skyscrapers), people are encouraged to think more about the individual than the communal. The question emerges, what do these economic and cultural shifts mean for literature? |
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