City Women -- Contemporary Taiwan Women Writers, edited by Eva Hung, a Renditions Paperback, 160 pages. Price: HK$89, (US$11.41). Eva Hung is director of the Research Centre for Translation at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
This is a collection of short stories by some of Taiwan's leading contemporary women writers, and the Chinese women they portray here are capable, enterprising, and, if need be, self-sufficient.
Less than a century ago, neither the topology nor the authorship would have been possible.
Emerging women
Since it was the development of modern cities in the early 20th century that changed the lives of Chinese women, the stories collected here are, suitably, all city stories.
At the most basic level, employment in the anonymous city provided a significant number of women from various social backgrounds with the opportunity to break away from the confines of the traditional family and to achieve a certain financial independence.
The beginning of the last century saw Chinese women who grew up in the countryside find jobs in speedily burgeoning cities such as Shanghai, most often as factory hands or domestic servants.
While the work was hard and the remuneration low, the independent income it supplied nevertheless allowed women to pursue a more or less self-sufficient life -- one which differed dramatically from that known to their mothers' generation -- theretofore quite unimaginable to them.
A growing female work force also brought about rapid changes in economic and social relationships, notably in marriage and family.
Though this new urban female population was mostly illiterate to begin with, its literacy rate improved with time. Their daughters and granddaughters would constitute a female readership unprecedented in Chinese history, and in their lives a new dimension for writers to explore.
The development outlined above was mirrored in the experience of young women of the upper and middle classes, who were fortunate enough to receive formal education. Most of them spent their school and working lives in a city environment which was more tolerant and encouraging of new ideas and practices.
While it would be untrue to say that no Chinese woman was given an education before this period, education for women had traditionally been limited to families of the liberal-minded scholarly class and the number who benefited had been decidedly small.
Moreover, the educated women of traditional China were never expected or given the chance to put their learning to use: the only outlet they had was in poetry.
The revolutionary younger generation which took its name from the May Fourth Movement (1919) adopted women's issues as banners for their campaign against the traditional patriarchy. This greatly expanded education and job opportunities for young women. Since these opportunities were all city-based, it was to the major cities that the young women flocked.
The emergence of Chinese women writers in the public sphere was thus closely linked to the development of major cities, where new economic and social structures provided the necessary shelter and support for a generation of nonconformists, and where a new way of life gave them the inspiration for creative writing.
As the standards set by the new, rebellious cultural movement achieved normative status, so the significance of cities in women's writing grew.
Narrative tradition
This is perhaps the main distinction between writing women of old China and those of the modern tradition: women poets of China's classical tradition subscribed to an aesthetics and a view of the world that were similar to those of their male counterparts; what differentiated the two was mainly the women's more restricted place in the world.
The women writers of 20th century China, supported and nurtured by life in the big cities, used the new literature as a means to develop a more personal -- and more realistic -- narrative tradition. Nor is the affinity between writing women and big cities limited to the Chinese scene.
In the literary tradition of the West, women have also drawn greater strength from city life than men. Most male modernist writers of the early 20th century painted a dark picture of the modern metropolis -- as an insatiable monster sucking up resources, or an ugly landscape in contrast to the rural idyll, or the gutter of poverty and overcrowding.
The women writers, however, responded positively to the opportunities and new patterns of life that the big cities offered them.
In the case of China, it is no exaggeration to say that from the May Fourth generation on, the city has been the chosen milieu of almost all significant women writers -- indeed of most educated women -- both as a place to live in and as the setting of their work.
This does not mean, however, that there is uniformity in their work. As society changed, so did the attitudes and concerns of writing women.
New generation
Thus while the May Fourth generation -- with such figures as Ding Ling (1904-86) -- dealt mainly with the intense struggle against the patriarchy, the generation that followed -- such as Eileen Chang (1920-95) -- mapped the subtle changes in the relationships between urban men and women.
What characterizes the works of today's Chinese women writers is an almost completely new social and emotional landscape. In all this, the writings of Eileen Chang, which flourished in the 1940s and have retained a remarkable following since, stand as a landmark in the symbiotic relationship between a woman writer and the city that nurtured and inspired her.
Chang's exploration and depiction of this symbiosis is being continued today notably in the literary work of women writing in Taiwan.
The close affiliation between Chinese writing women and big cities has been particularly strong since the 1960s, when the economies of such Chinese communities as Taiwan and Hong Kong entered a phase of rapid development and transformation.
As the fundamental structures of communities changed, so did the position of women, their social roles, their self-perception and their realignment.
In the exploration and re-definition of women's roles, some of the keenest observations and most persuasive arguments are put forth by women fiction writers. The stories in this book demonstrate the complexities, tensions and frictions that permeate ordinary women's lives in the contemporary world.
This collection of stories, all written in the late 1980s and early 1990s, is about ordinary women whose approach to life and to problem-solving is intelligent but non-intellectual, and whose aesthetics are based on a vibrant material culture.
The two themes which run through this book are human relationships and financial resources; how these themes play out testifies to the dramatic change in Chinese women's social and economic status within the last century.
The social landscape depicted here is one in which formerly taboo elements, such as homosexuality, extramarital affairs, and women's sexual desire, have become part of the everyday scene. While the traditional perceptions of women that remain are manipulated and twisted to fit into the new -- and still shifting -- landscape.
In a sense, this collection provides many unexpected late-20th century answers to Lu Xun's question: "What happens after Nora leaves home?"
Two stories
Selling House and Home is a story built on an ingenious manipulation of women's traditional role as home-maker, wife and mother.
An intelligent but not highly educated divorcee defies her homosexual husband's family and keeps custody of her child. She strives to provide him with an advantageous upbringing and, without assistance from anyone, generates the necessary financial means by buying old houses which she refurbishes and then sells at a huge profit.
What makes the sales different, however, is the guise she adopts to market her houses. This is a story which could only take place in a fast booming urban economy.
The author deals with the emotional strain faced by mother and son when financial security has to be gained at the expense of innocence. Yet readers who approach it from a historical perspective will also marvel at the opportunities today's city-dwelling women have over their mothers' and grandmothers' generations'.
Fin de Siecle Splendour is, in terms of setting and atmosphere, the youngest and most optimistic of the stories collected here.
The heroine, a fashion model in her 20s, relies on her senses -- smell, touch, colour, taste -- to appreciate life and build her future.
She and her friends seem to represent a new breed: women involved in the youth and beauty industry (the part which our material culture considers as the most chic) who may or may not be in a relationship, but who all live independently of men.
Yet we are still faced with ambiguities, for the author says of her heroine:
This is what Mia wants; this is what she has chosen. In the beginning this was not what she wanted, but finally it became her only choice.
The heroine's confidence in women reconstructing the world may or may not be illusory, but she has certainly taken a firm first step towards that goal by making a realistic assessment of her personal circumstances.
It is perhaps impossible to have two women more different than the fashion model of Fin de Siecle Splendour and the housewife of Nineteen Days of the New Party. They live in the same world, albeit in different parts. One is almost tempted to see the family in Nineteen Days as that of the model's middle-aged lover's.
In Nineteen Days we witness the plight of a middle class middle-aged woman who, after devoting half a lifetime to being a housewife and a mother (or a "non-person" in her family), suddenly finds a personal life and financial freedom in the alluring bubble of the stock market.
It is significant that the woman's newly found sense of personal worth is closely linked to her sense of financial well-being. That her daughter should suddenly regard her with respect because of her impressive purchasing power is perhaps the most revealing of the effects a materialistic culture has on human relationships.
Set in a time that marked a turning point in Taiwan's political history (a crashing stock market led to large-scale street demonstrations), Nineteen Days has been perceived by some as a political critique.
A decade on, after the story's topicality has receded, its focus becomes crystal clear. It is about the joys and sorrows of an ordinary woman trapped in a prescribed role who, for a brief moment, glimpsed unimagined possibilities through an open door, only to have that door shut in her face again.
Finally, however much the attitude and subject matter of these stories may differ, they have one major point in common: none of their heroines -- nor, for that matter, their creators -- would be able to thrive if transported out of their usual metropolitan milieu.
The sense of disorientation and fear experienced by the heroine of Fin de Siecle Splendour when she ventures out into the "wild" suburbs for a few hours speaks for them all. These stories and their authors are firmly rooted in the city which is their -- and our -- home.
(China Daily April 24, 2002)
