In the above discussion, I have tried to highlight the autobiographical elements in Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards, in order to explore how Nieh and Chen have transferred their traumatic memories into their fictional writings. While in both two semi-autobiographical novels the portrayals of individual and family traumas are interwoven with the delineation of tumultuous national history, those traumas
represented by Nieh and Chen in their works may resonate with different ethnic groups’ traumatic experiences in Taiwan. I personally agree with Kali Tal on her remark that “[e]ach author [of literatures of trauma]…affirms the process of
storytelling as a personally reconstructive act, and expresses the hope that it will also be a socially reconstructive act…” (121). Hence, in the last section of this chapter, I aim to compare the positions from which Nieh and Chen tell their stories concerning collective traumas in Taiwan, and further explore what effects the two novels may bring to the traumatized as well as the non-traumatized in Taiwan.
I would like to borrow the concept of “positions of enunciation” from Stuart Hall
to present my comparison of the positions from which Nieh and Chen represent the national/collective traumas. In his essay “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Hall reflects upon the representation of cultural identity in cinematic works and contends that identity, rather than “an already accomplished historical fact,” is a on-going
“‘production’” that is always formed within representation (392). “The practices of representation,” Hall suggests, “always implicate the positions from which [the creators of certain works] speak or write—the positions of enunciation” (392;
emphasis in the original).
Indeed, Nieh and Chen demonstrate to us distinct “positions of enunciation”
while intending to mirror collective sufferings of Taiwanese in the twentieth century in their semi-autobiographical novels. Significantly, the positions from which Nieh and Chen narrate the trauma stories not only reflect the two authors’ individual perspectives rooted in their own ethnic backgrounds but also reveal the collective traumatic memories held by the ethnic groups they belong to. As Nieh’s Mulberry and Peach displays the exile journey of a refugee woman from China, it epitomizes the exile experience shared by thousands of Chinese refugees who had no choice but to flee to Taiwan in the era of unrest: although successfully escaping from the political and social tumults in their hometown, they inevitably had to live in an atmosphere of political oppression in the foreign land. By contrast, Chen’s Mazu’s Bodyguards portrays the story of a native Taiwanese family—although composed of a mixture of ethnicities—whose traumatic experiences are intertwined with the national upheavals in twentieth-century Taiwan; the most notable examples may be the conflicts between the civilians and the governments during both the periods of Japan’s colonization and the Kuomintang’s one-party dictatorship.27
27 Since its publication, Mazu’s Bodyguards has been widely recognized as a national allegory written by a “Taiwanese daughter.” In my thesis, I also emphasize this major characteristic of the novel.
However, it should not be neglected that the refugee experience of the narrator’s father Er-ma, a
Nevertheless, both Nieh and Chen have expressed that although they have embedded the private traumatic stories into the public traumatic events, they do not aim to focus on portraying the sufferings of any particular group of people, but would like to represent the conditions of all those who are being oppressed so that their readers can reflect upon the trauma issues in Taiwanese history.28 What is so
significant about this concern shared by Nieh and Chen is that instead of reinforcing the dichotomy which many people tend to employ when dealing with Taiwanese history and literature,29 both authors stress that while trauma issues have been ubiquitous throughout history, oftentimes they are perceived partially or even distorted by people due to ethnic stereotypes and political ideologies.
What have motivated the two authors to bring the above reflection among their readers may be attributed to the intricacy of their family histories and lived experience, which has made them aware of the ambivalence of identification. In Nieh’s preface to her memoir Three Lives, she has written that throughout her life, her identity has been changing but never been apart from the word “wai” (namely “out” in English) (12). In addition, when being asked about her political leanings, Nieh has claimed that she supports neither the left nor the right due to her father’s being killed by the
Communists and her being oppressed by Chiang Kai-shek’s government; ironically, it
mainlander, occupies a considerable portion of the novel; Er-ma is also the victim of Kuomintang’s oppression.
28 Nieh has even claimed that by writing Mulberry and Peach, she wanted to depict the predicament that every human being on the earth may experience; see the interview “Tao yu kun” (“Fleeing and Being Trapped”) conducted by Yu-huei Liao. As for Chen’s case, see Note 15.
29 Kuo-wei Chen borrows the political and cultural critic Yang Zhao’s observation to remark that after the lifting of martial law, the public in Taiwan has been separated into “we” and “they,” that is to say, the so-called Taiwanese is considered as the group of people who identify with Taiwan while the
“waishengren” (the mainlander) is regarded as the opposite (Xiang xiang Taiwan: Dang dai xiao shuo zhong de tsu chun shu xie [Imagining Taiwan: Writing Ethnicity in Contemporary Fiction]
9-10; emphasis in the original). Besides the opposition quoted from Chen, there exist other common binary oppositions that are parallel to the local Taiwanese (the “real” Taiwanese) /the mainlander, such as the oppressed/ the oppressor, the victim/the privileged, etc. Similarly, in the realm of Taiwanese literature, there has sprung literary sectionalism through which some critics judge whether a literary work is “Taiwanese” or not. Under the circumstance, the factors that those critics may consider while determining the “Taiwaneseness” of a work include the author’s ethnic identity, the subject of the work, the language that the author employs, and so on.
was because her fathers’ death under the communist regime that the Kuomintang government did not arrest her while Lei Chen and three others were arrested in “The Free China Fortnightly Incident.”30 As for Chen, she has stated in the interview conducted by Cornelius, “Coming from an ethnically mixed family, I have been taking a rather ambiguous attitude toward the issue of identity, later I have found that I have always been a bystander, but not a silent bystander.... I think I have been making the inquiry ‘Who am I?’ throughout my whole life…” (“Before Becoming a Husband, He Was a Wife” 334).
Despite the fact that both Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards do not go far beyond their autobiographical contexts—that is, Mulberry and Peach centers on a mainlander woman’s life story and Mazu’s Bodyguards delineates mainly the
traumatic experiences of native Taiwanese and mainlanders while omitting those of other ethnic groups—the two novels, I think, still contribute to what Tal calls as the
“socially reconstructive act[s]” (121) of trauma literature writers. The voice of an individual’s wound, as Caruth asserts, is not only about his or her own past, but also about “the way in which one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another…
through the very possibility and surprise of listening to another’s wound” (Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History 8). Here in this comparative study of Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards, I consider that the two novels, as written by authors having different “positions of enunciation,” can illustrate Caruth’s idea about how one’s trauma relates to another’s within the context of Taiwanese society. More precisely, since the two novels display collective traumatic memories belonging to different ethnic groups in Taiwan, they enable readers from different backgrounds on this island to gain understanding of how each ethnic group’s
30 See “Hualing Nieh Engle Talks about Her ‘Three Lives’ and the Founding of the UI International Writing Program” by Jennifer Feeley; http://fulltilt.ncu.edu.tw/Content.asp?I_No=45).
traumatic experiences have been interwoven into Taiwan’s traumatic history and thereby treat Taiwanese history with a more impartial angle, which, can be considered as a starting point for reconciliation and justice.
In this chapter, I have discussed Nieh’s and Chen’s acts of writing traumas in their semi-autobiographical novels, and further explore the different “positions of enunciation” they possess when representing national/collective traumas in Taiwan.
Here, it is worth mentioning that Nieh and Chen, while living outside their homelands, both have claimed that their roots are their mother tongue and their acts of writing about their native lands are greatly connected with their experiences of living abroad.31 To read the two authors’ statements within the domain of trauma studies, one can refer to the kernel of trauma theory—the belatedness and repressiveness of trauma. As Caruth points out, “the attempt to understand trauma brings one repeatedly to this peculiar paradox: that in trauma the greatest confrontation with reality may also occur as an absolute numbing to it, that immediacy, paradoxically enough, may take the form of belatedness” (“Trauma and Experience: Introduction” 6). Being
“numbing” to the traumatic events, the victims were thereby unable to verbalize their traumas at the immediate moments when the events occur. For both Nieh and Chen, it was by staying away from the very “traumatic space” for a certain period of time could they write their semi-autobiographical novels representing traumas.
While I have interpreted Nieh’s making of the traumatized female protagonist as
31 In her essay “At Home and Elsewhere,” Feng has translated a quote from Nieh’s “Sangqing yu Taohong liu fang xiao ji” (“Note on the Exile of Mulberry and Peach”; Sangqing yu Taohong 271):
“When I moved to Iowa from Taiwan in 1964, for some years I could not write a single word.
Because of this uncertainty about my roots, my creative pen had been suspended between Chinese and English. During those years, I read; I lived; I experienced; I meditated; I explored. Finally I discovered only by writing in Chinese about the lives and affairs of the Chinese could I feel at home and set free. Then and there I knew that my mother tongue is my roots. China is my native. Iowa is my home” (qtd. in Feng 129-30). Similarly, in her interview with Cornelius, Chen has stated that “I think that it is by staying a certain distance away from one thing that I can see it clearly…my root is my mother-tongue culture, but not a place…” (“Before Becoming a Husband, He Was a Wife” 324).
a schizophrenic in Mulberry and Peach with Caruth’s idea of the “impossible history”
carried by the traumatized, the concept can also be applied to examine Nieh’s and Chen’s composition of their trauma narratives here. According to the two definitions of the word “impossible” cited before, the “impossible history” not only can mean the history that is unable to exist (as it should be referred to in Caruth’s original
statement), but also can describe the fact that the traumatic past which is “very
difficult to deal with” may recur to the traumatized subject. It is when Nieh and Chen, as traumatized subjects themselves, reveal their difficult pasts can they make the telling of their histories no longer impossible.
Significantly, in both Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards, confined spaces are among the important settings where the two authors’ “impossible
histor[ies]” are unveiled. While studying the liminal spaces in Mulberry and Peach, Feng quotes from Mihai Spariosu to explain the idea of liminality in anthropology and literary studies. As an anthropological term, the liminal means a transitional period of a rite of passage during which the existing community norms are “inverted or
dissolved” (“At Home and Elsewhere” 139). When the concept of liminality is applied to literary studies, Spariosu regards “literary discourse as a mediating, neutral space where new discursive games of power are being ceaselessly (re)created and old ones, constantly tempered” (qtd. in Feng 139). The liminal spaces in the novel that Feng has discussed include the stranded boat in Part I, the besieged city in Part II, and the attic in Part III. As a conclusion, Feng argues that “liminality is the most
prominent modus operandi of [Mulberry and Peach’s] spatial representations because it corresponds to the psychological mappings of the protagonists and the author” (144;
italics in original). Likewise, as mentioned previously, in Mazu’s Bodyguards Chen purposely makes the rooms of different family members as the spaces in which the characters were entrapped mentally and emotionally at first; however, later the rooms
become the settings where the traumatic pasts become known to the narrator in the text as well as us as readers.
For both Nieh and Chen, adopting the semi-autobiographical novelistic mode to represent their traumas is essential. As suggested by Schwab, who in Haunting
Legacies studies several works about transgenerational trauma of Holocaust survivors written in different narrative modes, “Memoirs often bear the traces, gaps, and
lacunae of trauma like raw scars; fiction, poetry and film can create a more protected space to explore the effects of violence from within multiple voices embedded in imagined daily lives” (5). To extend Schwab’s point, we can state that for victims who attempt to verbalize their psychological wounds, writing in the fictional mode may provide them with the “more protected space” to deal with their own struggles.
In addition to serving as a more psychologically secure way for the traumatized to voice their wounds, the fictional mode of trauma narrative, as some literary critics maintain, may also be more suitable for representing traumas. This idea is elaborated in Anne Whitehead’s Trauma Fiction. According to what Whitehead has quoted from Nicola King, Jean-François Lyotard and Cathy Caruth, in trauma narratives a too definite position of recounting the traumatic experiences should be avoided, for it may undermine the very essence of trauma—possessing force so overwhelming that people cannot fully understand.32 Based on what the above three critics have cautioned, Whitehead argues that compared with literary realism, the fictional mode of narrative may be more apt “to articulate the resistance and impact of trauma” (87).33
Since both Nieh and Chen have indicated the connection between their acts of
32 In fact, as I have mentioned in the introduction of this thesis, Dominick LaCapra and Kali Tal also express this concern about the representation of trauma in literary works. See page 4-5 in Chapter One.
33 When examining several contemporary novels categorized as postmodernist and postcolonial fiction, Whitehead further claims that “the more experimental forms emerging out of postmodernist and postcolonial fiction offer the contemporary novelist a promising vehicle for communicating the unreality of trauma, while still remaining faithful to the facts of history” (87).
writing traumas and their attempts to find a way out of sufferings,34 Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards certainly demonstrate to us not only the authors’
artistic accomplishments, but also the routes through which they attempt to attain relief from their afflictions. In addition, by inserting public history in their storytelling, Nieh’s and Chen’s narratives reverberate with collective traumas shared by different groups of Taiwanese people. As Tal notes, “[w]hen trauma is written as text, it transcends the bound of the personal. It becomes metaphor; yet, when such texts are read, they are once again personalized, assimilated somehow by the reader” (132).
Based on my discussion in this chapter, Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards can be regarded as literature of traumas that assist their authors seeking relief from their past shattering experiences; moreover, the two texts go beyond the realm of self-healing, prompting readers to experience vicariously about others’ wounds.
34 When being asked how she survived during the two years of isolation after “The Free China Fortnightly Incident,” Nieh answered: “From writing and translation” (“Hualing Nieh Engle Talks about Her ‘Three Lives’ and the Founding of the UI International Writing Program” by Jennifer Feeley; http://fulltilt.ncu.edu.tw/Content.asp?I_No=45). Chen has straightforwardly stated that
“Writing can help me be withdrew from psychological and spiritual tumults…” (“Before Becoming a Husband, He Was a Wife” 322).
Chapter Three
The Subversive Voices from the Margins:
Fictional Representations of Traumatized Women in Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards
In the previous chapter, I have examined how Nieh and Chen perform acts of writing traumas in Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards respectively. As mentioned, I consider that by writing their semi-autobiographical novels from the female perspective to represent traumas in both personal and public domains, Nieh and Chen not only create their own “alternative stories” which may help them be relieved of their painful memories but also offer “alternative stories” to counter the male-dominated national discourses in Taiwanese literature. In this chapter, I aim to study the writing strategies Nieh and Chen employ in telling their “alternative
stories,” and also explore what may be indicated by the ways Nieh and Chen construct the texts.
As suggested by the title of this chapter, I consider that the two novels can be read as “the subversive voices from the margins.” This idea is derived from
“Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” in which the feminist theorist bell hooks regards the margin as a strategic space of resistance. According to hooks, the margin is far from being merely “a site of deprivation” (149) but actually provides
“radical openness and possibility” for the marginalized individuals (153); to be more specific, the margin enables one to gain perspectives and identity to produce “a counter-hegemonic discourse” (149). What is noteworthy is that hooks does not suggest that the marginalized should waive their rights or stop striving to move to the center; instead, it is particularly in the margin that one can witness and experience the marginalization, create counter-perspectives and then make the voice of the
marginalized be heard by others.
One related concept worth mentioning here is the “double-voiced discourse”
proposed by Elaine Showalter. In “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” Showalter asserts that women’s writing constitutes “a double-voiced discourse that always embodies the social, literary and cultural heritages of both the muted and the dominant” (263). Indeed, to construct such “double-voiced discourse,” the writer should first identify the position of those muted, namely the margin. In other words, it is through recognizing how the muted develop their identities and perspectives as the minority in contrast with the dominant can a writer include elements of both the marginal and the center. In this way, Showalter’s idea correlates with hooks’.
Undoubtedly, in Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards most of the female characters are marginalized—being inferior, deprived of rights and free will and even oppressed—while living in patriarchal societies. As I have presented by juxtaposing the two novels with Nieh’s and Chen’s accounts of their lived experiences, the two authors’ depiction of the marginalization of women in the novels actually reflect what they have witnessed or experienced in real life.
In regard to portrayals of women in modern Taiwanese literary works
In regard to portrayals of women in modern Taiwanese literary works