Nieh Hauling emigrated from Taiwan to America in 1964 and completed a novel
about migration—Mulberry and Peach (Sangqing yu Taohong)—in early 1970s.
Written in Chinese, the publication history of the book reflects the political upheavals
in the history of Mainland China and Taiwan. At first, the novel was banned in
mid-serialization when it appeared in Taiwan, which was obviously caused by some
political intervention. During the next two decades, this book became a “traveling
text” that went through different versions and translations until a republication was
made in America and later in Taiwan.17 The novel not only reflects the diasporic fate
of the author, its traveling experience also corresponds to the exilic theme.
Therefore, Pai Hsien-yung places Mulberry and Peach within the field of exilic
literature, comparing it to a diasporic lament of Chinese people in the twentieth
century as “the wanderer of the century:”
“Mulberry” and “Peach” in fact are both the protagonist’s names, which stand
for her two identities. The whole story is the process of the split and
transformation of her personality. In the beginning she is Mulberry, a girl
coming from Mainland China, who is naïve. At the end she becomes
17 The English version of Mulberry and Peach won American Book Award in 1990. Its Chinese version was also republished in Taiwan in 1997. Sau-ling Wong notes in her afterword of the novel that “in additional to English, Mulberry and Peach has been translated in full into Croatian, Dutch, Hungarian, and Korean, while sections of the novel have been translated into Polish” (“Afterword”
227).
Peach—a totally erotic madwoman who wanders from Mid-West to New York
in America. Nieh Hualing does not simply depict an erotic madwomen’s life
experience. The novel is not merely a case study for clinical observation of
psychology. By the book, the author actually allegorizes the miserable
history of modern China.18
However, as Nieh mentions, this book is about “the fate of ‘human beings’” and
“not just about the fate of ‘Chinese people.’”19 In my opinion, Nieh in the novel
attempts to express the so-called fate by the female protagonist’s exilic life to refer to
human mobility through time. In her construction of the mobility theory, Sau-ling C.
Wong considers that in America mobility is ironically represented as collectively
forced historical experiences to Asian Americans. She argues that the politics of
mobility can be regarded as a tactic that tries to transform the hegemony. By
viewing mobility as a “rival cultural discourse” to disclose the possibilities and
proscriptions of movement in Asian American context, Wong believes that Asian
Americans can thus loosen the fixedness of places and the prohibitions of the
dominant society. In this chapter, therefore, I will borrow her conception of “rival
cultural discourse” to explore Chinese women’s horizontal mobility within the frame
of nationalist/patriarchal system. The central questions that I am working with are
18 This is my translation from “Shiji de piaobozhe: chongdu Sangqing yu Taohong” ([The Wanderer of the Century: Rereading Mulberry and Peach] 276).
19 This quote is translated from “Sangqing yu Taohong lihfang xiaoji” ([Note on the exile of Mulberry and Peach] 271).
the following: in the process of mobility, with a renewed spatial construction, can
women successfully contend with the controlling structure and its encoded system?
Besides, in their mobility, where does the power of resistance come from? How
does this kind of resistance affect their subjectivity in the immigrant America?
Women in Mobility and Spatial Consciousness
As Pai Hsien-yung suggests, Mulberry and Peach is based on the turbulence of
modern China. It portrays Mulberry, a Chinese woman, who experiences Japanese
invasion, the civil war between the Communist party and the Nationalist party, the
“White Terror” in Taiwan, and finally exile in America. Under the investigation and
interrogation of the Immigration Service agents, Mulberry suffers from multiple
personality disorder and finally becomes Peach. So far, it seems that the temporal
and spatial frame of the story covers three places and offers an epic-like presentation
of the modern Chinese diaspora. However, Nieh chooses to write in an
expressionalist way with the insertion of Peach’s four letters to the Immigration
Service agents as prefaces to the four narrative segments—the stranded boat in
Chu-Tang Gorge, the besieged Peking, the attic in Taiwan, and the exile in America.
By doing so, Nieh breaks the simple linearity of History and turns the focus on four
spatial narratives. In other words, Mulberry and Peach is in fact a novel about a
Chinese woman’s mobility and how the spatial consciousness emerges from the
process.
In the story, Mulberry/Peach constantly puts herself into exile or moves with
free will. Her mobility is presented not as directly resulted from national calamity or
family disaster but rather out of her own choice. In part Ⅰ, Mulberry appears in the
scene of the stranded boat as a girl who wants to escape from her family. She does
not go to Chungking in response to the government’s call for young patriots’
volunteer for war. Instead, she is there to run away from the disaffection between
her families.20 Next to this, when people flee from the North to the South, Mulberry
takes an opposite route and flies to Peking to live and marry her fiancé. After the
Communist party takes over Mainland China, her husband and she escape to Taiwan.
Yet, the husband embezzles the government’s money, which causes them to hide in
the attic together with their daughter to avoid being arrested. At last in Part Ⅳ,
Mulberry exiles to America and applies for permanent residency. Peach then takes
the place of Mulberry under the disorder of two identities. She presents visual
evidence of her travel in America with fragmentary maps and proudly announces her
power of mobility with the statement: “I’m on the road again” (Nieh 157).
Moving as a woman in the patriarchcal world, the mobility of Mulberry/Peach
indeed keeps on loosening the long-established codes of gender system. The
20 She runs away from home because she feels dissatisfied with her father who wants to give the family heritage—“jade griffin” —to her brother. And also she does not get along with her stepmother.
movements challenge the active and positive characteristics that are considered
masculine.21 Therefore, Mulberry/Peach’s high mobility—“leaving” and
“movement”— questions the old myth imposed by the patriarchical system, such as
“silent women” and “the fixed ‘mother’ land which awaits conquerors.” Moreover,
different spatial consciousness can emerge from the process of mobility, which
constantly suggests the possibility of resistance and transgression against the
hegemonic discourse of nationalism. If, as Sau-ling C. Wong claims, “the coerced
movement [of Asian Americans] …can quite arguably be read as a kind of immobility
as well, not as blatant as imprisonment but no less damaging” (123), the Chinese
woman’s geographical mobility in the novel therefore not only blurs or transgresses
the limitations of the gender system in America, it also symbolically reverses the
historical experiences of Asian American’s immobility by Peach’s free wanderings.
Thus the mobility brings resistances against both the chauvinistic formation of an
otherized woman and the domination of the White racism.
About the concept of mobility, Wang Zhi-hong has expanded on it in his The
Politics and Poetics of Gendered Flows: “…when flow and mobility become the
intermediary and the manifestation of power and constitute a key factor in the running
21 Wang Zhi-hong thinks that women’s “going out” under the patriarchical system on one hand transgresses the established borders and, on the other hand, it also delimits new lines. He considers it a dynamic process and “since flow combines with public affairs, it sets to be masculine. When women go out and join this flow of history, there are ambiguous transgressions within the encoding of gender system.” This is translated from Xing bie hua liudong dei zhen zhi yu shixue ([The Politics and Poetics of Gendered Flows] 114).
of modern society, they are not only a social phenomenon or tendency but also issues
of political actions” (12 original emphases).22 Therefore, in Mulberry and Peach,
the episodes of movements in different spaces show us how Chinese women’s politics
of mobility works. And, in light of Wong’s idea of “rival cultural discourse,” the
narratives which represent these “political actions” should be tactical due to various
time/space contexts.23 Wong believes that the tactical response coming along with
mobility narratives will be saturated with consciousness of resistance and
transformation, because those who choose mobility will have to face the dominant
cultures or ideologies that favor fixity. Hence, in horizontal mobility, people may
transform their roles or transgress the boundary of geography. Besides, they can
bring about alternative narratives which differ from hegemonic discourses in the
process of dislocation. Wong thus deems that mobility narratives function as a way
of “retelling/remapping” histories. Based on Wong’s argument, a Chinese woman in
mobility with free will may, on one hand, demonstrate masculine characteristics and
transform her role under gender hierarchy. On the other hand, her resistance to
22 Wong’s discussion of flow or mobility might originate from Arjun Appadurai who provides a framework of new mobile world of mutating cultural flows/scapes: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, and ideoscapes. Appadurai believes these flows lead disjunctive relations to each other. And, they will gradually separate the nation from the state. Among the five flows,
“ethnoscape” is closest to Wang’s conception of mobility because it stands for “moving groups and persons” who constitute a shifting world and “appeal to affect the politics of and between nations…”
(Appadurai 222).
23 Wong argues: “we are accustomed to thinking of narrative structure as temporally organized, but in a mobility narrative, place names and the way they are sequenced could also be indices of narrative structure, for mobility by definition involves changes in both temporal and spatial dimensions”
(“Politics of Mobility” 128).
re-establish the spatial discourse set by patriarchical power also makes her
reconfigure female experiences of mobility. Consequently, the woman in mobility
can break the signifying system of the old, patriarchical power and re-arrange peculiar,
dynamic codes of spaces by the power of exile and movement. In Mulberry and
Peach, we can see how Mulberry/Peach challenges the gendered codes of “passive
women/active men” and how she contends with nationalist hegemony by constant
dislocation/de-position.
However, paradoxically, this does not mean that the power and spatial
reconfiguration bringing by mobility can make Mulberry disregard the call for
Chinese nationalism. After immigration, American nationalist domination also casts
a shadow on Mulberry/Peach’s life with immigration agent’s investigations. In
geographical displacements, however, the way she responds to this unceasing call is
through initiating alternative spatial experiences or imaginations to dispel and
transgress the hegemonic control over gender, family, class, nation, and history. As a
result, both Mulberry’s exile and Peach’s wandering are enriched with a sense of
resistance against nationalism. To Peach, in particular, the nationalist hegemony
becomes more complex because of its racist element. Therefore, Peach’s movement
indeed brings more resistant power in a Chinese American context.
In the first part of the story, Mulberry and others are trapped in the stranded boat.
While they are waiting for the boat to move again, it seems that the boat becomes
what Foucault calls a “heterotopia.” It refers to heterogeneous spaces of sites and
social relations and can be constituted in varied forms.24 People get rid of classes,
gender, and morality and are addicted to carnival-like laughter and play, as though
they are put there by Nieh to contrast to the outside world of war. Even so, the
celebratory atmosphere in the boat actually intermixes with the story of the Three
Kingdoms that they sing about, which to some degree instills the grand narratives of
History into this heterotopia. The interpellation of nationalist sentiment is thus made
clear.25
Part Ⅱ is about how Mulberry flies to Peking and marry Chia-Kang, her fiancé.
The ancient capital under the Communist siege becomes disordered. Chia-Kang’s
dream simply implies that the civil war is going to ruin this thousand-year old capital:
“The Temple of Heaven I dreamed about wasn’t like that at all. The Hall of
Prayer, the Imperial Circular Hall, the Altar of Heaven were crowded with
refugees’ straw mats, quilts, and sheets. Ragged pants were hanging out to
dry in the sun on the white marble balustrades. The memorial tablets of the
emperors had been thrown down to the ground, and the Hall of Prayer was full
24 Feng Pin-chia draws upon Foucault’s concept of “heterotopia” to explain how the boat has alternative and imaginary mobility. Because of “its physical mobility and the rich imagination it offers,” the heterotopia makes people wander between History and Reality (Feng, En-Gendering 56).
25 In this part, the story connects history to nationalist patriotism by resorting to loyally devoted historical heroes. One of the six passengers on board—the old man—believes their fate is not unlike those heroes’: “all of us here on the boat are going to Chungking; we are going there because we are concerned about the country….[yet] we are stranded in the midst of history!” (39-40)
of excrement.” (72)26
The Temple of Heaven is originally a holy place symbolizing political and
patriarchical hegemony. It becomes dirty and messy in the dream. This discloses
that the illusion of a perfect nation/family is in danger of breaking into pieces.
Mulberry at first chooses to get married and establish a typical bond of filiative
relation to mend this broken imagination of nationalism. Yet, when the Communist
party occupies Peking, the couple flees to the South and leaves the burden of
family/nation in Peking. In the “no man’s land” (104), places in between the
Nationalist army and the Communist troops, the refugees in the no-name temple re-set
the space of heterotopia where they sing and play as though all are free as people of
no-name, no-family, and no-nation. However, their happiness is intermittently
mixed with anxiety about the war. These refugees after all could not absolutely
achieve the temporary amnesia of no-family and no-nation.
In the third part, the couple flees to Taiwan and Chia-Kang commits a crime.
To avoid being arrested by the Nationalist government, they take their daughter,
Sang-wa, to hide in an attic. The isolation and confinement of the attic make the
triad similar to prisoners on a lonely island. At the same time, the historical fact of
“White Terror” still permeates into the attic, as represented by their collection of the
26 The quotations of the story in this chapter are all quoted from the English version—Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China.
news clips. To the three, the words on the newspaper become the medium for
imagining a nation. They cannot go out, but they can imagine their way out. In
Sang-wa’s diary, this eagerness gradually transforms into disordered narratives and
fantastic plots:
The typhoon is coming. It is raining so hard. They want to hurt the attic
with the wind and rain. They’ll turn me into a wet chicken. They want to
drink soup with people’s meat in it. I draw a dragon on my flour sack. I
wear dragon clothes then turn into a dragon girl. The typhoon breaks the
attic window. Rain comes in. when the rain hits me I become a dragon and
swim out the window. The more it rains, the happier I am. I give out silver
rays as I swim in the sky. They lose again. (148)
From Sang-wa’s narrative, the attic seems to be a kind of mythical space. The world
outside the attic is unfamiliar to Sang-wa and life in the attic is out of normality.
Therefore, she produces the sense of myth out of the reality around her; myth and
reality can not be easily told apart in this case. As Tuan Yi-Fu remarks, “though
inaccurate and dyed in phantasms, [the fantastic field] is necessary to the sense of
reality of one’s empirical world. Facts require contexts in order to have meaning,
and contexts invariably grow fuzzy and mythical around the edges” (88). So far, it
seems that the attic has become a fantastic world and mythical space. Besides, the
“reality of one’s empirical world” mostly comes from the function of the patriarchical
structure. The two women in the attic finally get up from this “mythical purlieus”
and go out of it to draw the next route of movement. With their mobility, they throw
themselves into “reality,” the hegemonic world of nationalism. At the same time,
however, Mulberry’s leaving the attic and abandoning her husband symbolize her
resistance of familial burden, an action which has loosened the base of patriarchical
nationalism.
The space at last dislocates into America where Peach wrote four letters to the
Immigration Service agents. In three of them, she even adds local maps to indicate
her route of wandering. About the map, Benedict Anderson has informed us how a
map may carry important historical discourse behind it:
They were on the march to put space under the same surveillance which
the census-makers were trying to impose on persons. Triangulation by
triangulation, war by war, treaty by treaty, the alignment of map and power
proceeded. (173)
Through chronologically arranged sequences of such maps, a sort of
political-biographical narrative of the realm came into being, sometimes with
vast historical depth. (175)
The map can be regarded as a demonstration of ideology. It clearly marks the
way the hegemonic discourse dominates the space. The struggle for power leads to
the production of the map. What lies behind it might be specific historical and
political meaning or, under modernity, a symbol of colonialism.27 In other words,
the map is the tool with which Ideological State Apparatus naturalizes things. In the
novel, the three maps that Peach offers to the agents are all incomplete ones with
which she in the first letter claims “I’m wandering around these places shown on the
map. If you want to chase me, come on” (Nieh 11). According to this, Liang Iping
in her “Women/Maps/Empires” considers that Peach “tears up the map and nomadizes
in the empire:” “Furthermore, the three fragmented maps therefore break the unity of
the map/nation. This illustrates that Peach has already discarded identity of nation or
consciousness of nation” (351). To Liang, what Peach asserts—she is “always on
the road”—just shows that both the end and the beginning of this travel lose their
meaning. Hence Liang points out that Peach “not only runs away from China and
Taiwan, but also disdains America” (364). However, since Peach appropriates the
Taiwan, but also disdains America” (364). However, since Peach appropriates the