The main concern of my following discussion will be how the “domestic women” in Mazu’s Bodyguards, although being seemingly powerless victims in the social and political upheavals, overcome various trials to keep the family/nation together while the men in the novel are always out of their homes/homelands. As Lisa Bernstein points out in “Mothers and Motherlands,” the introduction to (M)Othering the Nation: Constructing and Resisting National Allegories through the Maternal Body, “the ‘mothers’ stories’—experiences of actual women—are often missing within the discourse of national motherlands”(1). This omission can be noted in Taiwanese literature as well.41 Through writing Mazu’s Bodyguards, Chen not only articulates the marginalized voices of Taiwanese women but includes these women in the national discourse.
While Mazu’s Bodyguards is undoubtedly a familial-national narrative constructed from the female perspective, Chen does not make those women in her novel as female activists who voluntarily take part in public affairs. A major feature of Chen’s storytelling is the polarization between the “public men” and the “domestic women.” However, those women who have no understanding of the public affairs are eventually involved in the political struggles caused by men. What Dong-chin,
40 See “Tao yu kun” (“Fleeting and Being Trapped”).
41 I have quoted Chia-ling Mei’s observation to elaborate this literary phenomenon on page 13-14 in my introduction chapter.
Er-ma’s Chinese wife from an arranged marriage, soliloquizes in the story—“People usually say that women know nothing, but how come now not even women can escape from the fight?” (234) —provides a thematic description of Chen’s portrayals of those female characters in Mazu’s Bodyguards.
Telling from the perspective of the first-person narrator, the family saga is built upon the story of the maternal side of the narrator’s family. Markedly, the
phenomenon of the absence of men in the story is revealed as early as Grandma Ayako’s arrival in Taiwan, prior to which her Japanese fiancé has been murdered in the Wushe Incident. Although Ayako later marries the Taiwanese Lin Cheng-nan and resides in Taiwan, her husband leaves home to pursue his dream of flight and then voluntarily joins the Japanese army. Even Lin’s younger brother Chih-nan, who Ayako has an extramarital affair with, has to escape Kuomintang’s political
oppression and ends up fleeing to Brazil. Each of the three men is away from home due to their participation in public affairs, yet none of them succeeds in the deeds. By contrast, after Lin leaves home, Ayako is the one who takes charge of the family store and keeps everything in order in Lin’s extended family while Chih-nan, who becomes the only man in the household, is enthusiastically engaging in political activities. By interweaving the family story with major national incidents, Chen reveals the
tumultuous national history of Taiwan in her storytelling. Furthermore, Chen’s depiction of men’s failures in the public realm mirrors her view that it is not men but women who have been taking the major role in sustaining the family as well as the nation in the history of Taiwan.42
Indeed, Ayako and many other female victims in the novel represent the typical domestic women under patriarchy. As Rey Chow points out, “[o]ne of the functions
42 See the interview held in 2004 by Kang-yung Tsai in the program Jintian bu dushu [Today is the Day of No Reading] on Taiwan Public Television Service; the interview script can be found at http://web.pts.org.tw/~web01/tuesday/t_051.htm.
of the patriarchal organization of society—in particular traditional Chinese
society—is the consignments of women to domesticity. Domesticity should therefore be seen as a predominant, if not the only, paradigm under which many Chinese
women’s thinking operates” (91). Although it is mainly the traditional Chinese society that Chow refers to in the statement, I consider that Chen’s portrayals of most of the female characters in Mazu’s Bodyguards echo with Chow’s observation here.
Influenced by her mother-in-law, Ayako, who initially knows nothing about Mazu, begins to worship the patron goddess widely worshipped by people living in the south-eastern coastal areas of China and Taiwan after her husband leaves home:
“She worships Mazu for her husband Cheng-nan, and also for the family. She decides to live in the same way as her Taiwanese family, and is willing to be like that” (40).
To borrow from Sylvia Lin’s term, the character Ayako in the story reflects the image of “self-sacrificing wife” (95). In fact, “self-sacrificing wife” is a recurring image that can be found when we examine the female characters in the novel. Another illustrative example worth noting here is Ayako’ s first daughter Natsuki. After eloping with her lover Er-ma, a refugee from China, Natsuki gives birth to five daughters but no son.
Having no son thus becomes one of the excuses for Er-ma to have adultery with other women. Although facing Er-ma’s repetitive infidelity ever since the beginning of their marriage, Natsuki is portrayed as a woman who wants nothing but her husband’s love and return, as the narrator recalls:
Every time when Father left home for a long while, Mother would feel extremely upset, wearing no smile on her face. Now as I can recall, she must have been suffering from depression during that time…. /…I knew Father had beaten Mother before, by throwing the chair at her or
whipping her with the leather belt. But Mother never reacted against his acts….I did not understand why Mother never resisted…. (191-92)
It is when her unfaithful husband is jailed for being charged as a “communist bandit” that Natsuki stops being suicidal, starts working to support the family and tries everything she can to get her husband out of jail. In Chen’s portrayal of the relation between Er-ma and Natsuki, the man ceaselessly betrays the family and the woman always acts as the savior of her husband. In this way, Natsuki plays the role as Er-ma’s patron saint who redeems him on every occasion through her self-sacrificing behaviors in the story. The last time Natsuki rescues Er-ma from his trouble is when Er-ma finds himself being cheated by his
relatives in China and fells seriously ill after he determines to leave his family in Taiwan and returns to China. According to the narrative, it is because “she could see that he was scared” (169) that Natsuki decides to again take care of Er-ma after agonizing over the situation:
One time she was so weary that she fell asleep besides him. She woke up suddenly at midnight and found he was waiting for her to wake up so that he could talk to her. That was the first time Natsuki felt that he totally belonged to her, he really had no one else in his heart, yet she felt so sorrowful and resentful. Then she thought of the next life. She thought that she’d better not to meet him in her next life. Not only should she avoid being a woman, but also being Er-ma’s wife no matter how. (169)
When considering Natsuki’s being simultaneous the self-sacrificing wife and the savior in the novel, we can possibly correlate Natsuki with the legendary goddess Mazu. Although there exist diverse versions of the legendary tales, all versions share the major plot. Mazu, or Lin Mo-niang (meaning ‘silent woman’), had a vision of her father and brother (or only brothers without the father)
drowning one night when she was weaving at home and the men were fishing out
at sea during a storm. Mo-niang tried to rescue them through spiritual power while staying at the loom. As a result, Mo-niang’s father (or brother[s]) returned back home alive, yet her brother (or one of her brothers) drowned. It was
Mo-niang who, after few days of searching into the sea, found the dead body of her brother in order to bury him at home. Lin Mo-niang has been then
worshipped as Mazu posthumously, especially by fishermen who seek guidance and protection. As the legend reveals, the woman without voice in a patriarchal society eventually acts as the rescuer of the men who encounter difficulties.
Similarly, Natsuki in Mazu’s Bodyguards, although fated to be the woman who is devoiced and sacrificial under patriarchy, saves Er-ma in every tribulation.
In the novel, as women play the most significant part in supporting the family, Mazu, the goddess that the Lin family has been worshipping through generations, is considered as the deity who watches over the whole family.
Nevertheless, just as women’s sufferings and contributions are usually not included in orthodox heroic histories, neither is the goddess Mazu always recognized by the family members in Mazu’s Bodyguards. The following extract from the novel may exemplify this. Shortly after being released from prison, the then converted Christian Er-ma destroys the home altar which has been put and maintained by Natsuki:
“Do not worship the idols,” he said in a serious tone as if he were a pastor. Mother was so nervous. She then put all the statues and candles in a box and decided to start giving offerings in the temple on the first and the fifteenth of each lunar month. She said, “Your father has such ridiculous thoughts. Ridiculous! He doesn’t know that it is all because of the blessing from Mazu that he can get early release from prison.”
Father did not know, and did not want to know. One day he saw the
statues accidentally, and threw all of them away in the garbage can. I happened to be there at the moment. I secretly put the statues away, and even took two of them abroad.
The two statues are Thousand-Mile Eye and Wind-Accompanying Ear. (195)
The passage provides important hints concerning Chen’s use of female perspective in writing the novel. As it is widely considered, Christianity is a religion that holds patriarchal values at its center. Although in Taiwan Christianity has never been one of the major religions of the locals, it was claimed to be the religion of the then Taiwan’s political leader Chiang Kai-shek and his family. In this regard, we can possibly draw an analogy between Er-ma’s dominant position in the family with Chiang’s autocratic leadership in the country. Similar to Chiang’s suppression of dissenting voices during that time, Er-ma’s removals of the goddess and her bodyguards, the “idols” in accordance with the monotheism in Christianity, somewhat suggests the marginalization of women and the negation of female voices under patriarchy. By furtively keeping the statues, the narrator enables the family story to be continued; indeed, it is through her recording that the “herstory” of the family can be passed down.
In addition to the “self-sacrificing wife,” readers can also observe the image of “grieving mother” (Lin 95) in the novel. The chapters that record a series of events happening to Er-ma’s family in China present both types of female figures.
Er-ma’s family, once the “‘feudal landlord’” (178), becomes the target of criticism and destruction in the Communist struggle sessions against class enemies, during which time there remain only women in his house. Here, we see that just as what Natsuki has done for Er-ma in Taiwan, Er-ma’s mother Lu Guei-mei and his wife Dong-chin act as the protectors of Er-ma’s family in
China. As the novel presents, the fact that Er-ma has run away to Taiwan makes him be labeled as a “reactionary” (230) and causes Lu Guei-mei and Dong-chin great difficulties in the Communist regime. Significantly, the two domestic Chinese women, although being self-sacrificing wife and grieving mother of Er-ma respectively, are not sorrowful women who cry behind the scene but confront the real struggles and guard the root of the family—the only daughter—during the most tumultuous decades in twentieth-century China.
Chen’s portrayal of the calamities in Er-ma’s hometown again highlights one of the major characteristics of Chen’s storytelling in Mazu’s Bodyguards: men’s absence from home versus women’s efforts to sustain the family. Lu Guei-mei and Dong-chin thus become the only family members who can legitimately testify to the traumatic events that strike the family as well as the nation during the time when the men were all gone. The two women’s first-hand experiences of political and social upheavals, in this case, consist the whole of Chen’s representation of historical traumas during the tumultuous period in China.
Apparently, here Chen purposely makes women become the sole bearers of historical traumas in Er-ma’s family in China, and thereby creates another familial and national narrative through the female perspective in the text. It is noteworthy that upon Er-ma’s return to China, he is rejected by his own daughter Hsiao-di, the child who his wife was pregnant with when he left China; moreover, in the end the sick man Er-ma has no choice but returns to Taiwan due to the painful experience of being cheated by his relatives during his five-year stay in China. In this regard, we can state that the non-existent husband and father is destined to be excluded from the woman-centered family heritage.
As a female familial-national narrative, Mazu’s Bodyguards centers on women’s traumatic experiences in times of national unrest. While all these
women initially belong to only the private realm of domestic life, they eventually are embroiled in traumatic events in the public realm and thus become victims of historical traumas. In this section, I have discussed several examples of Chen’s portrayals of the female victims in the novel. It is rather ironic that these domestic women, while being absent from the public scene and thereby marginalized in the patriarchal societies, eventually are compelled to bear the brunt in the public realm at first hand; furthermore, while the men fail in their deeds and are overwhelmed by their traumatic experiences, the women somehow become the ones who overcome tribulations and maintain the families. It is through displaying the above-mentioned feature in Mazu’s Bodyguards that Chen strategically enables those marginalized women’s experiences to be the
foreground in her familial-national narrative. Importantly, Chen demonstrates different narrative models of framing these female victims’ traumatic stories. To best illustrate this difference, one may parallel the case of Natsuki and that of Dong-chin. By portraying Natsuki as the indirect victim of the “White Terror” in Taiwan and Dong-chin as the survivor of Communist struggle sessions in China, Chen represents the major national traumatic events in her novel. Although both women are the self-sacrificing wives of Er-ma, they suffer for the husband in different ways: while Natsuki acts as a supportive, though oftentimes resentful, wife behind the scenes who saves Er-ma from every trouble caused by himself, Dong-chin has no choice but to struggle to survive and protect Er-ma’s family in the real political scene. Moreover, in both cases, we see that women are not merely victims but are simultaneously the ones who resolve difficulties.
Consequently, we may state that Chen’s portrayals of these two female bearers of historical traumas reflect what Sylvia Lin proposes: “the definition of victimhood is in fact never transparent” (96).
While women’s experiences constitute an integral part of national histories, their voices are conventionally negated in dominant national discourse. By drawing on women’s bodily experiences to capture the national traumas in twentieth-century Taiwan (and China) in their works, Nieh and Chen enable these marginalized voices of women to be heard. According to my analysis of the representation of the traumatized women in the two novels, Nieh and Chen do not portray these women as victims who are doomed to be overwhelmed by the traumatic incidents; rather, they make these seemingly inferior women as the ones who eventually find their own ways to deal with (or help the men deal with) the predicaments. In other words, these female victims in each of their cases are not only the ones who should bear the burdens of life but also the ones who dare to confront the life challenges. Given this characteristic shown in both Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards, we can state that Nieh and Chen, as
witnesses to women’s sufferings during national unrest, eschew symbolically re-victimizing those female bearers of historical traumas in their fictional narratives, and thereby avoid “exploit[ing] women in the name of nationalism, even though women often exist on the margin of national discourse” (Lin 75).
Rather, Nieh and Chen “empower” these traumatized women in their
story-telling as a means of producing what hooks terms as “counter-hegemonic discourse[s]” through the female perspective. In this manner, the two writers’
efforts well illustrate what is stated in the introduction chapter of Between Woman and Nation: “Women are both of and not of the nation. Between woman and nation is, perhaps, the space or zone where we can deconstruct these
monoliths and render them more historically nuanced and accountable to politics.
The figure of ‘woman’ participates in the imaginary of the nation-state beyond
the purview of patriarchies” (12).
Chapter Four Conclusion
Adopting an interdisciplinary approach in this study has enabled me to delve into not only the two textual representations of trauma in Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards but also the makings of the narratives (or, in Kali Tal’s words, “the specific effects of trauma on the process of narration” [117]). Although sometimes being perplexed by trauma studies’ “mythic fantasmagoria,” as described by Geoffrey Hartman,43 this thesis project certainly provides me with an opportunity to experience the multiple facets of trauma studies, including how it has developed at the
intersection of different disciplines, and how it has related to other subjects in literary studies.
While in the introductory chapter a literature review of notable trauma theories is presented, its coverage is limited. However, as discussed, most critics have centered on the essence of trauma—its delayed yet recurring appearance that results from the impossibility for it to be grasped at the very moment when the shattering event happen—to further their theorization of trauma in literature. Consequently, many of the critics, including Cathy Caruth, Dominick LaCapra, Kali Tal and Anne
Whitehead,44 argue for the necessity to recreate the traumatic events in order to represent them in literary works.
Hartman, while commenting on trauma and literary studies, contends that the nexus between literature and mental functioning exist in three specific areas:
Hartman, while commenting on trauma and literary studies, contends that the nexus between literature and mental functioning exist in three specific areas: