In the interview conducted by Yu-huei Liao entitled “Tao yu kun” (“Fleeing and Being Trapped”), Nieh has claimed that by writing Mulberry and Peach, she wanted to portray “the predicament of mankind—always fleeing and always being trapped,”
since “one can be trapped in many aspects, such as spiritual, psychological, political and personal.” She has also pointed out how the specific events that she went through in the unrestful era affected her:
I was a refugee student growing up during the war of resistance against Japanese aggression, who had been fleeing all the time. I ran away from my home town in my teens; the Japanese people came to Wuhan when I was fourteen, so we just ran, ran, and ran! After China’s victory of the
anti-Japanese war, I went to Peiping, then the Communist Party came and I had to run again. Finally when I arrived in Taiwan, I thought I did not have
to run anymore! But I still had to run when living on the island.
From the above statement, one can gain a rough understanding about Nieh’s personal experience of diaspora in the midst of national upheavals.
The route of migration the female protagonist takes in Mulberry and Peach resembles the one Nieh had in her life: from the southern region to the northern region within China, from China to Taiwan, and from Taiwan to the United States; moreover, the major political events in twentieth-century China and Taiwan that are intertwined with the storyline of Mulberry and Peach also reflect Nieh’s first-hand experience in the tumultuous era.
In Part I of Mulberry and Peach, the Chu-t’ang Gorge on the Yangtze River is where the boat that carries Mulberry and other refugees gets stranded during the Anti-Japanese War. According to Nieh, the grandeur of Chu-t’ang Gorge, which she had witnessed in her journey of escape during the Chinese civil war, suddenly emerged in her mind when she was writing the first part of Mulberry and Peach (Three Lives 140). In Part II of the novel, Mulberry, the only passenger on the plane from Nanking to Peking, arrives in the then besieged city to visit the Shens. During the time when Mulberry stays in Peking, she gets married to Chia-kang and witnesses how Peking becomes completely occupied by the Communists. Nieh makes her female protagonist’s experiences in Part II of the novel parallel closely with her own during 1949. In the chapter entitled “The Besieged City” (“Wei Cheng”) in Three Lives, Nieh writes:
As it turned out, I was the only passenger on the plane.
And it was the last plane that flew from Nanking to Peking. Peking was surrounded by the Communists. At the time when the plane landed, the Communists occupied the airport.
Suddenly I was lost in a big family in the North. And suddenly I got
married….We could hear the thunder of guns when the wedding ceremony was being held. (142)
In the end of the section, Nieh writes, “On February 3, 1949, I saw the People’s Liberation Army walk unhurriedly into downtown Peking” (143). Here we can see how the story backgrounds of Part I and Part II of Mulberry and Peach echo with Nieh’s earlier life in China.
As a writer who experienced the “White Terror” in Taiwan, Nieh represents the force that oppresses people during the political turmoil by creating the attic scene in Part III of Mulberry and Peach. In Three Lives, Nieh recalls a past event in her childhood before recounting the whole story of “The Free China Fortnightly
Incident.”18 In 1929, she and her family fled to the Japanese concession in Hankou.
She described that her father during that period “was like playing the hide-and-seek;
once he got bored in the hiding place, he sneaked out” (179). One night Nieh woke up and was told that there was someone hiding on the rooftop. Nieh’s mother then went out to look for Nieh’s father who had been out during that night. Nieh wrote in the passage that “I was so scared that I remained still on the bed…Father would not be able to come back, and neither would Mother. As it turned out, Father was hiding in an attic of a Japanese nurse’s house. That was my first taste of fear [in life]” (179).
From the above excerpt from Nieh’s memoir, we can observe that Nieh seems to intentionally build the link between the horrific experience in her early life with her involvement in “The Free China Fortnightly Incident” in her narrative. We can also note that while the attic serves as a literary symbol in Mulberry and Peach for Nieh to depict the plight of those oppressed, the attic was once the hiding place for the
author’s father to escape from political oppression in reality.
18 Four people related to Free China Fortnightly were arrested in 1960 due to the criticism against the Kuomintang government published in the magazine. Lei Chen, the general editor of Free China Fortnightly, was then charged with treason and later jailed for ten years.
In Nieh’s narrative about how she and other editorial staff at Free China Fortnightly were persecuted by the then totalitarian Kuomintang government, the author straightforwardly expresses her regret and helplessness in facing the oppressive force:
Mother and I glanced at each other; we did not talk. We both understood what was going on, even without saying a word. The only thing I knew was to remain still, being not afraid. Nine-year-old Lan-lan began playing her mini piano; she sat on the floor, playing “My Mother.”
I felt weak all over; I sat on the chair, completely motionless. They planned to catch us one by one…They were coming, so I decided to just sit there and wait.
Lan-lan stopped.
Play, play, Lan-lan, just play. I told her.
She continued playing. This time, she was playing “White Christmas” at a brisk and lively tempo. (189)
While it might be coincidental that Nieh’s daughter played the joyful song “White Christmas” on the piano when the policemen were searching her house, Nieh’s portrayal of the scene in “September 4, 1960” in Three Lives certainly constitutes a rather ironic display in her narrative. Here, the irony lies in the contrast between the harsh oppression they encountered in reality and the heartwarming atmosphere revealed by the lively melody as well as by the lyrics of “White Christmas,” such as the line “May your days be merry and bright.” As I have pointed out Nieh’s attempt to string together one of her past traumatic experiences in her childhood with her
experience of the “White Terror” in later years, she also includes her daughter’s encounter with the “White Terror” as a child witness in her narrative:
Lan-lan repeatedly played “White Christmas.” Suddenly she stopped,
asking, “Ma-ma, what are they doing?”
Just leave them alone, Lan-lan. Keep playing the piano.
Lan-lan continued to play, but grew weary of her playing as it went on.
I looked at her, thinking, if only the next generation will not suffer this kind of fear. (190)
The narrative method Nieh adopts here calls attention not only to the fact that the history of twentieth-century China and Taiwan is composed of continuous traumatic events, but also to the fact that trauma does not solely operate on an individual level but will affect the ones who are close to the traumatized and even bring about transgenerational effects.
Significantly, as in reality Nieh’s daughter inevitably witnessed the traumatic event in the world of adults, in Mulberry and Peach Mulberry’s daughter Sang-wa has no alternative but to be imprisoned in the attic with her parents. Chia-kang’s word,
“[Sang-wa] was born at the wrong time” (134), well indicates the hardship that Sang-wa must face as a child of victims of fierce oppression. However, when
Mulberry finally tries to take Sang-wa out of the attic, “[Sang-wa] says being outside the attic makes her tired. She has never stood straight up like this on the ground before” (153). Nieh’s portrayal of Sang-wa indeed corresponds to what she has stated as her motivation of writing Mulberry and Peach, that she wanted to depict mankind’s being constantly trapped in life’s predicaments. Furthermore, by creating an extreme case of a child witness whose life becomes completely dysfunctional due to traumatic experience, Nieh highlights the aftermath for children who witness traumas.
Markedly, the acts of writing trauma—to represent traumatic experiences “in different combinations and hybridized forms” (LaCarpra 186) — occur both outside and inside Nieh’s text. Not only Nieh, a victim of historical traumas, writes the semi-autobiographical novel through the female protagonist’s perspective, the
traumatized child Sang-wa in the text also writes stories through integrating reality and fictive elements in her diary. As I have mentioned previously, Nieh is widely acclaimed for demonstrating multiple literary devices in Mulberry and Peach. Similar to Nieh’s mingling various narrative forms to represent traumatic experiences in her novel, Sang-wa, as a child who has been physically and mentally suppressed while suffering the long-term imprisonment, displays her outrageous fantasies in her fragmented personal narratives. For example, in one of Sang-wa’s diary entries, a large portion of her writing is about brutal and bloody scenes which somewhat conveys a sense of paranoia. Beginning with the narrator’s mother going out every night to eat men, the story is then filled with cannibalism and killing. The narrator “I”
claims to be persecuted by people eaters who try to hurt and catch her through making the attic roasted by the sun and blown by the typhoon, yet she eventually escapes the cruelties by transforming into other creatures, including bugs, fly and dragon. Later, after the people eaters and her parents are all dead, the narrator is terrified to find that her belly grows big. What is noteworthy here is that after the narrator cuts the big round ball of meat that comes out from her body, the little balls also go through a series of metamorphoses, turning into stones, clouds, white birds and snakes with people heads. Accordingly, the metamorphosis constitutes the maneuver for both the narrator and the creature-like meat balls to survive the life-threatening conditions in Sang-wa’s story; however, all their attempts are in vain. Just as the narrator “I” can never free herself from the external force, eventually the constantly changing creatures cannot escape their doom, according to what Sang-wa writes in the end of the story: “A black cloud sucks the snakes with people heads in and they turn into rain.
It’s raining outside the attic” (149). Here, we see a sudden shift from the fantasy world to reality, which may imply not only Sang-wa’s disorderly thinking but also the chaos inside an imprisoned mind. The continuous series of hazards Sang-wa and the
creatures encounter in the story may symbolize the unceasing oppression that Taiwanese people must face during the dictatorship. It can thus be argued that by having the ten-year-old girl write a grotesque, bloodthirsty story interweaving fantasy and reality, Nieh successfully represents the mental tumults of victims of authoritarian oppression in her novel. In addition, the in-text story written by Sang-wa also reflects what Nieh proposes as the theme of Mulberry and Peach—“fleeing and being
trapped” as the universal predicament for all human beings, and importantly, as it is through transforming into another identity can the female protagonist in Mulberry and Peach counteract the chaos of her life, it is also via metamorphosis can the narrator and the creatures coming out from the narrator’s body find their ways to survival in Sang-wa’s story.
To regard Mulberry and Peach as a demonstration of writing trauma through a female perspective, one may observe that Neih’s delineation of women’s traumatic experiences relates not only to wars and exile, but also to patriarchy. Since Nieh has once admitted that there might be a tendency toward feminism in her fictional writing, here I also want to examine how Nieh’s experience in the Chinese patriarchy has affected her writing.
Firstly, Nieh reveals many Chinese patriarchal components in the first two parts of Mulberry and Peach. We may gain a picture of the traditional Chinese patriarchy from each character’s personal narrative given in the stranded boat in Part I. As polygamy is one of the significant characteristics of Chinese patriarchal society, the Refugee Student’s description of his father—a domineering man who treats his seven wives equally with repressive rules—provides an example of Chinese patriarchy.
Another illustrative example can be drawn from Peach-flower Woman’s case. Indeed, Peach-flower Woman, as a woman who speaks and acts in a rather uninhibited
manner in the stranded boat and who disobeys her mother-in-law by running away
from home with her baby son to look for her husband in Chungking, does not characteristically demonstrate conventional submissive attitudes of women in her times. Nevertheless, her earlier life experience still represents a typical fate of many traditional Chinese women: becoming a child bride (a girl adopted into a family as their future daughter-in-law) at a young age, being responsible for taking care of her husband who is junior to her as well as all works in the household, yet living in her husband’s family with an inferior status and being ignored by her husband. As for Part II, the early life experience of Aunt Shen, a woman with bound feet in her sixties, marks how vital it is for a woman to bear sons in order to gain favor and power in a traditional Chinese family.
By reading Nieh’s autobiographical narrative about her early life in Three Lives, we can know that she has already observed and been familiar with the patriarchy inherent in traditional Chinese culture ever since she was in her teens. In the chapter
“Mother’s Monologue” (“Mu chin de zi bai”), Nieh writes about her mother’s regrettable life with her mother as the narrator: she was arranged by the elders in her family to marry Nieh’s father; she strived to support her husband’s family by taking on the roles as a good wife and an obedient daughter-in-law, yet one day she knew accidentally that her husband had been a bigamist, and years later found that he had an extramarital affair with another woman; eventually, she did not choose to end the marriage although feeling resentful towards him. Nieh ends the chapter with her mother sighing, “Alas, it is such a worthless thing to be a woman” (46). In another chapter in Three Lives “Chen-chun,” Nieh writes about a girl who was sent to the Niehs not long after Nieh’s father died on the battlefield. Chen-chun, a mentally challenged girl, was claimed to be a new maid of her grandfather but in fact was intended to bear a son for the old man. It is noteworthy that the tone Nieh employs in her narratives about her mother and Chen-chun somewhat implies her position as an
“innocent child witness” to the Chinese patriarchy in her childhood, and her specific accounts of the events in her memoir many years later display her concern about women’s inferiority in a traditional Chinese society. Interestingly, by paralleling Three Lives with Mulberry and Peach, one can readily note that Chen-chun is exactly the prototype of Joy, the retarded young maid sent by Aunt Shen to Hsing-hsing’s grandfather as concubine in Part II of Mulberry and Peach.
As for Nieh’s own experience related to the patriarchal system, our reference may be the unhappy marriage she had with her ex-husband who fled to the U.S. alone in 1957, leaving Nieh and their two daughters in Taiwan. Although Nieh does not directly mention much about her first marriage in Three Lives, she quotes from Paul Engle’s account of their first lunch date in his memoir:19
You have been working so hard. I said, providing for your mother, raising your children. And you do not complain.
What is the use of complaining?
No woman can do so many things like you; especially your husband is not at home.
He has left for six years. Without him, I feel even happier.... (286)20 Significantly, as Nieh accepted Engle’s invitation to Iowa and started her new life there, her protagonist in Mulberry and Peach also “discovers” her new identity in the United States. Nieh later married Engle in 1971 and “spread out the branches and
19 Lisa Schlesinger, the director of the stage play Learner than Light: 12 Frames of Paul Engle, in her
“A note from Playwright” writes, “At the end of his life, Paul Engle was working on a memoir called Paul Engle Country....” The memoir Nieh refers to must be the one mentioned in Schlesinger’s statement, yet remains unpublished. The only one memoir written by Engle that can be found is A Lucky American Childhood, an autobiographical account of the poet’s childhood, in which all the pieces of writing were collected by Nieh after Engle’s death. Since the original quote from Engle is not available, I try to translate the words quoted by Nieh from Chinese into English.
20 In the documentary One Tree Three Lives (2012), Nieh mentions her relationship with her ex-husband: “We were not compatible….I was confused and lonely while he was studying in Chicago.” (The original statement is in Mandarin; here the lines are quoted from the English subtitles of the documentary.)
leaves” in the foreign land.21 However, instead of making her protagonist’s life in the novel a replica of hers, Nieh designs the protagonist as a schizophrenic who
constantly sways between the old identity and the new one.
Indeed, both Nieh and her protagonist are bearers of historical traumas. While submitting that PTSD is more “a symptom of history” than “a symptom of the unconscious,” Cathy Caruth suggests that the traumatized may “become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess” (“Trauma and Experience:
Introduction” 5). As Caruth further points out, the existence of the symptom is closely associated with “a question of truth” (5) which “arises not only in regard to those who listen to the traumatized” but “occurs rather and most disturbingly often within the very knowledge and experience of the traumatized themselves” (5). Accordingly, Nieh’s act of writing trauma can be regarded as an attempt to counter the
overwhelming power of her own traumas, as well as to unveil the “impossible history within [her]” (“Trauma and Experience: Introduction” 5) in a highly artistic way.
To conclude this section, I would like to further probe into what Caruth calls as
“an impossible history within [the traumatized]” (5) and use the concept to examine Nieh’s act of writing trauma in Mulberry and Peach. The word “impossible,”
according to Oxford Dictionaries Online, is used to describe either something “not
according to Oxford Dictionaries Online, is used to describe either something “not