國 立 交 通 大 學
外國語文學系外國文學與語言學碩士班
碩士論文
《桑青與桃紅》與《海神家族》中的創傷與生命書寫
Writing Traumas, Writing Lives in
Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards
研 究 生：劉雅郡
指導教授：馮品佳 博士
《桑青與桃紅》與《海神家族》中的創傷與生命書寫
Writing Traumas, Writing Lives in
Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards
研究生：劉雅郡 Postgraduate: Ya-chun Liu
指導教授：馮品佳 博士 Advisor: Pin-chia Feng
國 立 交 通 大 學
外國語文學系外國文學與語言學碩士班
碩 士 論 文
A Thesis
Submitted to Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures College of Humanity and Social Science
National Chiao Tung University in partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
for the Degree of Master
in
Foreign Literatures and Linguistics July 2013
Hsinchu, Taiwan, Republic of China
《桑青與桃紅》與《海神家族》中的創傷與生命書寫 研究生：劉雅郡 指導教授：馮品佳 博士 國立交通大學外國語文學系外國文學與語言學碩士班 摘 要 本論文嘗試以跨學科研究方法探討個人創傷與集體創傷在聶華苓的《桑青與 桃紅》與陳玉慧的《海神家族》中的再現。論文第一章將兩部小說及其作者的生 命經驗自述並置，藉此研究兩位作者如何在其作品中描繪己身創傷記憶，並且也 比較兩部小說成型的時代脈絡如何影響作者對創傷的再現。聶華苓與陳玉慧以小 說形式再現創傷的做法呼應了多位創傷研究學者的論點：創傷為受創者所帶來的 極大壓力將導致創傷無法被全然感知且無法被精確呈現，因此創傷敘事中敘述者 的角度無法絕對化且敘述者需要對創傷事件進行再創造。這個再創造的過程呼應 敘事治療的基本理念。敘事治療作為後現代取向的心理諮商學派，強調每位案主 的敘事皆是在特定脈絡下建構而成；在諮商過程中，案主在諮商師協助下解構原 先的敘事並進一步創造出「替代故事」。因在《桑青與桃紅》與《海神家族》中， 兩位作者分別將個人、家族創傷與國族創傷事件交織呈現，且皆持女性觀點，本 論文提出此兩本小說在兩方面可被視作其作者的「替代故事」：首先，兩位作者 在文本中融合生命經驗敘事與虛構元素，以此作為自身創傷記憶的「替代故事」； 另外，兩位作者以女性觀點所創造出的「替代故事」也構成可抗衡主流國族敘事 中的男性中心觀點。論文第二章分析《桑青與桃紅》與《海神家族》中的女性角 色刻畫，探討其作者如何避免讓這些背負歷史創傷的女性成為父權體制下的絕對 弱者；此章借用胡克絲（bell hooks）以邊陲作為策略性反抗空間的觀點，提出 兩位作者使文本中的受創傷女性形成「自邊陲發出的顛覆性聲音」，也因此提供 了對抗主流論述的觀點。 關鍵詞：《桑青與桃紅》、《海神家族》、聶華苓、陳玉慧、創傷書寫、生命書 寫、個人創傷、集體創傷、敘事治療、國族敘事、邊陲
Writing Traumas, Writing Lives in Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards
Postgraduate: Ya-chun Liu Advisor: Dr. Pin-chia Feng
Graduate Institute of Foreign Literatures and Linguistics National Chiao Tung University
ABSTRACT
This thesis is an interdisciplinary scholarly attempt to explore how individual traumas and colletive traumas are represented in Hualing Nieh’s Mulberry and Peach and Jade Y. Chen’s Mazu’s Bodyguards. In Chapter One, I juxtapose the two novels with Nieh’s and Chen’s accounts of their lived experiences, in order to investigate how Nieh and Chen transfer their traumatic memories into their literary works, and how the historical and social contexts they were in affected their artistic
representation of traumas. As Nieh and Chen represent traumas in the novelistic mode, their deeds correspond to a crucial point held by many trauma studies scholars: since the overwhelming power of trauma leads to its impossibility of being fully perceived and accurately presented by people, in trauma narratives too definite positions of recounting the traumatic experiences should be avoided and recreating the traumatic events is needed. This recreation process corresponds to the basic philosophy of narrative therapy, a branch of postmodern psychotherapy approaches. Narrative therapy suggests that the story told by every client is constructed within certain context; during the treatment, the predominant problematic story should be deconstructed and replaced by “alternative stories.” Due to the fact that in both Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards the two authors reveal their individual and family traumatic stories embedded in national traumatic events through the female perspective, I consider that there are two aspects in which the two texts
constitute their authors’ “alternative stories.” First, by interweaving depictions of their lived experiences with fictional elements in the texts, Nieh and Chen tell the
“alternative stories” as substitutes for the traumatic memories that have been haunting them in real life. Moreover, Nieh and Chen provide “alternative stories” to counter the male-dominated discourses in mainstream national narratives. In Chapter Two, I examine how Nieh and Chen, as witnesses to women’s sufferings during national unrest, eschew symbolically re-victimizing those female bearers of historical traumas in their “alternative stories.” Borrowing bell hooks’ theory about the margin as a
strategic space of resistance, I consider that Nieh’s and Chen’s portrayals of those traumatized women constitute “the subversive voices from the margins” that can provide counter-perspectives against the predominant discourses.
Key Words: Mulberry and Peach, Mazu’s Bodyguards, Hualing Nieh, Jade Y. Chen, writing traumas, writing lives, individual traumas, colletive traumas, national narratives, margin
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
“Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the guards stand watch in vain” (Psalm 127:1). The completion of this thesis would not have been possible without God who gives me strength always and the following supportive individuals He has put in my life.
I would like to express my deep gratitude to my advisor Prof. Pin-chia Feng, for her enlightening guidance, constant patience and generous encouragement. I also want to thank Prof. Ying-hsiung Chou and Prof. Joan Chiung-huei Chang for their valuable comments and suggestions that have helped me improve upon my thesis. My
appreciation is extended to Prof. Ioana Luca and Prof. Ariel Hui-hua Wang, who have been inspiring me in many ways.
My sincere thanks also go to these lovely people who have been there for me through my ups and downs: Ms. Ching-hsien Yang, a caring teacher who has lightened up my world and has been one of my best friends throughout these years; Linda Yen, a good partner who shared all the joyful moments and is a friend for life; Cathy Wu, with whom I have authentic and intimate spiritual friendship; I-li Lin, a faithful friend who always stood by my side.
Over the past year, I have been blessed to meet so many wonderful people who have colored my life in Chiayi. God has used them to heal my old wounds in an amazing way. I would like to thank them for their genuine support through their company and their prayers: the pastors, aunts and uncles at Chiayi Chuntouli Church, as they were always willing to offer their prayers; Jacqueline Ng, whom I have enjoyed working with and her resolute trust in God has inspired me; Enneke de Jong, whose pleasant and cheerful manner has brought me a lot of joy; Katie Hsu, a great listener whose encouraging words have always brought me comfort; all my friends at church, whose most sincere friendship warms my heart.
I also have to thank my classmate Michelle Chiu, who never hesitates to help whenever I am in need.
Finally and most importantly, my family deserves my deep appreciation. I thank my mother for her constant prayers and taking good care of us, my father for always being proud of his daughter, and my brother for his joy that always settles my uneasiness.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chinese Abstract ...i
English Abstract ...ii
Acknowledgements ...iv
Chapter One:
Introduction………..1
Chapter Two:
Writing Traumas in Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards…17
Mulberry and Peach and Hualing Nieh’s Act of Writing Traumas……..21
Mazu’s Bodyguards and Jade Y. Chen’s Act of Writing Traumas……….32
Different Positions of Enunciation………...41
Chapter Three:
The Subversive Voices from the Margins: Fictional Representations
of Traumatized Women in Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s
Bodyguards………..49
Mulberry and Peach: The Woman in the Attic Unbound……….52
Mazu’s Bodyguards: “Public Men” and “Domestic Women”…………..62
Chapter Four:
Conclusion………...72
Chapter One Introduction
Twentieth-century China and Taiwan marked a time of continuous traumas. In addition to a series of wars, events such as being invaded or colonized, and
dictatorship that brought political oppression and even atrocities can all be recognized as the nation’s traumatic experiences. Many literary and cinematic works have been
produced to portray the distressing life amidst national calamities;1 the two texts investigated in this thesis—Hualing Nieh’s Mulberry and Peach (Sang-qing yu Tao-hong) and Jade Y. Chen’s Mazu’s Bodyguards (Hai shen jia zu)—are certainly included in this category of literature.2 This thesis is an interdisciplinary scholarly attempt to explore how Nieh and Chen, as trauma victims themselves, represent individual and collective traumas in their semi-autobiographical novels. In my study of the two important works in modern Sinophone literature, I will not only draw on theories of trauma studies in the humanities, but also borrow some concepts from the psychotherapy field, particularly narrative therapy.
“Trauma,” a term that has been widely deployed in scholarly research especially in recent decades, is in fact an interdisciplinary concept itself. As it is known, the term can be used in both somatic and psychological aspects: a clinician
1 Michael Berry makes reference to David Der-Wei Wang, Yomi Braester, Ban Wang, and Xiaobin Yang in the introduction chapter to A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and
Film, claiming that these critics “have established historical trauma and the manifold responses to that
trauma as a central theme in modern Chinese literary and cultural studies” (2). In this book, Berry investigates literary and cinematic works capturing major historical traumas of Taiwan, China and Hong Kong in the twentieth century, including Musha Incident in Taiwan (1930), the Rape of Nanjing in China (1937-38), the February 28 Incident in Taiwan (1947), the Cultural Revolution in China (1966-76), Tiananmen Square Incident in China (1989) and the Handover of Hong Kong (1997). 2 The English name of Hai shen jia zu “Mazu’s Bodyguards” is the official translation shown on the
cover of the reprinted Chinese version of Hai shen jia zu (Taipei: Ink,2009). Since the English edition of Mazu’s Bodyguards has not yet been published, all the translations of the excerpts from the novel are mine. In addition, besides those quotes specifically mentioned as others’ translations, all excerpts from Chinese sources cited in this thesis are translated by me.
may use “a trauma” to indicate a physical injury, a psychologist or sociologist may
apply the term while studying a catastrophic personal or social event. Kai Erikson, a sociologist, probes into the definition of trauma in his essay “Notes on Trauma and Community.” Erikson mentions that the meaning of trauma has been extended from its initial usage: from “the blow” (184) that stirs people’s negative reaction to “the
state of mind” (184) that is incurred by a certain stimulus. He proceeds to give definitions of “individual trauma” and “collective trauma,” which I would like to borrow in this thesis. According to Erikson, individual trauma is “a blow to the psyche that breaks through one’s defense so suddenly and with such brutal force that one cannot react to it effectively” (187), while collective trauma is “a blow to the basic
tissues of social life that damages the bonds attaching people together and impairs the prevailing sense of communality” (187).
Concerning the origination of trauma theories, Ruth Leys in Trauma: A Genealogy regards Sigmund Freud as “a founding figure in the history of
conceptualization of trauma” (18). In Understanding Trauma: A Psychoanalytical
Approach, psychologist Caroline Garland combs through the evolution of Freudian notion of trauma, contending that Freud’s conception of trauma has progressed in line with the developmental history of psychoanalysis. Initially there was Freud’s study of hysterics in 1893, in which the patient’s condition was considered to be the repression
of painful memory, and it was not until the memory came to the consciousness together with the patient’s original feeling of distress could the “catharsis cures”
happen. According to Garland, two ideas later proposed by Freud, including the three mental functioning modes (namely the id, the ego, and the superego) in 1923 and the derivation of anxiety within the ego in 1926, significantly contribute to the present knowledge of trauma. Following the illustration of automatic anxiety that is
when danger threatens” (16), Garland then offers her own conclusion— “the ego, once traumatized, can no longer afford to believe in signal anxiety in any situation resembling the life-threatening trauma: it behaves as if it were flooded with automatic anxiety” (17; emphasis in the original). At this stage we can grasp the kernel of
Freud’s idea of trauma, which centers on the nature of trauma as being repressed and
continually repeating itself.
Although psychiatric researchers nowadays do not necessarily base their studies of trauma upon Freudian theory,3 there have been many contemporary trauma theorists making efforts to develop their ideas within the frame of psychoanalysis.4 One of the prominent figures in today’s trauma studies is Cathy Caruth, who in her
discussion underscores the delayed appearance of trauma. In the introduction to her edited volume Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Caruth points out the denotation of trauma while investigating the diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): “The pathology consists [. . .] solely in the structure of its experience or
reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it. To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event” (4-5; emphasis in the original).
Caruth later refers to Freud’s writing about the recurrence of dreams in traumatic neurosis and describes the repetitive dreams as “the literal return” (5) of the traumatic
event to the victim who has undergone it and been unwillingly to experience it again. For Caruth, it is due to its “literality” and “insistent return” (5) that one’s trauma can testify to the existence of the shattering event. Thereby Caruth argues that PTSD can
3 In fact, as Kali Tal notes, “Most [contemporary medical studies of trauma] begin with the observation that trauma places extraordinary stress upon an individual’s ordinary coping mechanism” (Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literatures of Trauma 135).
4 The reason may lie in what Caroline Garland states in the introduction to Understanding Trauma: A
Psychoanalytical Approach: “The psychoanalytic approach…investigates, and tries to shift or
modify, these internal object relations and the corresponding state of the internal world, rather than focusing primarily upon symptomatology and classifiable mental disorder”(“Introduction: Why Psychoanalysis” 4).
be considered as “a symptom of history” (5), and that “the traumatized…carry an
impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess” (5). The impossibility of history, according to Caruth, lies in the trauma’s being perceived as “a temporal delay” (10), which
indicates its inaccessibility to be grasped at the immediate moment; moreover, rather than being repressed for good, the trauma reappears to the victims’ minds, urging to
voice itself (that is, to come to the consciousness of the victim in order to be
recognized), and eventually be voiced by the victim. In her conclusion, Caruth writes that “the history of a trauma, in its inherent belatedness, can only take place through the listening of another” (11).
Dominick LaCapra responds to Caruth’s discussion of trauma by stating that “[t]rauma indicates a shattering break or cesura in experience which has belated effects” (186) in the ending chapter of Writing History, Writing Trauma.5
Reflecting upon Caruth’s claim that literature and psychoanalytic theory resembles each other in dealing with “the complex relation between knowing and not knowing” (3),6
he gives further elaboration on the representation of trauma in literary works. According to LaCarpra, a historian, there is a distinction between “writing about trauma” and “writing trauma” (186). While “writing about trauma” operates within the historiographical domain that tends to be objective, the act of “writing trauma” implies a distance away from trauma and engages “processes of coming to terms with traumatic ‘experiences,’ limit events, and their sympathetic effects that achieve articulation in different combinations and hybridized forms” (186). Literary works, as
a form of art, serves to demonstrate the whole process in which traumas give voice to themselves, get voiced, to finally get listened. However, far from being merely an
5 Caruth’s discussion on trauma that LaCarpra makes reference to is from “Introduction: The Wound and the Voice,” in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History.
agency to give witness, literature of trauma bears elements that documentary works do not. While literature entails much freedom in narrative, it provides the reader possibilities of interpretation instead of the absoluteness of truth claims; it presents “a precise form to opacity” (188) in LaCarpra’s term.
Kali Tal, a literary critic and the author of Worlds of Hurt: Reading the
Literatures of Trauma, argues for the vital role of literature in “the reconstruction and recuperation of traumatic experience” (17). Similar to Caruth and LaCarpra who are concerned about trauma’s belatedness in their discussion, Tal suggested that the
overwhelming power of trauma leads to its incapability of being perceived and represented by people. For Tal, “[a]ccurate representation of trauma can never be achieved without recreating the event” (15), and the essential task of the critic, is not
only to recognize and analyze the works by certain traumatized groups, but also to “deconstruct the process by which the dominant culture codifies their traumatic experience” (18). Here, Tal’s address that the voice bearing witness to the traumatic
experience should be carefully examined relates to the issue of representation. As Stuart Hall writes in “The Work of Representation” that “[r]epresentation is an essential part of the process by which meaning is produced and exchanged between members of a culture. It does involve the use of language, of signs and images which stand for or represent things. But this is a far from simple or straightforward
process…” (15; emphasis in the original), it is this “far from simple or straightforward process” that is worth our examination.
In this thesis, I aim to explore how the acts of writing trauma (as defined by LaCarpra) are demonstrated and how individual and collective traumas are
represented in Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards. I choose Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards to analyze, for in both semi-autobiographical novels the authors reveal their own individual and family traumatic stories embedded in
national traumatic events through the female perspective.
In regard to female trauma writing, Suzette A. Henke sets a research example in Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing, in which she investigates several pieces of female writers’ life-writing about personal traumatic
experiences. In her introductory chapter, Henke maintains that for those traumatized women, doing life-writing may contribute to their own psychological recovery, as personal narrative grants the victim “the tantalizing possibility of reinventing the self
and reconstructing the subject ideologically inflected by language, history, and social imbrication” (xv). While it may seem audacious for Henke as a literary critic to claim
so,7 her idea corresponds to clinical perspectives in the realm of psychotherapy to a great extent. For example, in “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening,”
psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Dori Laub asserts that in order to be set free from the entrapment of one’s traumatic memories, “a therapeutic process—a process of
constructing a narrative, of reconstructing a history and essentially, of
re-externalizating the event—has to be set in motion” (69; emphasis in the original). Indeed, writing is one of the various channels through which the traumatized can perform the therapeutic process stated by Laub. More significantly, when elaborating her point mentioned in the above, Henke further proposes:
Because the author can instantiate the alienated or marginal self into the pliable body of a protean text, the newly revised subject, emerging as the semifictive protagonist of an enabling counternarrative is free to rebel against the values and practices of a dominant culture and to assume an
7 Henke mentions that at the Convention of the Modern Language Association in 1985, she delivered a research paper connected with scriptotherapy, proposing that “[a]utobiography could so effectively mimic the scene of psychoanalysis that life-writing might provide a therapeutic alternative for victims of severe anxiety and, more seriously, of post-traumatic stress disorder,” yet “[t]he ideas may have struck…[the] audience as more psychoanalytic than literary, and even somewhat marginal to the field of critical theory”(xiii).
empowered position of political agency in the world. (xv-xvi; emphasis added)
Henke’s notion of “counternarrative” can be read together with the basic philosophy
of narrative therapy, a branch of counseling therapy that is marked as using
postmodern approaches. Stories play a vital part in the therapeutic procedure, for they “actually shape reality in that they construct and constitute what we see, feel, and do”
(397), as psychologist Gerald Corey states in the widely-circulated Theory and Practice of Counselling and Psychotherapy. Narrative therapists should avoid judgment and subjective interpretation but assist the clients in “deconstructing” their narrative and “externalizing” the problems from themselves,8
and further creating alternate life stories (401). In Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends, Michael White and David Epston, psychotherapists and the forerunners of narrative therapy, build their theory upon Michel Foucault’s discussion about power and knowledge,9
suggesting that the story told by every client is constructed within certain context. During the treatment, the original story should be deconstructed and replaced by “alternative stories” (15). These concepts will be used to examine the two trauma
narratives Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards in my thesis. Although strictly speaking, the process of writing traumas I discuss in this thesis do not involve
counselors who assist the traumatized subjects in constructing their narratives, it cannot be denied that writing itself constitutes an act of “re-externalizating the event” in Laub’s statement mentioned previously. Moreover, since in narrative therapy the counselors are suggested to be non-judgmental helpers rather than supervisors—
8
In the field of psychological counseling, the word “client” is used to indicate the person who is given the therapy.
9 One of the paragraphs White and Epston quote from Foucault is from Power/Knowledge: Selected
Interviews and Other Writings (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980): “[W]e should try to discover
how it is that subjects are gradually, progressively, really and materially constituted through a multiplicity of organisms, forces, energies, materials, desires, thoughts, etc. We should try to grasp subjection in its material instance as a constitution of subjects” (qtd. in White and Epson 23).
which means that they are supposed to take a neutral stand in general—it can justify we link the role of readers of trauma literature with that of the counselors, for basically they act as the “listeners” of the traumas.
Here, I would like to refer to Tal’s remark about writing trauma, which tallies with Henke’s perspective and, in the meanwhile, stresses the importance of reading
trauma literature with an interdisciplinary approach. In her discussion, Tal draws on the concepts of the “national [collective] myth[s]” and “personal myth[s]” (117) to
elaborate her idea. According to Tal, a national myth functions in the public domain and is in the process of change as new concepts continue to be created in the social and cultural realm, a personal myth exists within every individual and is the base of his or her perceptions and reactions to particular situations. Tal adopts psychologist Daniel Goleman’s point that a personal myth forms with schemas that “operate at the level of the unconscious” (116) to state that “[g]rand revision of a personal myth must always spring from a traumatic experience” (116). Writing trauma, as stated by Tal, engages both “the development of alternative national myths through the
manipulation of plot and literary technique” and “the necessary rebuilding of
shattered personal myths” (117; emphasis in the original). Furthermore, Tal suggests that in order to recognize “the specific effects of trauma on the process of narration,”
critics of trauma literature should extend their academic views beyond literary criticism, here Tal specifically mentions psychology and sociology as the realms of knowledge that the critics should also study (117).
Both Henke’s and Tal’s statements remind us that besides affecting the writer’s
personal domain, writing trauma may also bring effects to public realm; or, when the traumatized give voices to their own traumas, they may not only want to articulate themselves but also expect to bring effects to their readers in an attempt to undertake a mission of social justice through writing. In fact, long before the emergence of
trauma studies in the twentieth century, the concept of “catharsis” stated in Aristotle’s Poetics has already suggested the psychological effects that artistic displays of tragic subjects may bring to the audience. When discussing tragedy in Poetics, Aristotle first brings up the idea of “catharsis” but does not elaborate much on its meaning, which leads to the existence of various interpretations of the concept nowadays. Yet, as Gerald Else puts as a footnote in his translation of Aristotle’s Poetics, almost all the definitions of “catharsis” “have in common a focus on pity and fear which are aroused
in the spectator. These are to be somehow either ‘purified’ (reduced to beneficent order and proportion) or ‘purged’ (expelled from his emotional system) by the play”
(97; emphasis in the original). Indeed, the Aristotelian notion of “catharsis” does not limit to the domain of drama studies but can be extended to other studies of arts, including literature.10 To provide a modern clinical perspective, I would like to turn to what psychoanalysts Barbara Almond and Richard Almond present in The
Therapeutic Narrative: Fictional Relationships and the Process of Psychological Change. While examining several novels, they find that a similar therapeutic mode can be found between clinical treatment and literature. They argue that literature is not only a source of “self-curative endeavors” (21) for creative writers, but also proposes that reading occurs in “a transitional space” (169), in which people may find
identification with the fictional characters and further relate the narratives to their own life stories. In view of the foregoing, one of the aspects I shall be concerned about in my study of Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards is what the two texts of trauma literature may possibly bring to their readers.
When it comes to national/collective traumas in Taiwan, the issue of ethnic
10 Interestingly, Chen has once stated that for her, writing is somewhat like having psychotherapy, but sometimes writing is like going through the process of catharsis and that when she was writing
Mazu’s Bodyguards, she seemed to be in the theater of cruelty, being able to sympathize with the
identities should be brought up. As it is widely known, Taiwan has been a state
composed of multiple ethnic groups because of migration and colonization. According to the currently widespread categorization of Taiwanese ethnic groups, there are four major ethnic groups in Taiwan, which include the Minnan (also known as Hokkien or native Taiwanese), the Hakka, waishengren (or the mainlanders) and Taiwanese aborigines. While this classification may be rough, it has been commonly used to categorize the population in Taiwan since 1945 when Japan surrendered Taiwan to the Republic of China (ROC) military forces which initially had its base in China. As the ROC government began to exercise sovereignty over Taiwan, the tensions between the so-called native Taiwanese and the newly arrived mainlanders came into existence.11 The “228 Incident” happened in 1947 marked the flashpoint of the conflicts between the Taiwanese civilians and the new government, which later led to the “White Terror,” Kuomintang’s suppression of its political dissidents under the
martial law from 1949 to 1987. Under the sovereignty of Kuomintang dictatorship, there generated disaffection among Taiwanese people. In both Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards, there contain depictions of major traumatic events happened in the above-mentioned political and social contexts of twentieth-century Taiwan. In the following, I am going to present the basic information about the two novels.
Hualing Nieh, known for her founding and directing the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa with American poet Paul Engle, has been a
significant literary figure in the contemporary age. In her long literary career, she has also been engaged in writing, translating, editing and teaching. Born in 1925 in China, Nieh grew up in an era of unrest. She fled to Taiwan in 1949 and lived on the island for more than a decade, during which time Taiwan was ruled under Chiang Kai-shek.
11 Yet, not until 1949 when being defeated by the Chinese Communist Party in China did Chiang Kai-shek, the then leader of Kuomintang, evacuate the ROC government to Taiwan. During that period of Kuomintang’s retreat, approximately two million mainlanders fled to Taiwan.
Holding an editorship of the dissident intellectual magazine Free China Fortnightly, Nieh was then oppressed by the Kuomintang government, which resulted in her exile to the United States in 1964. Nieh has published dozens of literary works, among which is the best-known and widely-translated Mulberry and Peach. Originally published in Chinese in the 1970s, Mulberry and Peach was banned under the governmental censorship.
The novel opens with the scene in which a woman named Peach is investigated by a man from USA Immigration Service in her house. Peach’s personality has been
clearly revealed as vigorous, obstinate, and even indecent. Divided into four parts, the main body of the novel is composed of Mulberry’s diary written in different periods of her life. The subtitle of the English edition, “Two Women of China,” somehow
obscures the theme that Mulberry and Peach are in fact the split personalities of one person. From 1945 to 1970, Mulberry has gone through the turmoil in war-time China, the political persecution and oppression in the “White Terror” period of Taiwan, and
the chase by the USA Immigration Service. Prior to each part of the diary is the letter to the immigration officer written by Peach while she is on the road to avoid being arrested. Ever since leaving home at the age of sixteen, Mulberry has begun a life of fleeing and exile, from the southern region to the northern region within China, from China to Taiwan, from Taiwan to the United States, and finally among the states in the U.S. Although it can be readily found that the female protagonist’s experience in the novel overlaps with the author’s in real life, Mulberry and Peach does not appear to
be a memoir-like writing to its readers but a work that is infused with avant-garde narrative techniques.
During these decades after its publication, Mulberry and Peach has remained as a classic of contemporary Sinophone literature and attracted much scholarly attention. As Sau-ling Cynthia Wong puts, Mulberry and Peach can be classified as “modern
Chinese literature, overseas Chinese literature, literature by writers from Taiwan, literature of exile, diaspora literature, Asian American literature, feminist literature, border-crossing literature, and more”(“Afterword” 210). The complexity of Mulberry and Peach, according to Wong, has led to multifarious ways to read the novel. Among Wong’s list of the various aspects from which one can approach the text, “China,
Chinese in America, the Chinese diaspora,” “trauma, witness, testimony and survivorhood,” “language and representability,” and “feminism, lesbianism, gender transgressions” are those related to my study of Mulberry and Peach in this thesis (“Afterword” 209-10).
Pin-chia Feng in her “At Home and Elsewhere: Diaspora Imagination and Transnational Migration in Nieh Hualing’s Mulberry and Peach” regards Nieh’s writing trauma as an act “to overcome what Shoshana Felman terms ‘failure of translation’: to speak or write to a listening party in order to lift repression and to translate one’s experience, thereby at least partially overcoming a linguistic barrier” (130). Quoted from Felman’s Writing and Madness, the “failure of translation” in its
original context stems from the gap between the ones in madness and those who are not. To extend the notion, this “failure of translation” can be regarded as existing in
every piece of writing, between its writer and readers. The main concern of this thesis lies in how trauma writing can contribute to counter the “failure of translation,” and further find the nexus between those traumatized, whether they can make their voices heard or not.
Unlike Nieh’s identity as “a survivor of historical traumas” (Feng 130), Jade Y.
Chen writes Mazu’s Bodyguards from a descendant's perspective. Chen, a former correspondent for Taiwan’s United Daily News in Europe, has been active in creative
writing, theater acting and directing. Mazu’s Bodyguards is one of Chen’s
2004 and has been translated into German and Japanese. In 2009, it was adapted into a Taiwanese opera and performed on stage.
Often seen as a family saga with autobiographical traits, Mazu’s Bodyguards begins with the homecoming of the narrator with her German boy friend. The novel tells the turbulence within the family throughout three generations, starting with the Japanese grandmother leaving her hometown Ryukyu Islands for Taiwan. Grandma Ayako initially plans to marry her countryman who is sent to Taiwan by the Japanese government as a colonial policeman. However, due to the Wushe Incident (or the Musha Incident), the rebellion against Japanese colonial forces in Taiwan evoked by Taiwanese tribal natives, Ayako’s fiancé has been murdered before she arrives.
Knowing nothing about the massacre, Ayako comes to Taiwan and then meets Lin Cheng-nan, whom she later marries. Henceforth, the fate of Lin’s family has been interwoven with the turmoil in the period of intense warfare. Lin goes to Japan to attend the flight school and then becomes a “Japanese soldier” in the battlefield in
southern Asia during World War II. As the Japanese government announces the unconditional surrender in 1945, it also ends its colonization of Taiwan, and then comes the Kuomintang troops. Natsuki, Ayako’ s first daughter, is married to Er-ma, a
refugee from China and later gives birth to five daughters, including the narrator. A key feature of Mazu’s Bodyguards is the absence of the male characters from the family: Ayako’s husband Lin volunteers to join the Japanese army at the front line;
Chih-nan, the younger brother of Lin, flees to Brazil during the period of “White Terror”; Er-ma leaves home for extra-marital affairs and then is put to jail for being charged as a “communist bandit.”
Significantly, both Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards depict the individual and family stories full of miseries yet indicate something greater beyond that—the national history of suffering. Many scholarly observations have identified
the tight connection between the familial narrative and the national discourse in Chinese literary tradition. As Chia-ling Mei points out, the imaginary tie between the family and the nation in Chinese culture is grounded in the traditional patriarchal socio-political system, which can be traced back to ancient China. Even in this era of cultural fusion of the East and the West, the predominant concept still has a great influence. Following the analysis of several Taiwanese novels written by male writers in the postwar era, Mei further poses a question in the final part of her essay: “Aside from those ‘sons,’ may there be ‘daughters’ who are eager to redefine or rewrite the familial/ national story in the future”12
(399)? Since in Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards their authors use the female perspective to construct national narratives, here I consider the two texts aptly demonstrate a positive answer to this call for daughterly texts.
Indeed, both Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards have caught much scholarly attention in the field of literary studies. As quoted from Wong, Mulberry and Peach has been considered representative of many different categories of literature and thus there exist various resources on the novel. Although Mazu’s Bodyguards was published later and has not been translated into as many languages as Mulberry and Peach has been, a considerable number of studies in the field of Taiwanese literature investigating Mazu’s Bodyguards have been published. These studies mainly deal with identification issues, female subjectivity, overseas literary writing, female familial narrative in the novel. Here in my thesis, I focus on trauma issues in the novel through an interdisciplinary perspective; moreover, by paralleling it with Mulberry and Peach, I explore the different ways in which the two novelists represent collective traumas of
12 See“Gu er? nie tz? ye hai zi? zhan hou Taiwan xiao shuo zhong de fu zi jia guo ji qi lie bian” [“Orphans? Sons of Sin? Wild Childs? The Patrilineal Home-country Narrative and its Changing in Postwar Taiwan Novels”]. Wen hua, ren tong, she huei bian qian: zhan hou wu shi nian Taiwan wen
xue guo ji yen tao hue [Culture, Identity, and Social Change: International Conference on Postwar Taiwan Literature]. Taipei: Council for Cultural Affairs, 2000. 363-99.
Taiwanese people.
In this introduction, I have presented the theoretical components that will be used in this study. It is worth mentioning that while seeking to combine concepts about trauma from both the humanities and clinical fields in my analysis, I caution myself not to ignore the fact that the two texts are “literary works.” As suggested by Geoffrey
H. Hartman, it is essential “to rethink our relation to literature without superseding it in the fervor of our commitment to social justice” (549).
Treating Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards as acts of writing traumas, in Chapter Two I juxtapose the plots in the two semi-autobiographical novels with those in Nieh’s and Chen’s life-writing,13
in an attempt to investigate how Nieh and Chen transfer their traumatic memories into fictional writing. As Nieh and Chen artistically represent individual and collective traumas in the novelistic mode, their deeds correspond to what scholars of trauma studies, such as Cathy Caruth, Dominick LaCapra and Kali Tal, have stated about the representation of trauma: since the overwhelming power of trauma leads to its impossibility of being fully perceived and accurately presented by people, in trauma narratives reconstruction of traumatic events is needed. By using fundamental concepts of narrative therapy to examine Nieh’s and Chen’s acts of writing traumas, I view Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s
Bodyguards as the “alternative stories” that the two authors produce in lieu of the predominant problematic ones in their self-therapeutic efforts. In addition, agreeing to Tal’s contention that trauma narratives may make alterations to both national myths
and personal myths, I also discuss what roles Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards may take within the context of Taiwanese society in which identity issue
13 Nieh has published her literary biography San sheng san shi [Three Lives, Three Ages] in 2004, which was later extended into the memoir San bei zi [Three Lives] in 2011. Aside from fictional writing, Chen has published several volumes of prose writing, in which she writes much about her life.
has been controversial and conflicts between different ethnic groups have been significant.
In Chapter Three, I examine how Nieh and Chen, although portraying their female characters as bearers of historical traumas in the “alternative stories,”
undermine those traumatized women’s identities as victims in their fictional writings.
Notwithstanding most women in Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards are placed on the margins of patriarchy and simultaneously are compelled to face the external oppression in times of unrest, they counter the male-dominated power system in their own ways. Borrowing bell hooks’ theory about the margin as a strategic space of resistance, I consider that Nieh’s and Chen’s portrayals of those traumatized
women constitute “the subversive voices from the margins” that can provide
counter-perspectives against the predominant discourses.
The final chapter offers a brief summary of my observations concerning
Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards as well as some reflections on my study in this thesis. In my study of literature, I have been concerned about not only the literary elements in texts but also how literary works interact with history and society. Trauma literature, indeed, gives me an access to pursue my research interest. As Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub point out, the study of trauma literature can be defined as the exploration of “how art inscribes (artistically bears witness to) what we do not yet know of our lived historical relation to events of our times” (“Foreword” xx; emphasis in the original). While Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards provide me with two examples of Taiwanese literature to learn what Felman and Laub state about trauma narratives, I see that in order to de-marginalize the voices of various traumas on this island, more texts that belong to the different traumatized/oppressed groups are to be critically explored in my future study.
Chapter Two
Writing Traumas in Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards
Before I begin my discussion in this chapter, I would like to quote what Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson point out in Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives to explain the concept of semi-autobiographical fictional narratives. According to Smith and Watson,
the boundary between the autobiographical and the novelistic is, like the boundary between biography and life narrative, sometimes exceedingly hard to fix. Many writers take the liberties of the novelistic mode in order to negotiate their own struggles with the past and with the complexities of identities forged in the present. (12)
Their idea can be aptly applied to my studies of Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards, since I regard the two novels as products of the two authors’ acts of writing traumas; that is to say, it is “the liberties,” or poetic license, that enable Nieh
and Chen to mingle autobiographical and fictional elements in their writings of traumatic experiences, in an attempt to “negotiate their own struggles” and further
represent them. Hence, the aim of this chapter is to explore how Nieh and Chen take “the liberties of the novelistic mode,” in the two novels. In other words, I intend to
examine how Nieh and Chen represent traumas in the fictional mode in Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards, and how their acts of writing traumas contribute to their “negotiation” with their own psychological struggles.
Belonging respectively to two different generations, Nieh and Chen employ distinct narrative tactics in the two semi-autobiographical novels representing traumas. First published in 1970s, Nieh’s Mulberry and Peach has been considered a highly
“a hybrid of the picaresque, the diary/epistolary, and the psychological novel” (Feng
132), Mulberry and Peach also displays surrealistic and fantasy elements within the story. In her preface to one of the reprinted version of Mulberry and Peach, Nieh states that being a “rule-abiding” writer, she has written Mulberry and Peach as her first attempt to “go beyond the bounds”(1).14
The bounds, although not clearly stated by Nieh in the article, can be regarded to be not only artistic but also political, as Taiwan had been under the Kuomintang dictatorship when Nieh was writing Mulberry and Peach. In the afterword, Nieh later alludes to Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” to
elaborate her viewpoint that one should not arbitrarily equate the fictional world with the real world, although some elements of the two worlds may inevitably overlap. As Nieh is a writer who has first-hand experience of political oppression, the above statement by her somewhat reveals her voice of protest against the fact that the Kuomintang government put a ban on Mulberry and Peach when the novel was first published.
Unlike Nieh, Chen wrote her Mazu’s Bodyguards at a time when the martial law in Taiwan was already lifted and both free speech and publication were allowed. As literary critic Kuo-wei Chen notes, there have been abundant works by Taiwanese writers of different ethnicities published since the martial law was lifted, and through telling stories from perspectives of the ethnic groups they belong to, those writers may possibly re-form the domain of ethnic politics, in other words, reposition the
privileged ethnic groups and the marginal ones (3); Mazu’s Bodyguards is certainly among those works mentioned by Kuo-wei Chen.15 We can observe that in contrast with Nieh, Chen can explicitly express her concern about Taiwanese politics through
14 The version I refer to here is the one printed in 1988 by Han Yi Se Yen Publisher, Taipei. 15 Chen has once stated that while writing Mazu’s Bodyguards, “I hoped I could study Taiwanese
history with an objective point of view,…,I was much certain that the roles of oppressors and victims could be dislocated, overlapped, or mutually converted, thus generated those tragedies in history” (“Before Becoming a Husband, He Was a Wife” 334).
plain narrative in her writing. Moreover, Chen’s narrative reflects a particular style
that has sprung from her own artistic experience. Chen has once stated that influenced by European films, she intentionally employs narrative devices such as stream of consciousness, montage and collage in her prose writing;16 likewise, we can also find traces of this influence in Mazu’s Bodyguards.
Notwithstanding Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards were written within different political and social contexts and thereby demonstrate distinct narrative styles, both authors display non-linear narratives in their story-telling. As Nieh tells the story by alternately presenting Peach’s letters and Mulberry’s diary entries, Chen unfolds the whole picture of the family’s story by interlacing each family member’s story from different historical contexts. Through their use of
fragmented narratives, Nieh and Chen challenge the conventional linear narrative not only in terms of forms and aesthetics, but also in regard to the historical discourse constructed within the narrative. Jui-fen Chang, a critic of contemporary Chinese literature, applies Michel Foucault’s prominent concept of “rupture” proposed in The
Archaeology of Knowledge to argue that Mazu’s Bodyguards challenges the “linear extension” of prevalent male-dominated historical discourse (131).17
Here, I would like to submit that Mulberry and Peach can be analyzed in this way as well.
In both Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards, many of the female characters’ traumatic experiences are related to the marginalization of women in the patriarchy system. While reading the two novels along with Nieh’s and Chen’s
life-writing, one can note that a considerable part of the two authors’ depiction of
16 In the interview script included in Selections from Chen Yu-huei (Chen yu-huei jing xuan ji), Chen has mentioned that in some of her prose essays, there can be found the impacts European films have had on her narrative devices, including stream of consciousness, montage and collage (19).
17 See “Kuotsu, Chiatsu, Nuhsing— Chen Yu-huei, Shih Shu-ching, Chung Wen-yin chinchi wenben chung de kuotsu/chia” [“Nation, Family, Females—Nation/Family in Recent Texts by Chen Yu-huei, Shih Shu-ching and Chung Wen-yin”]. Hu Lan-cheng, Chu Tien-wen yu “San-san”: Taiwan dandai
wenxue lunchi. [Hu Lan-cheng, Chu Tien-wen and “San-san”: Collection of Critiques of Taiwanese Contemporary Literature]. (Taipei: Hsiu-wei, 2007) 123-60.
female marginalization in their fictional writing are transferred from what they have experienced or witnessed in real life. By giving voice to those female traumas in their semi-autobiographical novels, Nieh and Chen not only enable the marginalized voices of women be heard to counter the dominant patriarchal discourse, but also verbalize the repressed voices of their own traumas. In view of this, I consider that some key concepts of narrative therapy from the realm of psychotherapy can be used in my exploration of both Nieh’s and Chen’s acts of writing traumas.
Characterized as a branch of postmodern psychotherapy approaches, narrative therapy is developed upon the premise that one’s cognition of reality is constructed within specific social and cultural context, and the stories one tells are actually products of that certain context. In their Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends, the forerunners of narrative therapy Michael White and David Epston quote from Michel Foucault— “Let us ask [...] how things work at the level of ongoing subjugation, at the level of those continuous and uninterrupted processes which subject our bodies, govern our gestures, dictate our behaviours, etc.” (qtd. in White and Epson 23)— to illustrate the fundamental of narrative therapy. The main task of a narrative therapist, therefore, is to assist the client deconstructing his or her own narrative during the treatment and further creating “alternative stories” (White and Epson 15) to replace the one that has previously dominated, or “subjected,” the client’s perspective of the
world.
There are two aspects in which I consider Nieh’s and Chen’s acts of writing
traumas can be discussed with the above-mentioned principles of narrative therapy. Firstly, as it is suggested by Jui-fen Chang that masculine narrative constitutes the mainstream of national historical discourses in Chinese and Taiwanese literature, Nieh and Chen indeed provide “alternative stories” to counter the “subjugation” by the
providing female perspectives to mirror the national history. Moreover, by
interweaving depictions of their lived experiences with fictional elements inside the texts, Nieh and Chen tell the “alternative stories” as substitutes for the traumatic
memories that have been haunting them in real life.
In the following, I am going to present the autobiographical components in Mulberry and Peach and Mazu’s Bodyguards through juxtaposing the two novels with Nieh’s and Chen’s life-writing as well as their personal statements concerning the
composition of the two novels. By doing so, I would like to illustrate my argument that through creating “alternative stories” in their semi-autobiographical novels, Nieh
and Chen not only demonstrate their resistance to the dominant patriarchal familial-national discourses but also tentatively relieve the pain from their own traumas.
I. Mulberry and Peach and Hualing Nieh’s Act of Writing Traumas
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.
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
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:
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
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
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
