Crafting Chinese Memories: The Art and Materiality of Storytelling 9781800732384

Table of contents :
Contents
Figures
Foreword: Conceptualizing Chinese Memories
Introduction: Materiality, Imagination and the Memorable
Part I CURATING MEMORIES THROUGH ART AND FILM
1 The Memory Palace of a Chinese Painter
2 JIA ZHANGKE’S MEMORY PROJECT, 24 CITY Rewriting History, Rethinking Historiography
Part II FRAMING MEMORIES THROUGH LITERATURE AND THE BODY
3 ‘Swimming against the Current’ The Mediation of Cultural Memory in the Writings by Christa Wolf and Ding Ling
4 CHINESE BODY-EXPRESSION AND CULTURAL MEMORY IN MO YAN’S BIG BREASTS & WIDE HIPS
5 Remembering Statelessness in Food Stories from Jewish Shanghai
PART III PROPAGATING MEMORIES THROUGH STORYTELLING
6 From Personal Connections to Mutual Trust: Building Memories with the Children of the Chinese Staff of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service
7 Jailhouse Blues, Storytelling and Becoming the Stuff of Legends in Southwest China
Conclusion: Layers, Traces, Fields and Storehouses of Memory
Index

Citation preview

CRAFTING CHINESE MEMORIES

Material Mediations: People and Things in a World of Movement Edited by Birgit Meyer, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Utrecht University, and Maruška Svašek, School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics, Queen’s University, Belfast. During the last few years, a lively, interdisciplinary debate has taken place between anthropologists, art historians and scholars of material culture, religion, visual culture and media studies about the dynamics of material production and cultural mediation in an era of intensifying globalization and transnational connectivity. Understanding ‘mediation’ as a fundamentally material process, this series provides a stimulating platform for ethnographically grounded theoretical debates about the many aspects that constitute relationships between people and things, including political, economic, technological, aesthetic, sensorial and emotional processes. Recent volumes: Volume 11 Crafting Chinese Memories The Art and Materiality of Storytelling Edited by Katherine Swancutt Volume 10 From Storeroom to Stage Romanian Attire and the Politics of Folklore Alexandra Urdea Volume 9 Sense and Essence Heritage and the Cultural Production of the Real Edited by Birgit Meyer and Mattijs van de Port Volume 8 Ethnographies of Movement, Sociality and Space Place-Making in the New Northern Ireland Edited by Milena Komarova and Maruška Svašek Volume 7 Death, Materiality and Mediation An Ethnography of Remembrance in Ireland Barbara Graham

Volume 6 Creativity in Transition Politics and Aesthetics of Cultural Production Across the Globe Edited by Maruška Svašek and Birgit Meyer Volume 5 Having and Belonging Homes and Museums in Israel Judy Jaffe-Schagen Volume 4 The Great Reimagining Public Art, Urban Space and the Symbolic Landscapes of a ‘New’ Northern Ireland Bree T. Hocking Volume 3 Object and Imagination Perspectives on Materialization and Meaning Edited by Øivind Fuglerud and Leon Wainwright Volume 2 Growing Artefacts, Displaying Relationships Yams, Art and Technology amongst the Nyamikum Abelam of Papua New Guinea Ludovic Coupaye

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/series/material-mediations

Crafting Chinese Memories The Art and Materiality of Storytelling

Edited by

Katherine Swancutt

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2022 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2022 Katherine Swancutt All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Swancutt, Katherine, editor. Title: Crafting Chinese memories : the art and materiality of storytelling / edited by Katherine Swancutt. Description: First edition. | New York : Berghahn, 2022. | Series: Material mediations: people and things in a world of movement ; volume 11 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021017517 (print) | LCCN 2021017518 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800732377 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800732384 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Collective memory in art. | Collective memory in literature. | Arts, Chinese—20th century—Themes, motives. | Arts, Chinese—21st century—Themes, motives. Classification: LCC NX650.M45 C73 2022 (print) | LCC NX650.M45 (ebook) | DDC 700.951/0904—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021017517 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021017518 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-80073-237-7 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-238-4 ebook

 Contents

List of Figures

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Foreword Conceptualizing Chinese Memories Jialin Liu and Raphael Woolf

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Introduction Materiality, Imagination and the Memorable Katherine Swancutt

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Part I. Curating Memories through Art and Film 1. The Memory Palace of a Chinese Painter Benoît Vermander 2. Jia Zhangke’s Memory Project, 24 City: Rewriting History, Rethinking Historiography Chris Berry

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Part II. Framing Memories through Literature and the Body 3. ‘Swimming against the Current’: The Mediation of Cultural Memory in the Writings by Christa Wolf and Ding Ling Yejun Zou

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4. Chinese Body-Expression and Cultural Memory in Mo Yan’s Big Breasts & Wide Hips Wei Luan

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5. Remembering Statelessness in Food Stories from Jewish Shanghai Anna Reading

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Contents

Part III. Propagating Memories through Storytelling 6. From Personal Connections to Mutual Trust: Building Memories with the Children of the Chinese Staff of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service Chihyun Chang 7. Jailhouse Blues, Storytelling and Becoming the Stuff of Legends in Southwest China Katherine Swancutt (苏梦林) and Jiarimuji (嘉日姆几)

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Conclusion Layers, Traces, Fields and Storehouses of Memory Katherine Swancutt

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Index

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S Figures

 1.1 ‘The Signs of Spring Are All Over the World’ by Li Jinyuan (2001), named after a poem by Li Rihua. Part of the ‘Pilgrims’ Progress’ series, Homage to Matteo Ricci. © Li Jinyuan

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 1.2 ‘Reading Du Fu: “The Flowers Will Be Heavy in Brocade City”’ by Li Jinyuan (2017). © Li Jinyuan

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 1.3 ‘Himalaya 5’ by Li Jinyuan (2016). Part of the ‘Heavens’ series. © Li Jinyuan

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 1.4 ‘Himalaya 1’ by Li Jinyuan (2016). Part of the ‘Heavens’ series. © Li Jinyuan

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 6.1 The Brief CV of H. Mei Liu. © H. Mei Liu

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 6.2 Page 26 of the 1940 Service List for Chinese Staff of the CMCS. © CMCS Archives, published with permission 157  6.3 Pages 206–207 of the 1940 Service List for Chinese Staff of the CMCS. © CMCS Archives, published with permission

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 6.4 Page 47 of the 1942 Service List for Chinese Staff of the CMCS. © CMCS Archives, published with permission 159  6.5 Page 13 of the 1940 Service List for Chinese Staff of the CMCS. © CMCS Archives, published with permission 161  6.6 Page 199 of the 1940 Service List for Chinese Staff of the CMCS. © CMCS Archives, published with permission

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 6.7 Page 205 of the 1940 Service List for Chinese Staff of the CMCS. © CMCS Archives, published with permission

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 6.8 Page 36 of the 1940 Service List for Chinese Staff of the CMCS. © CMCS Archives, published with permission 166

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Figures

Page 48 of the 1931 Service List for Chinese Staff of the CMCS. © CMCS Archives, published with permission 167

6.10 Page 134 of the 1931 Service List for Chinese Staff of the CMCS. © CMCS Archives, published with permission

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6.11 Page 61 of the 1944 Provisional Service List for Chinese Staff of the CMCS. © CMCS Archives, published with permission 168 6.12 Page 13 of the 1948 Provisional Service List for Chinese Staff of the CMCS. © CMCS Archives, published with permission 169 6.13 Page 43 of the 1942 Service List for Chinese Staff of the CMCS. © CMCS Archives, published with permission 169 6.14 Page 51 of the 1942 Service List for Chinese Staff of the CMCS. © CMCS Archives, published with permission 170 6.15 Page 48 of the 1940 Service List for Chinese Staff of the CMCS. © CMCS Archives, published with permission 171



Foreword Conceptualizing Chinese Memories

Jialin Liu and Raphael Woolf

This volume is, happily, the child of many parents, but its most direct ancestry lies in two workshops held in 2016 and 2017 in Shanghai and London respectively, between academic staff and graduate students from the King’s College London (KCL) Faculty of Arts & Humanities, and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) School of Humanities. It seems appropriate, in this Foreword, to say a little about how the workshops came about and how they contributed to the emergence of the current volume. The underlying purpose of the workshops was both to reflect and to foster academic collaboration between the two contributing institutions, and thereby to further the cause of mutual cultural understanding in relation not just to the two great cities where the workshops were held, but more broadly as well. The workshops took place under the overall rubric of ‘Culture & Identity’, a theme intending to capture the breadth and variety of approaches that might be adopted in meeting our partnership’s wider aims. But it soon became clear that the topic of ‘Memory’ offered a focus that would both highlight the academic strengths of the participants and illuminate the social and intellectual currents that underpin – or disrupt – what we think we know about the shaping of cultural formations and influences. The fi rst workshop in Shanghai in September 2016 took as its topic ‘Cultural Memory in the 21st Century’ and featured five speakers from KCL and eight from SJTU on subjects ranging from the role of the Digital Humanities in the creation of cultural memory, to Shanghai football fans’ rivalry as a case study in the politics of identity. What was particularly gratifying about the workshop was not just its cordial atmosphere but the way in which connections between topics were forged during the event in

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ways that could not have been predicted beforehand. The contemporary formation of cultural memory was not just a theme but in a sense also an outcome of the proceedings. As a result, it was swiftly agreed that a return workshop would be held in London and this duly took place in September 2017. To retain continuity, ‘Memory’ remained a central concept. The workshop theme was ‘Discourse, Life-Writing and Memory’ and again featured thirteen papers in all, seven from SJTU and six from KCL, with themes ranging across many aspects of the interplay of cross-cultural memory, including Robert Payne’s Chinese narratives in his wartime diaries, and time, space and the Chinese migrant in Guo Xiaolu’s works. It became clear in the wake of the workshops that a volume of essays that followed their spirit while forging its own path was desirable. It seemed appropriate, too, given the multiplicity of interest in the concept of crafting Chinese memories that this should be the focus of the volume. Its key subtheme of ‘The Art and Materiality of Storytelling’ as a conduit for the crafting of these memories represents this multiplicity while also, in line with the aims of the series of which this volume is a part, indicating the movement and dynamism that lies behind their making. For if there is any conceptual lesson to be drawn from the rich and dynamic history of Chinese memory, with its constant interchange of external influences and internal shifts, it is that memories are not a neutral, individualistic, cognitive given; they are created and framed, redeemed or submerged, through a complex interaction of social, political and artistic forces. We are delighted that the team of international scholars whose work is represented here has affiliations beyond the original two institutions that developed the workshops, so as to include perspectives from Europe and across China. We thank them, and especially the volume’s editor, Katherine Swancutt, for her tireless effort and initiative in bringing the collection together. We hope that the narratives and analyses in this volume will, like the workshops that inspired them, play their own small role in the fashioning and understanding of what memory is and what it can be, using Chinese experiences in their cultural and material context as a paradigm. We hope above all that reflecting on these reflections on the ways in which memory is a complex and dynamic cultural phenomenon will help to sustain the virtues of understanding and cooperation that are as essential now as they ever were. Jialin Liu is Professor of Literature, Director of the Department of Chinese Language and Literature in the School of Humanities and Director of the Centre for Life Writing at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His publications include: Nabokov’s Poetic World (Shanghai People’s Press, 2012), Foreign Biography Dictionary (deputy editor in chief, Shanghai Dictionary Press, 2009), and Introduction to Comparative Literature (co-author, Peking

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University Press, 2002). He is also the translator of Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859 (Guangxi Normal University Press, 2016), Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Guangxi Normal University Press, 2011), and Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years (Guangxi Normal University Press, 2009). Raphael Woolf is Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London. After undergraduate study in Classics at Cambridge, he received his MPhil (1993) and PhD (1997) in Philosophy at King’s. His main academic interests are in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. He is author of Cicero: The Philosophy of a Roman Sceptic (2015) and co-editor (with Verity Harte) of Rereading Ancient Philosophy: Old Chestnuts and Sacred Cows (2017). He has translated Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics (with Brad Inwood, 2013), and Cicero’s De Finibus (‘On Moral Ends’, edited by Julia Annas, 2001), and has published articles on Plato, Aristotle and Hellenistic philosophy. Between 2015 and 2018 he served as Vice-Dean (External Relations) of the Arts & Humanities Faculty at King’s. Before returning to King’s he was Assistant then Associate Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University (1999–2006), spending the 2002–2003 academic year as a Mellon Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

Index



Introduction Materiality, Imagination and the Memorable

Katherine Swancutt

Storytelling is a craft, and often a vocational art, that enlivens memories, gives them material form, and transmits them across generations. There are perhaps endless mediums in which a story can take shape, from artistic disciplines such as painting, film and literature to novels, life writing and tales infused with the larger-than-life qualities of legends or myth-histories. What each form of storytelling has in common, though, is the penchant for opening up spaces of (re)imagining – in highly memorable ways – lived experiences, historical events, popular legends, works of fiction or fantasy, and even excursions beyond any particular memory. Echoing the motif of this book series, the contributors to this volume set out to show how storytelling unfolds as a ‘material mediation’ that draws persons and things into memorable relationships. To this end, the contributors offer an interdisciplinary conversation on the material contours, sensuous qualities and imaginative ways of conceptualizing memories in and of China. It is likely that every memorable story is shaped by what Webb Keane, drawing upon Nancy D. Munn’s (1986) use of Peircean semiotics, dubs the ‘factor of co-presence or what we might call bundling’ (2003: 414; see also 2005: 194). As Keane explains, any sensuous quality, such as the redness of an apple or, I would add, the memorable features of stories ‘must be embodied in something in particular’ (2003: 414). Keane further suggests this material something is in turn ‘actually, and often contingently (rather than by logical necessity), bound up with other qualities – [such that] redness in an apple comes along with spherical shape, light weight, and so forth’ (ibid.). He concludes that the bundling together of sensuous and material qualities

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gives rise to the ‘“biography” of things’ so famously observed by Igor Kopytoff (1986) and Arjun Appadurai (1986) in the latter’s seminal volume on the ‘social life of things’ (ibid.). Now, anything memorable could be said to have material and sensuous qualities, as well as a biography, and stories are no exception. Each contributor to this volume therefore traces the social life of one or more memorable stories, understood in a broad sense to include the tales conveyed through painting, filmmaking, memoirs, novels, life-writing, the reunions of record-keepers, and storytelling legends among China’s ethnic minorities. The contributors focus upon stories that have been crafted chiefly within, but also beyond, the People’s Republic of China. They suggest that persons who can relate to memorable stories, works of labour or works of art engage with them in ways that stretch their own imaginations backwards and forwards in time. Ultimately, the contributors show that persons reflect upon their lives through the stories they hear, see, read or perceive in other ways, which they sometimes reanimate through their own memorable retellings of them. Telling memorable stories, though, is not easy. This is probably one key reason why stories are often analysed as ‘narratives’ in ways that set them apart from their material, and sometimes even imaginative, qualities (cf. Geertz 1973; Tedlock 1999; Schneider 1987: 809, see also 819; MacDonald and Harvey 2012: 135; Herrmann and DiFate 2014: 4). Since the postmodern movement of the late 1960s, the extant literature on storytelling across the arts, humanities and social sciences has focused predominantly upon narratives (Maggio 2014: 98–100). Much like sharing a joke, the telling of a story is still commonly explained away as a pastime that requires being steeped in the sense that one ‘had been there’ and experienced its events first-hand, at least if the story is to be understood in full (Carty and Musharbash 2008). Of course, any study of storytelling requires some discussion of the relevant narratives, how they came to be produced, and what it might have felt like to have lived through them. Yet as Kirin Narayan suggests of storytelling in India, ‘there’s always a reason’ why a story exceeds its narrative content (1989: 22). Perhaps the reason is that storytellers routinely go beyond familiar life experiences by inviting their audiences, viewers and readers to reflect imaginatively upon the memorably fantastical or strange qualities of a given tale that impart it with a distinctive social life of its own. Thus, as Keith Basso (1996) proposed in his now classic study of the Western Apache, stories do more than re-present narratives; they set in motion conversations that artfully weave the memorable and the fantastically strange into lasting repertoires of ‘wisdom’ that reveal exemplary social values, teach persons to think for themselves, launch complex social critiques, and reflect what matters most in life.

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Going Beyond Memory How does a storyteller craft a tale that goes beyond memory? And what does not count as memory in any given story, work of labour or work of art? Each chapter in the present volume addresses these two questions and invites the reader to consider what, besides memories, underpins the social lives of stories. Like other works of labour and works of art, stories are composed of imaginative invention, the exercise of fantasy, and notably the effort to exceed both personal memory (often called ‘individual’ memory) and social memory, which is frequently conceptualized as a kind of ‘public’, ‘collective’ or ‘communicative’ memory of the present moment that both shapes and is shaped by the ‘cultural’ memories and identities traced to myth-historical time. It is worth lingering here on the distinctions between these various kinds of memory to discuss their import for this volume before pressing ahead with what lies beyond them. Since Maurice Halbwachs’ (1980 and 1992) landmark studies on collective memory, which date to shortly before the mid-twentieth century, the study of memory has been entangled with materiality. It was Halbwachs who proposed that personal memories are shaped by the wider community, nation and (typically built) environments that persons inhabit. In a similar vein, Pierre Nora (1996, 1997, 1998) has suggested, in his influential trilogy on French lieux de mémoire, or places of memory, that the collective memory and identity of a nation arise through symbiotic relationships between human experience, architecture and material items. Striking out on a somewhat different path, Jan Assmann has proposed that Halbwachs’ ‘collective memory’ be parsed into two concepts: ‘communicative’ memory, which unfolds in ‘social time’ and has as its focus the ‘social self, [or] person as carrier of social roles’, and ‘cultural’ memory that takes place in ‘historical, mythical, [or] cultural time’ and is the provenance of ‘cultural identity’ (2008: 109). According to Assmann, the value of this particular distinction is that it preserves Halbwachs’ choice to separate collective memory ‘from the realm of traditions, transmissions, and transferences’ that make up ‘cultural memory’, while still recognizing that the social time of communicative memory and the myth-historical time of cultural memory are both important, albeit ‘different modi memorandi, [or] ways of remembering’ (2008: 110). These varied ways of conceptualizing memory are valuable unto themselves, if for no other reason than that they call attention to the multiple relationships between memory-making and sociocultural life. But since each of these analyses are built predominantly upon Euro-American conceptualizations and social thought, they do not always provide an apt foundation for drawing cross-cultural comparisons to vast cultural regions such as China, which

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have their own rich and extensive histories as well as particular ways of remembering or forgetting. Perhaps the one exception here is Assmann, who frequently brings Egyptian and Vedic conceptualizations of memory into dialogue with Euro-American ones, to provide a more expansive, cross-cultural, and cross-historical study of what constitutes memories and the memorable (cf. Assmann 2006). Building upon Assmann, Marc Andre Matten has observed in a recent volume on memory-making in modern China that Halbwachs (and one could say this of Nora too) emphasizes the ways in which ‘mémoire is transformed into histoire’ (2014: 9). But as Matten notes, Halbwachs argues that memory becomes history without acknowledging how ‘cultural memory itself consists of objectified culture, which includes texts, rituals, images, buildings, and monuments, whose main function is to bring to mind fateful events the collective has experienced in the past’ (ibid.). According to Matten, there is an important connection to be made between cultural memory on the one hand, which is founded upon historical, mythical and cultural time, and, on the other hand, items that evoke cultural memory through their material and sensorial qualities. Intriguingly, the connections that Matten (2014) draws between cultural memory and its material manifestations resonate with Keane’s (2003) suggestion that bundling together the sensuous and material qualities of things imparts them with memorable social lives. Yet it is possible to take the analysis further. This is because storytellers and those who create works of labour or works of art bundle together the sensorial, material and indeed conceptual qualities of tales in ways that reveal ‘things … are concepts as much as they appear to us as “material” or “physical” entities’ (Henare, Holbraad and Wastell 2007: 13). Throughout this book, the contributors suggest that storytellers recount typically memorable experiences by calling attention to their conceptual, material and sensorial qualities. Storytellers may describe dramatic bodily states, whether of material privation or luxury, in ways that are meant to evoke the imaginative empathy of a readership (see the chapters in this volume by Yejun Zou, Wei Luan and Anna Reading). Alternatively, storytellers may focus upon the kinds of items that Matten (2014: 9) calls ‘objectified culture’, such as texts or images, which are memorable precisely because they have unique conceptual, material and sensorial features, as Benoît Vermander and Chris Berry suggest in their chapters for this volume. Moreover, certain storytellers set out to make their tales memorable by evoking the historical, mythical and cultural time of a particular social group. Many of the contributors to this volume thus show that storytellers and their audiences, viewers or readers may envisage ‘the group’ as a whole civilization, like that of China. Or the group may be conceptualized at a more particular level, for example as a specific lineage within an ethnic minority of China,

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such as the Nuosu, who are the subjects of the chapter in this volume by Katherine Swancutt and Jiarimuji. Beyond this, the group may be a collective of persons with a shared history that only gradually comes into focus, such as the descendants of the Chinese officials in the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS) of Shanghai, who feature in the chapter by Chihyun Chang in this volume. Seen in this light, the conceptual, sensorial and material qualities of any tale may provoke in audiences, viewers or readers what I have elsewhere called the ‘imaginative-cum-bodily experience of ideasthesia’, which compels persons to sense concepts or perceive meanings associated with a particular social, historical, mythic and cultural identity (Swancutt 2016: 97; see also 102 and 105–13). The contributors to this volume, then, start their analyses from the study of memory-making and of the memorable. They offer discussions of personal and social (or public) memory that align closely with Stephan Feuchtwang’s (2011) use of these terms in his study of state violence and remembering in China, Taiwan and Germany. To get a sense of how Feuchtwang envisages the relationships between personal and social memories that are often learned and transmitted through stories, consider the following passage: Memory proper is a capacity of human cognition and feeling. It is individual. But it is possible to understand individual human memory in more social terms, as the relation between learned habits (semantic memory) of telling stories, episodic (or autobiographical) memory, and public narratives. But this does not cover the fullness of the dynamic interaction between personal recall and various modes of transmission covered by the term ‘social’ or ‘public’ memory. (Feuchtwang 2011: 13)

Note that while Feuchtwang distinguishes here between the types of memory (i.e. individual and social/public) that give rise to certain kinds of narratives or stories, he is careful to point out the conceptual limitations to these categories. He suggests that any typology of memories is in fact exceeded by the multiple ways in which specific memories mutually shape each other (Feuchtwang 2011: 13–14). To Feuchtwang, only personal memory can be consistently defined, in this case as an individual’s retained thoughts, cognition and feelings about specific experiences. In contrast, social or public memory is subject to the recursive relationship between memory and learning. Thus, he suggests in this next passage that the recalling and transmitting of memories unfolds in tandem with the ways in which persons learn how to tell a story: On the one hand recalling something experienced, recalling it to oneself or for interpersonal transmission, can produce not just an interpretation but also possibly an alternative or more conflicted sense of what is transmitted much more sim-

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ply in public memory. On the other hand recalling even personal experiences is strongly affected by what is learned through the transmission of public memory. We all learn habits of how to tell a story, in various registers and genres. So there is a dynamic between the experiences and the ways of sharing experiences that are learned in the process of remembering. (Feuchtwang 2011: 13–14)

Here, Feuchtwang highlights the multiplicity of ways in which social (or public) memory and storytelling are recalled, interpreted and transmitted – sometimes even in the form of conflicted memories. His emphasis on the feedback loop between learning how to remember experiences and how to recount them is reminiscent of an earlier suggestion by the visual anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker, David MacDougall, that ‘social memory is thus “social” in an active sense: negotiated, provisional, and indicative of relationships’ (1994: 268). Feuchtwang (2011) and MacDougall (1994) each evoke an important observation shared by one anonymous reviewer of this volume: that the unity of social memory is never to be taken for granted, as it is ultimately an assertion, a hope, a possibility and a well-specified appeal to a given collective. It follows that any social memory is asserted by the persons who learn it, remember it and transmit it to a particular collective through storytelling. Indeed, as Vermander (this volume) suggests, ‘transmission is storytelling’.

Appealing to Social Memory Now, the contributors to this volume show that there is always some uncertainty around the professed unity of social memory. But they also propose that stories, works of labour and works of art may transmit lasting and, in some cases, mythopoetic visions about a particular social collective in and of China. They suggest that storytellers, broadly defined, go beyond recounting the experiences with which other persons may identify. As they show, some storytellers set out to artfully entangle their audiences, viewers or readers in the imaginative, fascinating and memorably strange. There are numerous ways in which evocations of the strange – particularly where it is equated with the ethnic other – may contribute to the assertion of social memory. Luan’s marvellous chapter (this volume) on Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize winning novel Big Breasts and Wide Hips, which is a work memorably embellished with the author’s fantasies about the strange and the ethnic other in China, shows that what is memorable need not be formed exclusively of memories. As Luan shows, Mo Yan recounts the hunger and other privations of mid-twentieth-century China that led, in his imaginative reflections on them, to such fantastical events as the transformation of persons who are half-Chinese into the bird fairies of Daoism.

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According to Luan, Mo Yan works to instil in his readership empathy and imaginative identification with his memorably strange characters as a way of asserting a unified social memory of China’s contemporary past. She suggests that Mo Yan’s version of social memory is grounded in a distinctive understanding of what the so-called Chinese body (sometimes entangled conceptually, materially and sensorially with the strangely other) happens to be. Complex works of literature, such as Mo Yan’s novel, give rise to the question of how storytellers come to ensure that the memorably strange not only emerges as something to which audiences, viewers or readers can relate, but ultimately becomes incorporated into social, public and even cultural memory. One important way in which storytellers may entangle their audiences, viewers or readers within the strange is through what Michael Taussig calls ‘mimesis’, or the ‘ability to mime, and mime well, [which] in other words, is the capacity to Other’ (1994: 206). Mimesis in Taussig’s terms is a famously ‘two-layered notion’ that bundles together ‘on the one hand a copying or imitation and, on the other, a palpable, sensuous connection between the very body of the perceiver and the perceived’ (ibid.). As a process, mimesis demands that persons establish a relationship with others (who are typically ethnic others) and identify with them through mimicry. Taussig’s study is renowned for its historically reconstructive analysis of how the Kuna of Panama improvised a new method of curing by carving wooden figurines that resemble Europeans (1993: 2–8). He suggests that the Kuna harnessed the powers of Europeans by reproducing their bodily, sensuous and material forms in wooden magic sticks, which were dressed in ways that mimicked European clothing styles and, in some cases, were carved in ways that revealed the European penchant for horseback riding too (ibid.). Yet Taussig also considers how storytellers and their audiences mimic, and thereby mutually re-experience, a tale as it is recounted (1993: 40). Drawing upon Walter Benjamin, he suggests that storytellers and audiences use mimetic empathy as a way of imagining themselves to be engaged in memorable experiences of the strange and other (ibid.). Consider his discussion here of how storytellers and audiences come to hold two perspectives at once, that of their own selves and that of the mimicked other: the storyteller embodied that situation of stasis and movement in which the far-away was brought to the here-and-now, archetypically that place where the returned traveller finally rejoined those who stayed at home. It was from this encounter that the story gathered its existence and power, just as it is in this encounter that we discern the splitting of the self, of being self and Other, as achieved by sentience taking one out of oneself – to become something else as well. (Taussig 1993: 40–41)

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Taussig’s point is this: storytellers induce mimetic empathy in their audiences in ways that appeal to a unified social memory. They set out to recount memorable tales of the self, the strange and the other to which audiences can relate. Storytellers who elicit mimetic, empathetic and imaginative responses from their audiences, viewers or readers collapse the distance, so to speak, between them. People thus come to identify something as a story, a work of labour or work of art through mimetic empathy. Although Taussig makes this point with respect to face-to-face storytelling, the contributors to this volume suggest that audiences, viewers or readers also empathize mimetically with the characters or plots of films, novels and other works of labour or works of art (more on this below). Right now, though, I need to make an important caveat, which is that not all works are memorable, embellished with the strange, or accessible through mimicry or imaginative empathy. The distinction commonly drawn between the recounting of experience and historiography, which resonates with the distinction between the memorable and actual experience, should help to make this point clear. Storytellers are commonly understood to recount experiences by drawing freely upon a combination of personal and public memories, historical events, legends, myth-histories, imagination, fantasy, the memorable, strange and other. By contrast, historiography typically refers to the writing of histories, the study of the writing of histories, or the study of written histories, which are based upon actual experiences – some of them memorable, some of them not. Historiography is therefore often envisioned as a single-authored endeavour that is not embellished with the strange and other. Yet, as Berry (this volume) suggests in his penetrating chapter on Jia Zhanke’s 24 City, a film about a former factory, self-sacrifice and the changing values in Chinese society, viewers are invited to envision a plurality of memories and histories about the Third Front. As Berry shows, Jia Zhanke offers an alternative and more democratic vision of historiography in 24 City, which, like The Records of the Grand Historian compiled by Sima Qian between 100 and 90 bce, encompasses a multiplicity of voices and perspectives. Plural visions of historiography, such as these, allow conflicted memories to emerge – in a manner reminiscent of the oppositional histories championed by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Elie Wiesel (Connerton 1989: 15). Given this, stories, works of art or works of labour (including some historiographies) transmit a suite of conflicted memories, counter-memories or contested memories. Vermander’s enthralling chapter in this volume on the conflicted memories inscribed into paintings is a case in point. As he shows, works of art by the Chinese painter Li Jinyuan reveal tensions between, on the one hand, the strange and memorable novelties introduced to China by the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci and, on the other hand, the nostalgia for Chi-

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na’s past or the indecision concerning its culture and destiny. This propensity of stories, works of labour or works of art to generate conflicted memories as well as imaginative, empathetic and highly memorable entanglements with the strange is a theme that cuts across much of this volume. It brings me now to some further reflections on the social lives of these works.

The Social Lives of Stories, Works of Labour and Works of Art The term ‘social life’, as one anonymous reviewer of this volume observed, implies that one can see or otherwise perceive what it is, with whom it is shared, or to what it is other or strange. I want to broaden the discussion now to show how the social lives of stories, works of labour or works of art come into focus, not only through the face-to-face recounting of experience, but also in film, literature, museum exhibitions and other mediums that are experienced at a distance from the persons who produced them. MacDougall suggests that films of memory ‘do not of course record memory itself, but its referents, its secondary representations (in speech, for example) and its correlatives’ (1994: 261). He raises the filmmaker’s question of how any viewer might engage with referents to specific memories of which they have no first-hand experience, and for which they cannot directly query the filmmaker. According to MacDougall, filmmakers are well aware of this problem and set out to address it through a good deal of ‘trial and guesswork’, as no films ‘communicate an unequivocal message’ and viewers may interpret films in their own ways, which are ‘open to continual rereading’ (1994: 261). Yet he also points out that many filmmakers use techniques, which, by all appearances, are meant to induce mimetic, imaginative and empathetic responses in viewers (MacDougall 1994: 264–66). For example, filmmakers may edit images of surviving objects, photographs and newsreels so that they appear alongside their interviewees, evoking in viewers the sense of directly having witnessed memories of the past. Each such filmic image may be presented ‘as if this were memory itself … [and] quite illegitimately as the memories of the speakers’ who were interviewed (MacDougall 1994: 261, emphasis in the original). Nonetheless, filmic images become memorable touchstones that shape how viewers think about the past, even as they feed into the processes by which viewers recall and transmit experiences into public memory (ibid.). Revealingly, filmmakers sometimes use images like these to critique the notion of a unified social memory, thereby encouraging viewers to recognize the conflicted, contested or counternarratives to the experiences being recounted (see Berry, this volume). Other works of labour or works of art, such as painting, literature and life-writing, may unleash similarly imaginative, empathetic and yet conflicted responses from readers or viewers. The con-

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tributors to this volume thus show that works containing images in the form of paintings, film, written text, official records or oral narratives may lead to conflicted memories, some of which acquire social lives that move far beyond the settings in which they were created to acquire an international presence. Certain stories, works of labour or works of art are perhaps especially likely to generate cross-cultural dialogues between storytellers, their audiences, viewers or readers, who, as Justin Izzo (2015) suggests, become imaginatively engaged in projects of ‘rewriting and writing over’ one another’s memories as though they were a ‘narrative palimpsest’. Vermander’s chapter on the ‘memory palace’ of Li Jinyuan is an evocative example of this dynamic, where the writing and painting of older memories onto newer ones leads to richly rewarding and yet also conflicted ways of re-envisioning them. Conflicted or contested memories are often traced to questions about the moral, and emotive, fabric of public and cultural memory as persons usually want to remember stories that present ‘exemplars’ of social conduct (Humphrey 1997, Højer and Bandak 2015), while anything less than exemplary or model behaviour is more easily forgotten. Before turning to discuss the arrangement of this volume, then, I want to offer some brief remarks on the way in which stories, works of labour and works of art have shaped experiences of remembering and forgetting in China.

Remembering and Forgetting In all kinds of settings, from everyday exchanges to memorials held for the dead, the recounting of experience encourages persons to remember some things and forget others (Vitebsky 1993, 2008, 2012, 2017; Mueggler 2001, 2014, 2017). Strategies of remembering have routinely shaped China’s past, which is rooted in its imperial and, in modern times, national historical narratives. China is famous for its long history of meticulous record-keeping and its grand projects of memory-making. One chief purpose behind its record-keeping was to establish the geographic bounds of everything that fell under the emperor’s mandate of heaven, including the peoples at the ‘Sino-Other’ borderlands, who were often envisioned as ‘barbarians’ to be encompassed within the Middle Kingdom (see, for example, Gros 2004, Mullaney 2004 and Wang 2012). These records offer a selective public memory of China as a civilization that has folded the strange and other into the imperial project and, more recently, into the projects of the party-state. Nevertheless, as Berry (this volume) suggests, the records compiled by Sima Qian offer a far more plural historiography than is often recognized outside of China, or at least in Euro-American social history. Beyond this, myriad grassroots-level stories of particular persons, regions, social and ethnic

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groups circulate in China, some of which have entered the official historical narratives and others not. Since its early days, the party-state has co-opted and even embellished the tales of contemporary persons, some real and others fictitious. A case in point is Lei Feng (雷锋), a soldier in the People’s Liberation Army, who, under Mao Zedong in the 1960s, was hailed as a heroic and legendary exemplar of modesty and selflessness to be emulated by the masses, but whose storybook memory (like that of many others) has alternately faded and been revived with the changing political times (cf. Chao 1999: 509–11). The effort to remember against the grain of political, ideological and aesthetically induced forgetting remains an important feature of Chinese storytelling traditions. Ka-ming Wu has shown, for example, that while the musical dramas of the Northern Shaanxi storytelling tradition were reworked in the early 1940s to bring party propaganda and cultural enrichment to rural villages, since the 1980s local storytellers have returned their craft to its original purpose as part of the religious observances at temple festivals – which, crucially, remain quite some distance removed from the eyes of the party-state (2011: 103–107). Storytelling in China is thus an enduring craft that sometimes gives voice to memories that conflict with or run counter to the official historiography. Like apt storytellers, the contributors to this volume explore unofficial and grassroots-level stories in and of modern China that are meant to launch projects of remembering and creatively connect with the world beyond it. They show how Chinese projects of remembering, and of forgetting, are routinely crafted into tales of personal and social value that draw upon elements of Chinese philosophy, modern history, imagination, fantasy, biography or legends. Each of the stories recounted in this volume revolves around a unique leitmotif that points beyond itself – to the ultimate truth of the Dao (Vermander), to the plurality of historiography (Berry), to the tensions and complexities of socialism (Zou), to the artistic memory field of Chinese body-expression (Luan), to efforts at coming to terms with statelessness (Reading), to reconstructions of biography (Chang), and to myth-histories that keep feuds alive (Swancutt and Jiarimuji). To this end, the contributors mobilize an interdisciplinary conversation that binds together the volume’s three interrelated themes, to which I now turn.

Part I: Curating Memories through Art and Film Part I of this volume is devoted to the theme of curating memories through art and film. It follows the contemporary storytelling projects of the painter, Li Jinyuan (Vermander’s chapter), and the filmmaker, Jia Zhangke (Berry’s

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chapter). Both Vermander and Berry reflect upon how artists-as-storytellers bring their works into conversation with the current moment, their previous works and the artistry of others. Their chapters show that stories, works of labour and works of art produce storehouses of memory filled with personal, social, cultural and historical reflections. Vermander proposes in his chapter that Chinese artists, such as Li Jinyuan, add ‘layers’ or ‘traces’ of the memories that they create throughout their lives to a ‘memory palace’ much like the one described by Jonathan D. Spence in The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci. The artist’s memory palace is filled with memories and meanings to be drawn upon when producing a composition, diary or other work. Going a step further, Vermander suggests that the artist’s memory palace becomes filled with memories of specific artistic compositions that he or she has either observed or produced. Not unlike the artworks or everyday items that act as the ‘containers’ (Küchler 1988, Strathern 1996, Morton 2007) of memories elsewhere in the world, the Chinese artist’s memory palace is a storehouse of memories, experiences and meanings that are always ‘ready to hand’ for the production of new compositions, in the Heideggerian sense of the term that Rane Willerslev adopts in his ethnographic study of Siberian hunters, for whom any ‘knowable object is a tool’ (2004: 401; emphasis in the original). Because storehouses of memory have material qualities, they also direct memory-making along specific lines, making it both tangible and accessible. As Vermander shows, Li Jinyuan crafts a storehouse of memory in dialogue with his painting mentors, his art students (including Vermander), and even Ricci himself. Thus, in a memorable train journey that Li Jinyuan undertook, he followed Ricci’s own travels in reverse by visiting his hometown of Macerata, as well as Rome and Macau, before returning to China. Throughout this journey, Li Jinyuan created memories that he added to his ‘creation diary’, which became a new storehouse filled with his sketches, paintings and often poetically inspired reflections on the art of layering colours and stories within a memory palace. The creation diary reveals that Li Jinyuan’s artistic œuvre is composed of layers and traces of personal, social and cultural memories from within and beyond China – all of which uncover Ricci’s own eye for detail. Yet Li Jinyuan’s creation diary does more than evoke resonances between the Roman plains of Ricci’s hometown and the plains of Northern China. It records, among other things, an earlier moment in Li Jinyuan’s life when he was incorporated into the spiritual lineage of his painting mentor, who presented him with a calligraphic work, as an aide-mémoire of his entrance into the master’s artistic school. Vermander discusses his own memorable entry into this spiritual lineage, as the person who, by all appearances, Li Jinyuan has tasked with disseminating his storehouse of memories internationally.

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Surely one key reason for producing a storehouse of memory is to ensure that personal experiences enter the annals of social and cultural memory. But there is also the question of how memories reflect particular histories, even as they defy the conventions of a genre. Berry proposes in his chapter that film can be an especially poignant repository of memories, particularly in works such as Jia Zhangke’s 24 City, which set out to include what he calls the ‘various incommensurable elements’ of documentary and scripted scenes. As Berry suggests, memories that unfold as a combination of unprocessed and scripted stories invite audiences to reflect upon how personal and social histories are crafted  into storytelling, and vice-versa. Moreover, viewers of 24 City are encouraged to empathetically identify with its protagonists in ways that evoke public memories – for example, of the transition to China’s market economy – which are not only emotionally moving, but also underscore the uniqueness of each person’s own memorable experiences. Berry shows that Jia Zhanke’s audiences reacted differently to the decision to have famous actors in 24 City play the role of ordinary persons alongside the non-actors who held more purely documentary roles. Some viewers found the resonances between the actors and their previous acting personas to be a moving artistic intervention that evoked uniquely personal memories and experiences in China’s social history. According to Berry, Jia Zhangke wanted to achieve precisely this effect. His casting choices for 24 City not only highlight the complex layering of personal, social and cultural memories onto history, but encourage audiences to cast a critical eye onto any collective nostalgia for a previous era. This critical eye is further honed by the many other artistic interventions that Jia Zhangke paired with the acting – such as poetry, montage, music and tableau-style long takes – that encourage audiences to reflect upon the changes taking place around them and empathetically identify with the past. Thus, Berry suggests in his chapter that Jia Zhangke’s casting choices and his artistic interventions effectively ‘blur the line between the historical or documentary and the fictional’, such that 24 City ‘challenges the modern idea of historiography as a unified discourse written in a single voice’ while offering in its place ‘a new, more democratic and plural form of historiography that resists closure and unification’.

Part II: Framing Memories through Literature and the Body In Part II of this volume, the focus shifts back in time to literary works from China’s twentieth-century history, which frame personal memories and social memories through bodily experience. The chapters by Zou, Luan and Reading emphasize the ways in which bodily memories make literature evocative and palpable. Each of these contributors shows that an author re-

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counts bodily experiences to encourage readers to empathize imaginatively, if not mimetically, with his or her own vision of specific moments in history. Zou offers in her chapter an illuminating comparison of the visions of socialist realism held by the East German novelist, Christa Wolf, and the Chinese novelist, Ding Ling. She shows that socialist realism is meant to connect readers to specific events on a material, sensorial, corporeal and conceptual level. According to Zou, both the East German and Chinese literary approaches invite readers to reflect upon how family ties and social relations are built in the wake of socialism, through relatable experiences such as illness, domestic warmth, social castigation, physical labour, being part of an ethnic group, or joining the local community to watch an opera performance. However, Zou also suggests that the tensions within the East German and Chinese versions of socialist realism require readers to go beyond absorbing their works in a fixed or prescribed way. Socialist realist authors and readers alike are prompted to envisage, negotiate and reinterpret their personal and social memories through imaginative empathy with the characters and plots of literature. To show this, Zou draws upon numerous poignant literary devices, including the novelist Ding Ling’s choice to invite her readership to empathetically identify with the persons who, during China’s land reforms, exposed those subtly exploitative landlords with whom they had built up relationships across the generations through a shared ‘kinship and bioethnic inheritance’. Just as the land reforms turned seemingly close kin relations on their head, so Ding Ling invites her readers to imaginatively re-envision this period – and the public memories to which it gave rise – as strange and other. Zou therefore concludes that socialist realism unfolds as ‘a form of storytelling narrative’ that encourages persons to update their storehouse of memories as though it were a palimpsest on which they can perform ‘the active process of rewriting the past, present and future of socialism’. Notably, Zou suggests that active memory-making involves the bodily effort not to forget something. This emphasis upon remembering, rather than forgetting, is pivotal to what Luan calls ‘Chinese body-expression’ in her chapter on Chinese concerns with self-image, and in particular, with the struggle to come to terms with one’s own corporeal features. Through her evocative analysis of what she refers to as the ‘artistic memory field’ of the novelist Mo Yan, Luan proposes that readers are invited to probe arduous moments in the history of modern China through the prism of their own bodies. As she shows, there is a self-reflexive current to Mo Yan’s work, which, however, does not boil down to evaluating personal experiences, memories or recent historical events in light of a single aesthetic standard. Luan suggests instead that Mo Yan’s characters inhabit a cosmos of fluctuating Daoist forms that evoke bodily change and yet are shaped simultaneously by Confucian sensibilities

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about the importance of survival, relations to family, and connections to one’s motherland. The artistic memory field of Mo Yan is filled with multiple and sometimes competing conceptualizations of the body, personal reflections on corporeality and the rather conflicted mode of Chinese bodyexpression that is inscribed onto each of his characters. Although Mo Yan’s artistic memory field is rich, it is not forgiving. Thus, Luan suggests that Mo Yan’s novel is designed to show readers they have no other option than to conform to the ideals of Chinese body-expression, which are unforgettably imprinted upon them – particularly in cases where the person’s appearance seems to belie an origin in some form of the strange and other, such as a Sino-Western parentage. Bodily struggles are central to Reading’s chapter too, where memories of colonialism and belonging in the Jewish community of Shanghai are mediated not only through a life-writing narrative on growing up ‘stateless’, but through palpable recollections of food that fold delicious childhood memories back into the lived experience of a Jewish woman who emigrated from China to the USA. Drawing upon Liliane Willens’ memoir, Reading shows that many Jewish refugees who arrived in China between the 1920s and 1940s settled in comfortably among other members of the refugee community, assisted by their Chinese caretakers and cooks, who helped them to manage Shanghai’s competing materialities of cleanliness, contamination and flavour. Reading thus draws attention to the colonialist sensibilities of Jewish refugees and their children, for whom the contrast between palatable non-Chinese foods and the supposedly unclean local fare underscored their international status. She shows that for Willens, who lived her childhood in Shanghai, memories of being stateless are peppered with a longing for the forbidden fragrances and flavours of certain Chinese foods. These gustatory memories are offset by recollections of the raw experience of hunger during wartime privation. Reading observes that memories of food are not just sensorially evoked in the bodies of specific persons; they are recorded in other material forms, such as letters, diaries, novels, newspapers, films, museum exhibitions and even comic books. Thus, she points to Willens’ choice to document the bodily memories that connected her most evocatively to her own past upon her return to Shanghai, years after having emigrated to the USA. Relishing the opportunity to bite once again into her favourite Chinese fried breads, Willens reconnects through their aroma to her childhood, and in a moment of synaesthesia is even transported to memories of the voice of her former Chinese nanny, her ‘old Amah’, who secretly bought her these forbidden snacks. At the same time, Willens is struck by the wealthier and seemingly cleaner appearance that street side snacks and vendors have acquired in Shanghai since her youth. According to Reading, this concatenation of

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bodily memories reveals Willens’ own transformation from being stateless in the once purportedly unclean and impoverished, but now leading metropolis of Shanghai, to finding herself in a ‘no longer stateless position as an American citizen’. What Reading, then, reveals are the ways in which Willens recalls, recounts and ‘metabolizes’ these memories for herself and her readership across time and space.

Part III: Propagating Memories through Storytelling Contemporary stories of China, and their role in propagating memories across generations, are the focus of Part III of this volume. Here, the chapters show that recounted experiences may acquire an unexpected material presence that folds them into social and even cultural memory. While the chapter by Chang reveals how social and cultural memories are formed through historical research and celebratory reunions of former colleagues and friends, Swancutt and Jiarimuji show in their chapter how social and cultural memories of myth-historical proportions are crafted in dramatic storytelling sessions. In these lively settings, storytellers draw their audiences into a collective effort to ensure that memories are transformed into lasting, if not legendary, matters to be recounted by future generations. To this end, storytellers offer themselves up as exemplars, inviting audiences to remember them across time. Chang shows in his chapter how he joined forces with the descendants of the Chinese staff in the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS) of Shanghai to uncover their social memory and a newfound cultural identity among them. As a historian, Chang had set out to reconstruct their parents’ biographies, histories and networks. But during his research he found out, through several strokes of serendipity, that his own position in the CMCS network was pivotal to retracing their stories. Memories of the CMCS network emerge in the chapter as its members call upon Chang to assist in reviving their close connections to a ‘British-influenced lifestyle’. He recounts to the reader how his research unfolded through revelation after revelation, which transported the descendants of the CMCS staff forwards and backwards in time as they reconnected with childhood friends and uncovered their shared connections within and beyond China. As Chang suggests, members of the network set out to relive their memories not only by revisiting the old textbooks and novels of their childhood, but by holding occasional reunions and even the book launch of a CMCS descendant. Through his role in documenting the history of the CMCS network, Chang reveals the storehouse of memories that it has built in order to perpetuate the biographies, kinship relations, status, educational and professional aspirations, and elite institutional memory of its members. On another level, he

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shows that the cultural memory and identity of the CMCS – which modern Chinese historians had taken to be their subject matter for decades – has recently been adopted by the actual descendants of the CMCS. This discovery is traced to three key sources: the reflections that the Chinese children of the CMCS staff have made upon their own biographies and memories; the tight circle that they have established among themselves; and their involvement in Chang’s historical research, which gave them the chance to observe the historian’s take on their social and cultural memories. The chapter throws unique historiographic light onto a rich tradition in-the-making, into which Chang masterfully guides the reader. Swancutt and Jiarimuji’s chapter also features a cross-generational recounting of events, which, however, unfolded among the Nuosu, a TibetoBurman group of southwest China. In their chapter, they discuss a tale that Jiarimuji, recognized as a legendary Nuosu storyteller, shared with Swancutt, who later observed it being recounted amid a good deal of joking, gesture and mimicry by the person who had actually experienced it. As Swancutt and Jiarimuji show, Nuosu storytellers share comic experiences of feuding in their clan and lineage-based society during moments of peace and conflict. Especially comic stories often take on the status of legends in their social memory and myth-history. Nuosu who share tales of lineage warfare set out to highlight their own humorous actions and rites, threats and mediations, and calculations of strategy, some of which are beyond words. In particular, they regale audiences with memorable scenes and sayings that can be readily mimicked and re-enacted by their lineage mates. Memorable actions and gestures gain a material presence not only through the storyteller’s body, but in the vocabulary of movement that Nuosu audiences transmit when mimicking, and later, re-enacting them. All of this takes on a particular poignancy when Nuosu prepare for battle against a rival lineage. In these moments, storytellers invite young men to inscribe the iconic imagery of their tales upon their own bodies, to mimic it on the battlefield, and to thereby uphold their lineage’s reputation in deeds of bravery that are meant to be memorable for all time. Here, the tales that Nuosu share are revealed to be storytelling matters of epic proportions that have entered their myth-histories and cultural memories. According to Swancutt and Jiarimuji, when both storytellers and their stories are memorable enough that other Nuosu choose to mimic and transmit them to future generations, they become the stuff of legends.

Concluding Reflections on Crafting Chinese Memories What the contributors to this book offer is a new approach to memorymaking that goes beyond the study of memories strictly speaking. They show that imagination, fantasy, mimicry, the strange, other and plural vi-

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sions of historiography underpin the memories recounted through stories, works of labour and works of art in China. Understanding storytelling, and indeed memory-making, in this way requires shifting the focus of analysis away from a predominant focus upon narrative. It involves showing that storytellers, their audiences, viewers and readers come to imaginatively identify with the material, sensual and conceptual qualities of a tale. Throughout this book, the contributors suggest that storytellers engage imaginatively with the world around them. They show that stories, works of labour or works of art are composed of layers and traces of memorable experience drawn from everyday life and banked within personal storehouses of memory. Beyond this, they propose that storytellers in and of China often share their own conflicted memories with audiences, readers or viewers, who may in turn both identify with and contest them. Conflicted or contested memories such as these are traceable to the fact that, in the process of storytelling, certain things will be remembered, and others forgotten. Some memories may always remain private, whereas others are recounted with the intention of having them join social or public memory. Thus, as the contributors suggest, conflicted memories arise from the tensions between what persons consider to be memorable and what they feel should be the trajectory of their own identities, histories, and social or public memory. It is because storytellers frequently set out to shape identity and history that they so often appeal to the notion of a unified social memory or incorporate certain memories into myth-history. But as each of the contributors suggests, the unity of social memory – particularly in contemporary China – can only ever be an assertion, a hope, a possibility, and a well-specified appeal to a given collective. Social memory is all too easily contested, particularly when a plurality of memories and histories surface through stories, works of art and works of labour. Of course, if stories are underpinned by a plurality of memories and histories, then identifying with them is not always a straightforward or easy task. The contributors to this volume thus suggest that storytelling requires of its audiences some degree of mimicry, imaginative empathy or identification with the memorable, strange and other. This is the case whether storytellers recount a tale face-to-face or through another medium, such as film or literature, that bridges the distance between themselves and their audience. To enable their audiences to identify with the memorable and strange, then, storytellers embellish their tales with a unique suite of material, sensual and conceptual qualities. For, as every good storyteller knows, the social life and longevity of any given work depends upon its memorability. Katherine Swancutt is Reader in Social Anthropology and Director of the Religious and Ethnic Diversity in China and Asia Research Unit at King’s

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College London. She is Project Lead of the ERC synergy grant ‘Cosmological Visionaries’ (Grant No. 856543) and has conducted research across Inner Asia on shamanic and animistic religion for more than two decades. Her latest research is on dreams and climate change. Key publications include: Animism Beyond the Soul: Ontology, Reflexivity, and the Making of Anthropological Knowledge (Social Analysis 2016, volume 60, issue 1, also published in 2018 by Berghahn) and Fortune and the Cursed: The Sliding Scale of Time in Mongolian Divination (Berghahn, 2012).

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Henare, Amiria, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell (eds). 2007. ‘Introduction: Thinking through Things’, in Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 1–31. Herrmann, Andrew F. and Kristen DiFate. 2014. ‘The New Ethnography: Goodall, Trujillo, and the Necessity of Storytelling’, Storytelling, Self, Society: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Storytelling Studies 10(1): 3–10. Højer, Lars and Andreas Bandak. 2015. ‘Introduction: The Power of Example’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21(S1): 1–17. Humphrey, Caroline. 1997. ‘Exemplars and Rules: Aspects of the Discourse of Moralities in Mongolia’, in Signe Howell (ed.), The Ethnography of Moralities. London: Routledge, pp. 25–47. Izzo, Justin. 2015. ‘The Anthropology of Transcultural Storytelling: Oui mon Commandant! and Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s Ethnographic Didactism’, Research in African Literatures 46(1): 1–18. Keane, Webb. 2003. ‘Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things’, Language & Communication 23(3–4): 409–25. ______. 2005. ‘Signs are not the Garb of Meaning: On the Social Analysis of Material Things’, in Daniel Miller (ed.), Materiality. Durham and London: Duke University Press, pp. 182–205. Kopytoff, Igor. 1986. ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process’, in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 64–91. Küchler, Susanne. 1988. ‘Malangan: Objects, Sacrifice, and the Production of Memory’, American Ethnologist 15(4): 625–37. MacDonald, Margaret Read and Hannah B. Harvey. 2012. ‘Introduction to the Special Issue: Global Storytelling’, Storytelling, Self, Society: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Storytelling Studies 8(3): 135–37. MacDougall, David. 1994. ‘Films of Memory’, in Lucien Taylor (ed.), Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990–1994. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 260–70. Maggio, Rodolfo. 2014. ‘The Anthropology of Storytelling and the Storytelling of Anthropology’, Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology 5(2): 89–106. Matten, Marc Andre (ed.). 2014. Places of Memory in Modern China: History, Politics, and Identity. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Morton, Christopher. 2007. ‘Remembering the House: Memory and Materiality in Northern Botswana’, Journal of Material Culture 12(2): 157–79. Mueggler, Erik. 2001. The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence, and Place in Southwest China. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.

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______. 2014. ‘“Cats Give Funerals to Rats”: Making the Dead Modern with Lament’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 20(2): 197–217. ______. 2017. Songs for Dead Parents: Corpse, Text, and World in Southwest China. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Mullaney, Thomas. 2004. ‘Ethnic Classification Writ Large: The 1954 Yunnan Province Ethnic Classification Project and its Foundations in Republican-Era Taxonomic Thought’, China Information 18(2): 207–41. Munn, Nancy D. 1986. The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Narayan, Kirin. 1989. Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Nora, Pierre (ed.). 1996. Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past. (Volume 1: Conflicts and Divisions). Arthur Goldhammer (trans). New York: Columbia University Press. ______ (ed.). 1997. Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past. (Volume 2: Traditions). Arthur Goldhammer (trans). New York: Columbia University Press. ______ (ed.). 1998. Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past. (Volume 3: Symbols). Arthur Goldhammer (trans). New York: Columbia University Press. Schneider, Mark A. 1987. ‘Culture-as-Text in the Work of Clifford Geertz’, Theory and Society 16(6): 809–39. Strathern, Marilyn. 1996. ‘Cutting the Network’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2(3): 517–35. Swancutt, Katherine. 2016. ‘The Anti-Favour: Ideasthesia, Aesthetics and Obligation in Southwest China’, in David Henig and Nicolette Makovicky (eds), Economies of Favour after Socialism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 96–116. Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York and London: Routledge. ______. 1994. ‘Physiognomic Aspects of Visual Worlds’, in Lucien Taylor (ed.), Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990–1994. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 205–13. Tedlock, Dennis. 1999. Finding the Center: The Art of the Zuni Storyteller. Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press. Vitebsky, Piers. 1993. Dialogues with the Dead: The Discussion of Mortality among the Sora of Eastern India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ______. 2008. ‘Loving and Forgetting: Moments of Inarticulacy in Tribal India’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14(2): 243–61.

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______. 2012. ‘Repeated Returns and Special Friends: From Mythic Encounter to Shared History’, in Signe Howell and Aud Talle (eds), Returns to the Field: Multitemporal Research and Contemporary Anthropology. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, pp. 180–202. ______. 2017. Living without the Dead: Loss and Redemption in a Jungle Cosmos. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Wang, Mingming. 2012. ‘All Under Heaven (Tianxia): Cosmological Perspectives and Political Ontologies in Pre-modern China’, Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2(1): 337–83. Willerslev, Rane. 2004. ‘Spirits as “Ready to Hand”: A Phenomenological Analysis of Yukaghir Spiritual Knowledge and Dreaming’, Anthropological Theory 4(4): 395–418. Wu, Ka-ming. 2011. ‘Tradition Revival with Socialist Characteristics: Propaganda Storytelling turned Spiritual Service in Rural Yan’an’, The China Journal 66: 101–17.

 Part I

CURATING MEMORIES THROUGH ART AND FILM

1



The Memory Palace of a Chinese Painter

Benoît Vermander

By Memory and Imagination I have known Li Jinyuan (李金远) since 1994. At that time, I was studying Chinese art (and Deng Xiaoping Thought, which I quickly put aside) at Sichuan Normal University, in Chengdu. I was at pains to find an inspiring and competent painting teacher until someone introduced me to Li Jinyuan. He looked at the miniature works I showed him, gave a brief and rather enigmatic laugh, and declared he was willing to teach me. The week after, we started to meet – and never really stopped. Notwithstanding his protests to the contrary, he remains and always will be my teacher. From March till June 1994, we worked together for a full day every week, and sometimes we went out for a sketching excursion in or around Chengdu. I had already a sound training in calligraphy, and enjoyed very much its practice. However, I had found it difficult to learn Chinese painting the way it is generally taught, through the copying of dull and ethereal models. Li Jinyuan told me from the start that I would have to rely on my memories: ‘Your own memories’, he insisted, ‘not mine, not the ones of a Chinese’. To that effect he gave me a bunch of paper and some charcoal. So, I started to clumsily draw the blurred recollections I kept of medieval castles, Romanesque churches, and the peaks of the Pyrénées. It was from such material (and I soon dis-

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covered that my memories were eager to flow out) that I would conceive ink compositions that Li Jinyuan would correct, teaching me specific brush strokes, the innumerable nuances hidden in the inkwell, the way to associate ink and colours, dry and washed parts, void and fullness. I soon realized that what Li Jinyuan asked from me was no different from the path he was following himself. If he spent considerable time observing and drawing landscapes and people, he never separated this activity from the flow of emotions and recollections that he would soon be sharing with me. It could be about his long experience as a worker in an aeronautic factory (he became a university instructor late in life), it could also be about the Cultural Revolution, or the first time he travelled by train to Beijing, as he drew incessantly while looking out the window; it could come with quotations from the poet Du Fu (712–770) that were unfolding in tandem with considerations on the present state of the Chinese people; it could focus on a volcano he had seen in Japan and the feelings with which his Japanese experience had left him. Later on, Li Jinyuan stayed in France for six months, as he was invited by local authorities to offer renderings in Chinese style of the Midi-Pyrénées region (I was no stranger to the project).1 In another instance, we visited Nagasaki together. There, the house where the Doctor Takashi Nagai (1908– 1951) lived his last years, confined to bed by the effects of radiation burning, became part of his painting repertoire. One year before, he had visited Macerata, the hometown of Matteo Ricci, for the story of the encounter between Ricci and the Literati captivated him.2 Besides Macerata and Rome, he endeavoured to paint the Macao cityscape and all the Chinese cities where Ricci had stayed, concluding with the site of the South Church (Nantang 南堂) in Beijing. Such paintings were loaded with layers of memories, some personal, some borrowed from Chinese history, its ancient past and its most recent developments. And so it continues. Work after work, series after series, memory layers have become more intricate and yet more unified.3 I will try here to unravel (some of) the memory layers from which Li Jinyuan shapes his artistic world.4 I will also pay attention to the development of this ‘memorial construction’ over a thirty-year period or so. Besides his painting corpus, I will rely on the conversations he nurtures with friends or students, as well as on the parts of his artist’s notebooks that he communicated to me. Words generate paintings, paintings generate words, and the process is part of an intense desire to communicate, to incessantly navigate between the internal (nei 内) and the external (wai 外). Each painting is loaded with personal and collective memories that the artistic process transforms and sublimates. Such testimonies may eventually be engulfed and lost in the emerging new languages of contemporary China, or (who knows) become engraved into a cultural consciousness that will perpetuate itself.

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Towards the end of this chapter, I will recapture this layering process by pondering over the term ‘Memory Palace’. Jonathan D. Spence (1984) has used it to characterize the mnemonic device (also called ‘method of loci’) through which he portrayed Matteo Ricci’s journey. Notwithstanding its anchorage in a Western technique aimed at organizing a knowledge corpus within the person’s mind, can the term help us to account for the way in which a contemporary Chinese artist deals with personal and collective memories? Before tackling the question, we need to circulate around the various layers of colours and stories that Li Jinyuan juxtaposes in his paintings. Only such ‘free and easy wandering’ (following the translation of the title of the first chapter of the Zhuangzi – xiaoyaoyou 逍遥游 – chosen by Burton Watson) will enable us to eventually approach the corpus and the experience as a ‘Palace’.

Memorializing One’s Life and Masters As Li Jinyuan was born in September 1945, his life’s itinerary closely follows that of the ‘New China’. He recalls his first years, marked by the early death of his father, as a time of utter poverty; at some point, his younger brother, Li Yuanguo 李远国,5 was destined to leave the family for the house of a couple looking for a son to adopt, and only the tears and protests of Jinyuan and an elder sister discouraged his mother from concluding the process. He entered a factory at sixteen or seventeen, and it was not until 1989 that he joined Sichuan Normal University as a Lecturer in Chinese painting.6 In the meantime, he had been actively involved in the Cultural Revolution, becoming the leader of a ‘workers’ revolutionary rebel group’. This earned him a one-month imprisonment in 1967 as a ‘counter revolutionary element’, before the ups and downs of the times allowed him to participate in a series of revolutionary meetings in Beijing and subsequently assume the position of vice chairman of the revolutionary committee of the factory in which he was working. He kept this position till 1976.7 On 8 June 1977, just one day after the birth of his only son, he was sent to reeducation through labour, before being reintegrated as a worker in 1979.8 In March 1978, in the farm where he was reeducated, he drew a series of sketches which he entitled ‘A small road in spring’. He obviously considers this series as the start of his creative pursuit, though he had been drawing since his early youth. It so happens that the reader can intuit the working experience of Li Jinyuan by referring to the contribution of Chris Berry in the present volume, which deals with the cineaste Jia Zhangke’s memory project 24 City (Ershisicheng Ji, 二十四城记, 2008). Before its closure, the state-owned Factory 420 in Chengdu (of which nine former workers’ interviews are used in the film in a dramatized form) was repairing MiG-15 fighter planes. Li

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Jinyuan was working in a related unit, Factory 161, which specialized in the manufacturing of meters for fighter planes’ instrument panels. Both factories were under the ultimate control of the National Defence Science and Technology Commission. Towards the beginning of the 1980s, Li Jinyuan was progressively discharged of his worker’s duties and put in charge of the Arts and Literature Society of the company manufacturing fighter planes in Sichuan. In this capacity, he frequently went to Factory 420, giving lectures and workshops on artistic creation, sometimes followed by exhibitions. This shows an aspect of the corporate culture of the Chinese state-owned factories of the time that now generates nostalgia in people who, like Li Jinyuan, experienced it: low salaries and dire housing conditions were partly compensated by a number of activities that nurtured a sense of belonging as well as of personal accomplishment. Such ‘nostalgia’ has been aptly analysed by Jonathan Bach (2014) when it comes to former East Germany. However, in contrast to the case analysed by Bach, the nostalgia for the period that immediately follows the fall of the Gang of Four does not focus on ‘objects’ (the phenomenon also exists in China, but centres around the Maoist period) but rather on ‘atmospheres’, which Chinese filmmakers are skilled at capturing and putting, as Jia Zhangke does, into new artistic formats. Indeed, at times Li Jinyuan expresses some nostalgia for a time when workers were able to develop ‘a rich cultural life’ (his words). The decision to write about Li Jinyuan’s ‘Memory Palace’ was entirely my own. The fact that I based my initial draft on recollections I kept of our exchanges during the last twenty-five years or so first created an effect of mise-en-abyme (a story within a story), though this effect was largely involuntary. However, as I informed Li Jinyuan of my decision and progressively asked for confirmations or details, he eventually shared with me the electronic versions of two of his notebooks (the existence of which I was originally unaware). One of them groups together thoughts and reading notes kept during the years 1981–1988. They testify to the determination that usually marks a period of new beginnings. One of the first (undated) entries reads: ‘[I have] to train the ability to capture images at high speed. I must remember the characteristics that makes one thing different from the other things, and rely on memory to paint’. The second notebook (2012– 2018), much more developed, is a kind of creation diary, composed of notes originally taken on his mobile phone but also of sketches woven into these notes. As can be expected from a man writing at a much later stage in life, this second notebook also abounds in recollections. Two teachers of Li Jinyuan are evoked. The first one, Feng Jianwu 馮建吴 (1910–1989), was a fellow Sichuanese, the older brother of Shi Lu (石鲁 1919–1982): Shi Lu is one of the most notable painters of the second half of twentieth-century China and,

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as we will soon see, the one who captured most vividly Li Jinyuan’s imagination. A long entry of 24 January 2017 reads: In the early 1980s, thanks to the introduction of Peng Lin, I was received as a student by Mr. Feng Jianwu. The master was very strict with me. Every comment on my paintings was a criticism, never a praise: ‘What kind of cloud did you paint? A cloud, my ass!9 Too ugly!’ His sharpness made me progress faster. Once, I made a painting of bamboos, and the master said: ‘These strokes need more contrast, and there must be more bone, more strength’. But then he added: ‘This picture could be entitled: Bamboos, hill after hill, I enjoy their delicious shoots’.10 Under his guidance, this work was selected for the Sichuan Province Chinese Painting Exhibition and received favorable comments. In order to make me systematically explore Chinese painting, the master gave me his book, Study of Landscape Painting, which was eye-opening. Later, I would use these lectures when teaching in the undergraduate and postgraduate programs at the Fine Arts College of Sichuan Normal University. During my study of this book, I also copied dozens of sketches of Liangshan, Emei, Huangshan and Yandangshan made by the master. There are three stages in sketching: collecting material; finding expressiveness; and creation proper. The sketches of Feng Jianwu are fresh, simple and unique in style, with the colors and the ink combined into one body and spirit. It made me find the road to creation through sketching. The creation of each painting, from the details to the whole of the composition, was repeatedly scrutinized. The master used to say : ‘Simplicity in the brush stroke, infinity in the meaning; confusion in the design, emptiness in the spiritual universe [jingjie 境界]; if you look for excellence, the mystery will reveal itself’. He also told me: ‘First of all, be honest. In painting, you do not need only to study hard, you also study goodness. and you must reflect earnestly’. In 1986, the Sichuan Artists Association held an exhibit, ‘Life, Nature - Li Jinyuan Paintings’, and the master wrote for me the following inscription: ‘By going beyond the image, one reaches the center of the ring’.11

Already in the early 1980s, Li Jinyuan had developed a local reputation as a worker painter, and he obviously had kept some contacts from his revolutionary past. This may explain the invitation he received to go to Beijing in 1983 for a two- to three-month stint. He met there with the renowned painter He Haixia 何海霞 (1908–1998), whom he frequented intensively during this short period. Early on, he showed him sketches he had made in the train from Chengdu to Beijing. An entry that also dates from 24 January 2017 (Li Jinyuan obviously wanted to associate his two favourite teachers in a common homage) recounts the following anecdote: [The day after I had shown him my sketches], the master said to me: ‘Jinyuan, take with you a few sketches’. He spread a sheet of rice paper of 60x97cm and

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presented me with ink and brushes, whispering at the same time: ‘Jinyuan, you still need to work hard with the brush and the ink, so as to develop the potential shown by these sketches, and then you can go far’.

While in Beijing, Li Jinyuan witnessed He Haixia creating large-scale works for the Yuanwanglou Hotel, and he narrates how, through watching him, he furthered his knowledge about traditional pigments, ink and wash techniques, but also about the way to shift to oil painting brushes for special effects. He also echoes stories told by He Haixia himself, reminiscing how Zhang Daqian (张大千 1899–1983) saved him from his addiction to opium. When Li Jinyuan departed from Beijing, He Haixia gave him, besides a painting, a piece of calligraphy, the text of which he had received in a similar fashion from Zhang Daqian who had himself received it from his master – a well-established way of cementing a spiritual lineage. The text of this calligraphy was freely adapted from the last verse of a poem that memorializes the farewell exchanged between the patriotic hero Su Wu (苏武 140 bc–60 bc) and the general Li Ling (李陵, d. 74 bc) who defected to the Xiongnu Confederation. While its authorship is uncertain, the poem predates the sixth century of the present era, and was probably written much earlier. The verse can be roughly translated as: ‘Always value the bright virtue [within you]. Constantly cherish [i.e. never waste] the time [imparted to you]’ (长久重明德, 随时愛景光). The idea of time is expressed here through the metaphor of the light of the day (jingguang 景光 is the equivalent of shiguang 时光 in modern Chinese), and the coupling of the light from within with the one coming from outside may possess special attraction for painters. I should add that Li Jinyuan wrote down this text for me very early in our acquaintance, probably because my very Confucian Chinese surname (‘Bright Virtue’ Mingde 明德) can be found in this poem. At that time (1994), Li Jinyuan could not know that I would, one day, ‘memorialize’ him. He was transmitting what he had received. Whether I would myself receive (and, who knows, one day transmit) the teaching embedded into the inscription was up to me. It might be that asking Li Jinyuan to provide me with ‘hard evidence’ of what I was going to narrate about him was meant to mitigate the effect of mise en abyme that the use of my own recollections was creating, though all this was largely unconscious. However, the reception of the notebooks and my subsequent decision to refer to them made my hesitant attempt at crafting a more linear and ‘objective’ account fail from the start. The (relative) ‘materiality’ of the (electronic) notebooks was not enough to ‘objectify’ the narrative; rather, it revived and furthered the memories I had in store. Li Jinyuan himself, as I should have known, inserts stories within stories, and does this with an ease that reminds one of the deftness of the Zhuangzi for instance. But it would be a mistake to refer only to Daoist masters: the

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narrative power of the Mencius is also remarkable, and there is a Confucian undertone in the words of Feng Jianwu that indeed evokes the spirit of Mencius. What is of importance here is the underlying conviction that artistic as well as spiritual progress depends on letting oneself being affected by stories – stories told by ancient Chinese as well as by the masters you have met, who themselves learnt their trade by ingesting stories transmitted and perpetually enriched. Transmission is storytelling. At the same time, stories need to be incarnated, relived, ‘exhibited’; they need to leave traces (I will come back to this latter notion and its Chineselanguage equivalents later in this chapter).12 The gift of a painting or of a seal is an episode that becomes embedded in the storytelling of the relation that has led the crafter to donate testimony to (for instance) a disciple. A piece of calligraphy constitutes the best example of the process of the ‘materialization’ of a story I am pointing to. First, a piece of calligraphy can be indefinitely repeated. As Li Jinyuan did for me, you can copy and offer someone the few significant characters that you received, and, by doing so, you are cementing a spiritual lineage. Second, a piece of calligraphy is the trace of a movement; it thus becomes the repository of the spiritual energy of its author, of the moral and physical breath that has rhythmed the writing. Even more than a seal or a painting, a piece of calligraphy is a ‘sacred object’ invested with the mana of the crafter/donor.13 Using a Chinese term that conveys connotations very close to the ones associated with mana, a piece of calligraphy is invested with ling 灵14 – a quality that can be forwarded by the copy you make of it, which furthers the movement that had traced the original characters without implying the donation of the ‘original’ (if any).15 When copied and given, it is not merely the ling of the donator that circulates, but rather the one of the spiritual lineage that includes the master’s master, the master, the disciple, as well as the potential disciple of the latter.

The Twentieth Century and Chinese Painting As sincere and exact as the recollections of the notebooks most probably are, they also serve to insert Li Jinyuan into a chain of creators, into a tradition that he both continues and intends to further.16 At the same time, Li reads the experience of the Cultural Revolution as a disjunctive event that decisively affected Chinese art. At the very least, the fact of recapturing what happened during these times makes it even more necessary to integrate suffering and anguish into the realm of Chinese painting (a path that had actually already been partly travelled by the artists who participated in the Anti-Japanese war, through their engravings and propaganda posters for instance).17 From 1963 onwards, violent criticisms were directed towards painters as famous as Shi Lu 石鲁, Li Keran 李可染, Lin Fengmian 林风眠 or Pan

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Tianshou 潘天壽 (the last one posthumously), criticisms aimed at their supposedly counter-revolutionary spirit. Among them, Shi Lu died at the age of sixty-one, in a state of semi-folly, his mind enfeebled by the sufferings he had endured during the Cultural Revolution. Yet, this revolutionary artist had created an iconic representation of Mao Zedong in Shaanxi (though this particular painting had been criticized from the start for making the Chairman too small against the background of the gigantic landscape). His painter’s name, Shi Lu, was a special tribute to the two greatest influences on his art and life, the painter Shitao (石濤 1642–1707) and the writer Lu Xun (魯迅 1891–1936), whose life and thought were somehow reflected in his own destiny. Like Lu Xun, his earlier works were loaded with the pains and burdens of the Chinese people, which made him a pioneer in allowing Chinese painting to express a new range of feelings and social realities. Like Lu Xun also, his rebellious spirit set him apart from the very people whose cause he was joining.18 Shortly after I started studying under him, Li Jinyuan directed my attention towards the artworks of Shi Lu, showing me examples of the brush strokes superimposed by the artist over his former paintings, for he was reading in them much more than the scribblings of a paranoid man that many have been prone to dismiss. These strokes bear the distinctive calligraphic style that Shi Lu experienced with using his toes when chained in a shed during the Cultural Revolution. An entry of 7 April 2018 confirms to me that, till now, Li Jinyuan has not varied in his appreciation: ‘Tonight, [I have been] looking at the collection of Shi Lu’s calligraphies. Shi Lu was from a generation of masters who crossed the threshold from tradition to modernity. Unfortunately, he passed away too early, and could not bring to completion many of the conceptions he had in mind’. By ‘conceptions he had in mind’ I translate what seems to me the meaning of the term gouxiang 构想 for Li Jinyuan: it refers to a ‘visual idea’, a way of structuring a painting or developing stylistic characteristics that is already loaded with both conceptual and affective content. Gouxiang is never far away from goutu 构图: the composition of a painting. Li Jinyuan’s interest in the figure of Shi Lu should not be misinterpreted: he has always avoided excessive romanticism about the figure of the artist and the process of creation. Against my tendency to think that the brush’s trajectory was leading directly from the heart to the hand, he firmly emphasized the role of the eye, the crucial importance of attentive, patient observation. Attentive and trained vision (‘skilled vision’, sensu, Grasseni 2004) was obviously for him akin to what Rane Willerslev, commenting on the conceptions and practices of the Yukaghir hunters, has called ‘the coming into being of the Visible’ – something that happens at a distance but that can be ‘had’, ‘possessed’ out of the attentiveness induced by the distance

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itself (2006: 34). (And after all, hunters and painters do present similarities – they both need to nurture patience, but also decisiveness in execution when the time to proceed to the ‘catch’ has happened.) Later on, I recognized in Li Jinyuan’s stress on observation the ancient attitude summarized by the character guan 观: a ‘scrupulous observation’ (di shi 谛视) as the Shuowen jiezi puts it,19 which allows the practitioner to progress from the recognition of the visible to the discernment of what is barely perceptible and already introduced to the invisible. In Li Jinyuan’s judgement, some works of Li Keran (1907–1989) exemplify what attentive observation allows an artist to accomplish. Somehow, both Shi Lu and Li Keran had been able to blend together memory and imagination, but they created universes with different atmosphere and resonances, highlighting in the process the choices and trials that Chinese painting met with during the second half of the twentieth century. As we will see later, Li Jinyuan reproaches Li Keran for being at times ‘too intentional’ in his way of painting, for instance when trying to create light effects. The reservation expressed towards an otherwise deeply admired artist might be interpreted as follows: while Shi Lu integrates the whole of his experience in his artistic vision, amalgamating into it his political passion, his sensitivity to cosmic rhythms as expressed in the movement of his strokes, or even his awe in front of certain mountains or rivers, Li Keran relies so much on his keen sense of observation that the vision he eventually offers may not blend the whole of the senses into the kind of ‘synaesthesia’ that a Chinese painting hopes to awaken in the viewer – a synaesthesia that the painting may conjure only as it refuses to ‘realistically’ apprehend the world. The ‘blurring’ of the representation is nothing other than its opening to senses and experiences that go beyond or behind vision.20

Travelling on Ricci’s Path Sojourning and painting in Japan, France, Thailand and Germany, as Li Jinyuan did during the period 1996–2007, certainly enriched his personal ‘Memory Palace’ but did not directly build on the store of personal and collective recollections with which a Chinese audience could identify.21 These travels were the result of invitations he received. The engagement of Li Jinyuan towards the figure of Matteo Ricci is different in nature; not only did he develop a reading programme and personal fascination towards the Italian Jesuit and his times, but he also planned by himself the memorial travel he undertook. He wished to achieve a series of paintings in time for the 400th anniversary of Ricci’s settling in Beijing, in 2001.22 Only after he had planned it all did he ask for contacts, from myself and other friends, so as to implement his project. Later on, he wrote a Relation of his expedition from Italy to Beijing:23

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On August 13, 2000, Fr. Jacques Duraud and I took the train departing from Rome. It took about more than two hours to Macerata – the hometown of Matteo Ricci – the land that I had dreamed of days and nights. I would be seeing you very soon, my dear friend Ricci… My heart was full of hope. ‘Where exactly is Macerata?’ I urgently asked when Fr. Duraud opened a map of Italy. ‘This is Macerata,’ Jacques Duraud said, pointing to a little spot next to the railroad line on the map… Clear rivers were running through the fertile and placid Roman plain, as if they were telling one story after another with peaceful smiles. Because of them, great souls have been gestated here one after another… I was suddenly brought back to the wide and vigorous North China Plain in my mind. I was brought back to the sacred land also surrounded by hills on one side and waters on the other, and shielded by green pines as well. That was the place where a holy spirit is rested – Ricci’s graveyard located at Beijing’s West Mountain. (Li Jinyuan 2002: 148–49)

At first, the visit to Macerata was something of an ordeal: Li Jinyuan’s hero was nowhere to be seen in his native town. However, his very absence eventually illuminated a presence of a different nature, as it became a manifestation of the merging of Heart (xin 心) and Heaven (tian 天) into one: We went across through several streets, continuously searching for ruins of Ricci’s schools and houses. We finally met some local residents there. But they knew nothing about Ricci when we asked them about him. Even the doorman at the city hall knew nothing about him. We could do nothing but to continue our search along the stone steps and then came to a road sign placed in downtown. Ha! We found out that there was only a Matteo Ricci Street without any memorial halls in town. How strange it was! Some of the names of Macerata’s celebrities were engraved on an old building at the city square. Ricci’s name was not included….24 The weather cleared up and the bright sun came out again when we were about to leave Macerata. White clouds were floating in the blue sky, and the trees and mountains looked even greener. Ha! I finally saw it. The place I was searching for was actually hidden in the wide universe. It was actually right there deeply in my heart. I ran to the ancient wall of the old town, looking at the uneven hills and terraced fields, as if I was back to my hometown – the West Sichuan Plain, surrounded by steep mountains. Everything here was so fresh but yet so familiar. Looking into the far distance, I whispered in a low voice, ‘Macerata! Macerata!’ (Li Jinyuan 2002: 152)

The travel did not end in Italy. After a pilgrimage to Macao, on 19 December 2000, Li Jinyuan arrived in Zhaoqing, Guangdong Province, where Ricci had settled in September 1583: There was an old factory on the left side of the tower. A memorial stele was standing by the foot of a wall, with an inscription on it… From the city walls of the Zhaoqing City to the Great Wall that extends for tens of thousands of miles, these walls symbolize the long-standing and heavy history of China, implying

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the feudal autocracy and extremely conservative concepts of the nation. It takes joint efforts of mankind to eliminate hostility, suspicion and distance between one another. If we cannot pull down the walls in our hearts, what hope is there for China? For the world? (Li Jinyuan 2002: 157)

However, walls do not enclose nor do they terminate the narrative that Ricci initiated and that Li Jinyuan had found his duty to further. On 1 March 2001, he arrived at the Nanhua Temple located in Shaoguan, where Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch of the Chan School, lived and taught: Coincidentally, Ricci established a Catholic church next to the Nanhua Temple. Just like the two thousands-year-old bodhi trees – with intricate gnarls and twisted roots deeply rooted in the land of southern China – the gospel of Christianity from the West mixed with the Buddhist chanting of prayers coming from the ancient temple, as if the combination was playing an eternal chant of the universe. (Li Jinyuan 2002: 159)

The South Church (Nantang 南堂) in Beijing constituted the last stage of the journey. The paintings that were the fruit of the pilgrimage, which were all part of what Li Jinyuan entitled the Pilgrims’ Progress series, follow exactly the steps described in the Relation.25 Several of these paintings are named after a poem by Li Zhi (李贄 1527–1602) who, marvelling at the road already travelled by Ricci and assessing the future of his own mission, concludes by writing that ‘the sun is at its zenith (中天日正明)’, probably implying that Ricci had just reached the middle of his path. Li Zhi, one of the most famous and provocative thinkers of that time, was eventually arrested and committed suicide. He had met Ricci in Nanjing, and, although their dialogue was probably marred by mutual misunderstanding, professed much admiration for him.26 It is certainly telling that Li Jinyuan chose to use a quotation by Li Zhi, who remained a stranger both to orthodox Confucianism and to the new faith, in order to make a return to the ‘childlike heart’ (tongxin 童心) at the core of his own moral philosophy. The title of another painting in the Pilgrims’ Progress series, ‘The Signs of Spring Are All Over the World’ (春色在天涯), is borrowed from a poem by the artist and art critic Li Rihua (李日华 1565–1635), whose aesthetic principles directly influenced the ones propounded by Shitao (1641– around 1719; see figure 1.1). In contrast, Li Jinyuan chose to name a much darker composition in his Pilgrims’ Progress series after a different poem by Li Rihua, entitled ‘A Light in the Long Night’ (长夜明灯). Looking at the Pilgrims’ Progress in its entirety, it is its versatility that may surprise the audience. The dark winters, the exuberant springs and the reddish autumns that compose it do not appear to merge into a harmonious symphony; they rather seem to suggest a tension between conflicting mem-

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Figure 1.1. ‘The Signs of Spring Are All Over the World’  by Li  Jinyuan (2001), named after a poem by Li Rihua. Part of the ‘Pilgrims’ Progress’ series, Homage to Matteo Ricci. © Li Jinyuan

ories, some of them focused on the novelty brought forth by Ricci, some speaking of nostalgia for a period of opening (Late Ming and Early Qing) that was not meant to last long, while other paintings inscribe the dialogue between Ricci and Chinese literati into the grand (and undecided) narrative of Chinese culture and its destiny. We may already get a glimpse of what the ‘Memory Palace’ of Li Jinyuan might look like: conflicting memories, nostalgia and other emotive experiences are brought into dialogue and focus through the craft of making a painting. The paintings that are thus produced enter into the virtual Palace of collective memories that will remain at the disposal of future generations. With time, a painting – a material item, a combination of lines, colours and

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stories – becomes a repository where layers of memories struggle among themselves or harmonize. And a painting’s layers may alternate between struggling and harmonizing, as they take on new meaning in changing circumstances and for successive viewers.

Reading and Painting in Today’s China As a native from Chengdu, Li Jinyuan was certainly meant to feel a special affinity with Du Fu (杜甫 712–770); the city is known for the poet’s Thatched Cottage (Du Fu caotang 杜甫草堂). However, it is more the empathy of the wandering writer for the sufferings of the common people, the direct character of his style, the anchoring of poetic feelings into earthly realities that first appealed to Li Jinyuan. The affinity goes further: one day, in 2017, I noticed in his workshop a large, extremely colourful painting that happened to be part of a series adorned with a title taken from one of Du Fu’s most celebrated poems, ‘Delighting in Rain on a Spring Night’ (chun ye shan yu 春夜喜雨), and more specifically from its last line: ‘The flowers will be heavy in Brocade City’ (花重锦官城).27 The atmosphere of this painting was so different from the traditional pictorial representations of this work that I could not help but ask what had inspired it (see figure 1.2). It was just the fact of reading Du Fu anew, answered Li Jinyuan, and then being struck by the abundance of the colour notations, while the dominant imagery had enrolled Du Fu into a grey over grey representation of Chinese poetry.28 The discovery, he continued, had awakened a question in him: ‘How to read Chinese Classics?’ I could not help feeling a pang, for it was exactly the question I was pondering over at that time in the context of assessing the way I was teaching Pre-Qin philosophy.29 I found in his notebook several entries that testify to this renewed interest in Du Fu, as well as of its insertion into a larger narrative. On 30 July 2016, Li Jinyuan speaks of the ‘expressionist colours of Du Fu’s poetry’ and he elaborates this in a way that may help us to grasp further the synaesthetic quality he looks for in Chinese painting, already evoked through the comparison between Shi Lu and Li Keran: In Du Fu’s poetry, the white colour looks like white hairs, a white head, a white sun, giving to it a true consistence. On a person’s body there are two things that are white: the bones and the hair. When he realized what ‘white bones’ looked like in real life, and that his bones would be sharing the [common] destiny, his poems became filled by the same white bones, and, likewise, his hair was dyed by ashes. Traditionally the ‘white’ in poetry and in painting expresses void, nothingness, clouds, floating beauty. But in the poetry of Du Fu white bones and white hair are desolate, tragic. ‘White’ moves and shocks the soul, like only the light can do – the light of the heart in the long night.

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Figure 1.2. ‘Reading Du Fu: “The Flowers Will Be Heavy in Brocade City”’ by Li Jinyuan (2017). © Li Jinyuan

The character ‘black’ comes 46 times in Du Fu – and only twice in Li Bai. Black is cold, dark, deep. The black in Du Fu has an extraordinary, shattering power: ‘At Mount Kongtong the deadly atmosphere was black, the Lesser Seas’ banners were yellow’ (Travels of My Prime 壯游). Or yet: ‘I’ve heard that it blackens with speeding thunder, now for the first time I watch it redden, bathing the sun’ (Pool of Heaven, 天池). Black associated with yellow, with red… how powerful! … ‘From river’s sapphire the birds are still whiter, in the mountain’s green flowers almost take flame’ (Quatrains, 絕句二首). Green and red, sapphire and white…. Highly concise colour words that grasp the impression of the moment, leaving us with a vivid visual experience and rich colour associations… But, till now, the colour expressionism of Du Fu’s poetry has not been converted into paintings. If China’s pictorial arts want to become truly contemporary, there are rich gems to be found in Du Fu.

This way of reading Du Fu led to the creation of two series of paintings, achieved around April 2017. As we have seen, one series, which comprises

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twenty artworks, takes its title from the poetic verse ‘The flowers will be heavy in Brocade City’. A notebook entry dated 13 April 2017 reads: ‘I integrated into this series sketches taken from 1966 to 1978, in Chengdu as well as the drawings “A small road in spring” I had done at the farm where I underwent re-education through labour’. Here, the layering process is particularly striking: the love for life and nature is mixed with the feelings awakened by political upheavals, and this creative tension is shared by both the poet of ancient days and the painter active in contemporary China, the latter asserting this companionship by emphasizing the vivid colours that traditional readings had often erased from Du Fu’s poems. The same entry also records the creation of a series of four very large paintings (380x190cm each) named after the ballad ‘The Old Cypress’ (古柏行), and, specifically, after the verse: ‘Its trunk is like green bronze, its roots are like stone’ (柯如青銅根如石). Li Jinyuan observes: Ancient tall cypress trees are covered with moss, and under the reflection of the setting sun after the rain, they emit a bronze light… The Chinese paintings of the past only speak about yin-yang, they do not express light. In his landscapes, Li Keran has tried to express light, and, without doubt, he obtained a certain measure of success. However, the way he uses black circles and then traps white circles into them is too intentional. The deep, mysterious world created by freehand brushwork, by abstract ink and wash painting – such a world should surge as a matter of fact, intention emerging from the absence of intention.

A last entry (14 December 2017) sums it up: A tragedy: Why did not Chinese painting beget the equivalent of a great poet like Du Fu? Lu Xun said that every page written in Chinese speaks of cannibalism. In modern Chinese painting, outside ‘Peasant Refugees’ (流亡图) by Jiang Zhaohe and some latter-day paintings by Lin Fengmian, the scene is still filled with mountains, with flowers under the wind and moonlight over the snow. The real, the cruel social problems – those are not their business.30

Therefore, paintings inspired from Du Fu’s poems are certainly not celebrations of the China of the past, neither of one form or another of so-called ‘cultural essence’. Rather, they work as an indictment of the tradition of Chinese painting in so far as it can be read as an ‘escapism’ when contrasted to the ‘expressionist realism’ that Du Fu was able to craft. However, such indictment comes from within the tradition itself, as an effort to subvert it in order to give new relevance to the best of its inspiration. One may find in what I call here ‘escapism’ a version of ‘nostalgia’ as already discussed when referring to the cultural atmosphere of the 1980s in China or the material products of former East Germany (Bach 2014). However, ‘escapism’ has to do with a flight from reality that proceeds by

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referring to an imaginary past or place – such is the ‘essence’ of Chinese culture – without a specific anchorage. Nostalgia refers to a given place and time, idealized for sure, but still tangible. This has consequences for the way in which one relates to material memories: nostalgia privileges objects from the past, and nurtures a collector’s mentality. Escapism comes with a production of artworks, often of a repetitive facture, that exemplifies an ‘essence’, an imaginary, floating spacetime, unceasingly celebrated.

Memorializing the Immemorial Even in the Pilgrims’ Progress series (which in any case constitutes an exception), the paintings of Li Jinyuan do not primarily intend to memorialize specific events, places or people. They rather insert the persons, landscapes and periods they evoke into a flow of meaning that most often has to do with cosmic energies at work, struggles within the human heart, and the obscure, slow, convoluted growth of freedom and individual agency that takes place throughout the ages, particularly in the Chinese world. In an entry dated 25 May 2013, Li Jinyuan elaborates as follows: This morning, I walked briskly for two kilometres in cool rain and wind – they were dizzying the heart and the lungs! I suddenly thought about the [art of drawing] lines. In one article, Fan Zeng31 talks about the rich expressivity of the lines in Chinese painting as compared to the way lightning circulates through the universe. Quite a meaningful symbol. There is a mystical field in the universe, and religions, science and art are all exploring this field… When the line progresses over the rice paper or the canvass it looks like the original qi [zhenqi 真气]32 piercing throughout the myriad things of the universe. The fluidity of the movement, this is the original qi [气] of humankind and the original qi of the universe associating in time and space, joyfully returning to their wellspring and, through painting, begetting a new Heaven and new Earth. … There is nothing in Heaven and Earth that is not [a kind of] cursive calligraphy. [We need to] reconstruct universality, [assert] the value of each particular existence, the unique character of art and human freedom, and come back to the point from where the qi originates.

This may explain why most paintings of Li Jinyuan may be legitimately seen as a way to memorialize the Immemorial – one could also say: memorializing the Elemental. From the beginning of his career, landscapes, inhabitants and animals of the Ngawa Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture (阿坝藏族羌族自治州) and of the Yi Autonomous Prefecture of Liangshan (凉山彝族自治州) populate his corpus, with Mount Gongga (贡嘎山)33 inspiring some of his earlier, majestic paintings, while the human element is much more present (and the mood generally darker) in his later works. However, the ‘Immemorial’ itself is probably a multilayered reality (see figure 1.3). There is an ‘orientalist’ thread in Li Jinyuan, common to

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Figure 1.3. ‘Himalaya 5’ by Li Jinyuan (2016). Part of the ‘Heavens’ series. © Li Jinyuan

many Han painters, which the following entry (19 February 2013) may somehow reflect: Watching ‘Himalaya’34 last night – how touched I was. Touched by the companionship between the Tibetans and the yaks, by the way they are living and dying in union with the highlands and the snowy peaks. Under the harshness of wind and snow, life takes it full dignity as well as its exuberance. In my ‘Heavens’ [Tianjie 天界] series, only a few paintings possess real strength, most are just average. Only in the real world [can one find] depth and strength. This year, I must go to the Northwest, to Qinghai and Xinjiang – much more important than going to the United States!

The omnipresence of the yak in Li Jinyuan’s ‘ethnic’ paintings has earned him the nickname ‘Yak Li’ (Li Maoniu 李牦牛), which he obviously enjoys.

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However, the yak is treated less as a touch of exoticism than as the incarnation of the primordial forces shaping the extreme natural surroundings that its dwellers have learnt to navigate. A series of large-scale paintings of 2016 depicts the yak independent of any other element, with strong, freewheeling brush strokes that make the animal strangely similar to the mountains it inhabits (see figure 1.4). Furthermore, the life experience of Li Jinyuan has made him progressively approach and befriend the Yi population of Liangshan Prefecture in a way that deepened and transformed his depiction of places and people. Li has been active in a primary school project in Liangshan prefecture from its beginnings in 1999, and has brought there some of his students, who have subsequently maintained contacts with the youth graduating from the school.35 The experience was furthered by his association with Zhang Pingyi 張平宜, a Taiwanese woman who, from the year 2000 onwards, has tasked herself with the transformation of a leper village in Yuexi County, also in Liangshan prefecture (Zhang 2011). Li Jinyuan went to the village school and designed murals for it, following closely the development of the project. The fact remains that Li Jinyuan’s depiction of Yi life and environment is far removed from the ones that this same ethnic group gives of itself, vividly evoked by Katherine Swancutt and Jiarimuji in this volume. The ‘stuff of legends’, as these two authors demonstrate, is, in Yi self-narratives, eventful and epic. Li Jinyuan’s paintings of Liangshan look more like ‘icons’ that both freeze and encapsulate a specific story or situation.36 On the whole, though, Li Jinyuan’s ‘ethnic’ paintings have progressively escaped mere exoticism by inserting its subject matter into a vision that speaks conjointly of the struggle with natural, elemental forces, of historical dispossession, and of ecological alienation: Dark clouds weigh upon the heart, and it is unbearable. To scream? Edvard Munch is a great artist: His ‘Scream’ came out, and Heavens and Earth responded to it. … [In my works] I have been focusing on the final destiny of life and the environment, focusing on Humankind and its destiny, particularly on the environmental fate that weighs on the Chinese people today. It is by walking on the surface of the earth that Man truly becomes Man. Make careful use of the time that remains to you for painting! (Notebook entry, 30 April 2018)

In order to further the story, I need here to recall conversations I had with Li Jinyuan during the last two years or so. He repeatedly insisted on the following (which I have not noted verbatim and need here to summarize): although there is nowadays an apparent stress on Chinese history as source of national inspiration, a stultified version of cultural essence substitutes for the genuine, living continuities that only the preservation of places and ways of life could nurture. Besides, the relationship to one’s own history and

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Figure 1.4. ‘Himalaya 1’ by Li Jinyuan (2016). Part of the ‘Heavens’ series. © Li Jinyuan

culture always needs to be a critical one, as the May Fourth thinkers had well understood, whatever their exaggerations and shortcomings may have been. For instance, being faithful to the tradition embodied by ink and wash painting means being able to recognize the difficulty the same tradition met with when it came to describe and echo the struggles and sufferings experienced by humankind and, notably, the common folk. (Following the lexicon I have adopted in this chapter, one may interpret this last statement as a way to assert that Chinese painting in the past has not been sufficiently ‘layered’, integrating into its fabric only a limited array of experiences, expressive means and storylines.) Chinese painting becomes truly contemporary when it accounts for failures, finding resources for inner renewal in poets such as Du Fu and taking inspiration from the capacity to constantly reassess its own tradition exhibited by Western art.

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A case in point manifested itself when I visited, with Li Jinyuan, the Matisse Museum in the painter’s native town, Le Cateau-Cambrésis, northern France, in April 2019.37 The Museum presents numerous examples of Matisse’s early works. The visitor cannot help but notice that these early paintings remain perfectly academic in style and are thus conventional. Matisse’s achievement, Li Jinyuan noted, lies in the fact that he progressively accepted the fact that he did not need to ‘complete’ his paintings: he could and should leave within them the blank, the space, the unachieved that paradoxically brought them to completion. And, reciprocally, the audience responded with its own proper achievement: they accepted and welcomed the hidden novelties and vision in Matisse’s work at that time, which produced not only a rupture from but also a newfound accomplishment within the Western pictorial tradition. The way in which tradition, history and cultural memory are taught and enshrined in contemporary China makes such a process impossible, Li Jinyuan asserted. Blind obedience to tradition, or else thoughtless rupture from the same tradition, are the only options that the dominant culture is leaving to Chinese artists. This amounts to saying that, in today’s China, there is in fact no history. The entry dated 30 April 2018, part of which has already been quoted above, ends as follows: Both the origin and the future of life are unknown. Is it genetics that will decode them? What is memory? The ages are as long as the night, and what remains of them are only these pictures [tupian 图片] – the ones of the Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes,38 the ones left by the desert wind. Traces [ji 迹]… Traces of these ages as long as night, traces of the universe, of the earth, of human life. The trace is the image [xiang 象] of life, love, emotion [qing 情].39 The trace [tells us] that ‘the Supreme Good is like water’,40 that ‘the wise man takes delight in water, the benevolent one in mountains’.41 The trace [expresses] an eternal love for life. The trace is eternal light, which will continue to illuminate these ages as long as the night.

The character ji [trace] has a long history in Daoist thought and meditation: the jishen [迹身 or 跡身], usually translated as ‘trace body’, corresponds to the appearance taken by the Supreme Truth in function of the characteristics and specific situation of the mind that receives it. Each trace may be particular; it still speaks of a reality that is universal. Somehow, what the character ji points towards is close to what I call here ‘layer’: traces or layers exist as individual ‘signs’ of an underlying reality, and they also take on added power as other traces appear along the way, other layers on the surface, combining into a richer symphony of meanings. As for the ‘image’ (xiang 象), the term traditionally refers to the symbolic condensation attached to each hexagram of the Book of Changes (Yijing 易经).42 ‘For expressing the fullness of the meaning [the idea], nothing is better than the

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image’ (尽意莫若象), asserts Wang Bi (王弼 226–249), in his epoch-making commentary of the Daodejing. At the same time, the same Wang Bi links the ‘image’ to the ‘idea’ or ‘meaning’ (yi 意) in the exact way that ‘being’ (you 有) relates to ‘non being’ (wu 无): ‘The image takes birth from the idea. Once you get the idea, you forget the image’.43 As important as the image may be, it does not constitute the term: it rather surges from the idea, and it leads one to come back to what has originated it. Being a painter, Li Jinyuan links together ‘idea’ and ‘image’ in a way that differs from the more intellectualistic approach of Wang Bi. Though this remains unexpressed, it seems that, for him, the idea never fully ‘frees’ itself from the image, and may even wither without the support of the latter. Building on a quotation from the Zhuangzi, Wang Bi himself compares the image to a trap (ti 蹄) through which to catch the idea. However, at a broader level, Li Jinyuan resorts to the themes of ‘image’ and ‘memory’ in a context typical of Chinese thought and aesthetics: what the painter leaves behind him are ‘traces’ similar to the ones that the wind leaves on the sand; they are loaded with the primordial energy (that can be termed life, light, love, emotion) of which he is the vehicle. As ephemeral or particular as such traces may be, they testify to the eternity and universality of what has moved his hand and his heart – as the same force moves other particles of the universe, each according to its nature. Among these particles, there may be artists who belong to the same spiritual lineage. For the continuity of an artistic lineage celebrates by itself the life power incarnated into both individuals and ‘species’, lineages, collectives. One understands that layering colours and stories goes far beyond crafting clear-cut memories of given places, times or events. Ultimately, the artist surrenders to the forces that continuously beget and regenerate the world. He lets them dwell in his midst so they make him participate in such begetting through an unceasing flow of traces – and this even though nobody can ascertain for how long and to what extent such traces will bear testimony to a travail that is both humane and cosmic, historical and immemorial.

Is there a ‘Memory Palace’ after all? In Renaissance Europe, the construction of a Memory Palace was related to a praxis – e.g. the ars memorativa, itself part of rhetoric.44 Walking through the various loci of a building you had designed, you were able to find the image associated with a set of data at the place where you had stored it. Spence (1984: 5) observes that the Latin author Quintilian (v. 40–96) had written: ‘We ought then to set up images of a kind that can adhere longest in the memory. And we shall do so if we establish likeness as striking as possible’.45 This short sentence was at the origin of complex devices aimed at building

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one’s Memory Palace and making its use most effective. The singularity of the images involved was a determining factor. As Spence suggests, a second principle was equally important: ‘To everything that we wish to remember, wrote Ricci, we should give an image, and to every one of these images we should assign a position where it can rest peacefully until we are ready to reclaim it through an act of memory’ (1984: 92).46 So, it was not only the vivid character of the images associated to specific bits of data that was central to the possibility of quickly finding what one was looking for, but also their rigorous spatial organization into coordinated rooms or corridors. Due to his Jesuit background Ricci may have been especially sensitive to the role played by memory for educating people skilled both at self-knowledge and at successful communication. As David L. Fleming suggests, Saint Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises put the stress on ‘memory and imagination’: during the course of a spiritual retreat, a time of meditation starts with ‘a composition, seeing the place’; the one who prays first focuses on a ‘corporeal place, as for instance a temple or mountain’ or else on representing ‘with the sight of the imagination’ an invisible reality (2004: 34).47 Imagination works together with memory, the latter having precedence over the former. This point is exemplified by the first prayer time of the Spiritual Exercises’ ‘First Week’:48 the first moment of this prayer time is ‘to bring to memory the first sin, which was that of the angels’.49 The close succession of these four ‘firsts’ (the First week, the first prayer time, the first moment of the first prayer time, and the first sin), though not entirely premeditated, certainly speaks of the way in which spiritual growth requires from the start the active use of memory. The above highlights the fact that remembering is not something ‘natural’ but is rather to be seen as a struggle against forgetting, as Yejun Zou also insists when discussing Christa Wolf (see Zou in this volume). Ricci speaks of keeping an image you have stored ‘in a position where it can rest peacefully until we are ready to reclaim it’, but this involves having arranged the respective positions of your troves of images through reflective attempts at optimal architectural disposition, to be repeated each time you enlarge the Memory Palace. So, in the first approach, a ‘Memory Palace’ is an apt metaphor for speaking of a storehouse, the design of which you need to create, of a carefully organized repository of memories that cross-cuts painters’ spiritual lineages, historical time, paintings, poems, notebooks, different locales and travels (all of which bear material traces within their purview). Still, the metaphor needs immediately to be adjusted. When it comes to the kind of artistic endeavours in which Li Jinyuan and other artists engage, the ‘art of remembering’ is expressed and activated not only through the meticulous gathering of emblematic figures (as well as of the material traces that embody these figures), but also, more importantly, through the artistic corpus progressively

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produced. Each painting exemplifies a spatial disposition of the Memory Palace that privileges a given set of elements. This is to say that, contrary to Ricci’s Palace, in which figures need to stay in designated storerooms, the disposition of which should never change, an artist’s Memory Palace is made of mobile partitions, which allow for figures to be matched and rearranged in ways that change or enrich their significance from one artwork to the next. Towards the end of the writing of this chapter, I asked Li Jinyuan if he had read the Chinese translation of Spence’s (1984) work, as I thought he had. He had indeed done so, but, he confessed, the book had not made any special impact on him. Until that point, while preparing this contribution, my questions to him had been merely factual, as I had been careful not to come up with theories, nor to ask for additional opinions, relying on what had surged from spontaneous conversations in the past or what I had found in his notebooks and other documents. At this stage, I made an exception, and asked him whether the ‘Memory Palace’ was for him an enticing concept or not, or what it would evoke. A few days later, he came back to me, writing that, upon rereading the book, it was its very beginning that struck him most: Spence (1984) informs the reader that Ricci suggests three ways of building a Palace: it can be done by recollecting real objects and places; it can be totally fictive; it can be half-real, half-fictive (ban shi ban xu 半实半虚, writes Ricci). Ricci recommends following the second or (even better, it seems) the third method. This way, the Palace can be expanded at will, whereas relying on something one knows too well will limit the future expansion of the locations and the subsequent storage space. Just as Spence observes, ‘Therefore the Chinese should struggle with the difficult task of creating fictive places, or mixing the fictive with the real, fixing them permanently in their minds by constant practice and review so that at last the fictive spaces become “as if real, and can never be erased”’ (1984: 2). The task is not different, Li Jinyuan wrote to me, from the one Chinese painters are called upon to undertake: The first thing is to nurture one’s qi, reading plenty of books, and going in many places; second, comes the qi of painting: there is a field in the universe, and there the original qi moves and fluctuates, expresses itself through appearances while its origin lies at the centre, beyond images… ‘True’ representation does not mean ‘true’ spirit. The third task is, once filled with qi, to create, by uniting the qi of the heart and the qi of Heaven into one; and then, Chinese painting is not Chinese painting any more, but the very manifestation of the Dao.

The layers that compose any painting (any painting going beyond the mere expression of ‘what is real’; and daring to enter into a world ‘as if real’, that is to say) are revealed to be, on the one hand, traces of historicity, connecting the painter to his background, travels or spiritual lineage,

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and, on the other, traces of the Elemental, which follow the fluctuation of appearances in order to espouse the movement that causes them all. Then, layers blend into the one and same artwork. The historical disappears into the Elemental, the Elemental into the historical. The Memory Palace stores the stories and figures that the artist gathers in the course of his or her quest, but it does so within a structure, a form, a space that is called upon to perpetually expand, till it escapes all shapes to take the one, immemorial and inexpressible, of the Dao. From and beyond the words of Matteo Ricci, Li Jinyuan has perceived that the Memory Palace is called upon to expand indefinitely, as the artist’s, the individual’s experience mingles with the field of ‘free and easy wandering’ that is the universe, as also it mingles with the journey undergone by his spiritual lineage and by fellow human beings. And thus, it can be said of the Palace what Laozi asserts of the Dao: ‘As it constantly springs up, one can draw from it without ever exhausting it’ (道沖而用之或不盈 Daodejing, 4). Benoît Vermander is Professor of Religious Studies at Fudan University, Shanghai. From 1996 to 2009, he directed the Taipei Ricci Institute, a leading sinological research centre. His research focuses on rituals, especially among ethnic minorities of the Chinese world, civil religion and comparative spiritualities. He practises Chinese painting and calligraphy, and, since 1996, has held around fifteen personal exhibitions in China, the US and Europe. Recent publications include Shanghai Sacred (with Liz Hingley and Liang Zhang, University of Washington Press, 2018), Corporate Social Responsibility in China (World Scientific, 2014) and Comment lire les classiques chinois (Les Belles Lettres, 2021). He has written on ‘Jesuits in China’, ‘Jesuits in the 21st Century’ and ‘The Sociopolitical Impact of the Bible in China’ for the Oxford Handbook and on ‘Cereals, Rituals and Social Structure’ for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Anthropology.

Notes 1. Among other productions, a bilingual book (French-English) came out of the experience (Vermander 1996). 2. He knew me to be a Jesuit, and this could not but contribute to his interest in the topic, but it still developed independently, nurtured by numerous readings, such as the one of the book by Lin Jinshui (1996), which is representative of the strong interest in this episode of intercultural history that manifested itself in China during the 1990s. Li Jinyuan is not a baptized Christian, though what he expresses sometimes evokes the discourse held by ‘Cultural Christians’ (wenhua jidutu 文化基督徒), at least when the movement first blossomed, during the 1980s. (For a critical discussion of the subsequent history of the movement one may refer to Li Qiuling 2007.) At the same time, and as the last part of this chapter will make clear, Li Jinyuan’s thought and sensitivity are firmly anchored to the Daoist tradition.

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3. I could have introduced further twists in the story: after 2005, Li Jinyuan added the practice of oil painting to the one on rice paper and, for a decade or so, spent as much time on the former as on the latter. The paradox is that the oil paintings he produces generally use a style reminiscent of the Chinese tradition, while his Chinese paintings borrow heavily from Western techniques and media (for instance through the use of acrylic – especially golden and bronze acrylic – on paper, substituting for or completing Chinese traditional pigments). The range of aesthetic references is enlarged by the fact of regularly shifting between two different pictorial languages and operating transpositions from the one to the other. I have chosen not to specifically discuss here aesthetic references and metamorphoses linked to the introduction of this new repertoire. 4. Among the numerous collections of Li Jinyuan’s paintings (2007, 2010, 2011, 2012), there is a volume produced by Li Jinyuan and his son, Li Juntao 李俊涛 (2011b). 5. Li Yuanguo eventually became a researcher on Daoism at the Sichuan Academy of Social Sciences and director of the Academy’s Center of Religious Studies. See his notice on Baidu, https://baike.baidu.com/item/李远国/8667018, retrieved 2 April 2019. He remains the prime interlocutor of his elder brother. 6. He retired in 2005, while continuing to occasionally intervene in the arts department of his university as well as in other academic and educational forums. 7. Upon further inquiries I made, Li Jinyuan insisted on the fact that this position was assigned to him in 1968 by the head of the office of defence industry of Chengdu city government, though he himself had asked to be sent to study at Chongqing Arts Academy. 8. At the same time, a statement according to which he had committed ‘serious political mistakes’ was included into his Party member’s personal file. 9. Literally, ‘A bamboo basket cloud’, the ‘bamboo basket’ metaphor being a Sichuanese expression that, nowadays, sounds very outdated. 10. The title suggested by Feng Jianwu comes from a famous poem by Su Dongpo, ‘Upon my arrival at Huangzhou’ (初到黄州). 11. ‘超以象外，得其环中’. One could understand this as meaning: ‘By going beyond the image, one reaches its centre’ (i.e. the place from which the image originates). However, the second part of the sentence is a quotation from the second chapter (Qiwulun 齊物論) of the Zhuangzi that conveys the following idea: the one who has reached the pivot of the Dao is able to witness all changes from a space that is both central and empty. Hence the translation I chose to adopt. 12. Without referring here to the Chinese notion, Derrida’s famous evocation (rather than definition) of the ‘trace’ as the ‘simulacrum of a presence’ says something of what is at stake here: the material traces of a story make its protagonists present while confirming their absence, an absence through which the continuation of the story becomes possible, and even desirable (1973 [1967]: 156). Even if the Chinese approach to equivalent terms will lead us into other directions, Derrida’s approach of traces will remain ‘layered’ into our understanding of the term. I am applying here to a Western concept a rule first expressed by William Théodore De Bary: in ancient Chinese thought, the more a concept is deemed central for apprehending human and cosmic reality, the larger the scope of its meanings will become (1970: ix). 13. This sacred quality could be further elaborated, by following for instance the lead provided by John Lagerwey: ‘As much as alphabetical writing mirrors the time of speaking, characters occupy space, as do bodies in ritual’ (2019: 267). 14. Ling can be defined as the spiritual efficacy attached to an object, a person or a place. Rituals may confer ling on a statue or an object of piety. The notion remains fully relevant in contemporary Chinese urban contexts (see Vermander, Hingley and Zhang 2018: 178–90).

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15. Note how difficult it is to ascertain whether a calligraphic work is an ‘original’. The best example is the one provided by the Lantingji Xu (兰亭集序) (Preface to the Poems Collected from the Orchid Pavilion) by Wang Xizhi. The tracking of the original of this work by Emperor Taizong (598?–649) became the stuff of legends. 16. Stylistically, the entries concerning Feng Jianwu and He Haixia are written more carefully than most of the other ones, showing that they are meant to be communicated, in one way or another. 17. For the insertion of new themes and feelings into Chinese painting in the early days of the People’s Republic and even slightly before, see Andrews (1994). 18. I have developed the parallel between Shi Lu and Lu Xun in Vermander (2015: 90–92). 19. The Shuowen jiezi 说文解字 is the first Chinese dictionary, or lexicon, compiled around the turn of the first century of the present era. 20. I hesitate to further this discussion, as Li Jinyuan stops at this point, but I will still venture the following: both the breakthroughs and the difficulties encountered by Li Keran and Shi Lu have to do with the way in which they integrated different Western techniques (an issue with which all Chinese painters of the twentieth century had to deal). Li Keran borrowed from Western classical shadowing techniques. Shi Lu exhibits expressionist tendencies and has sometimes been dubbed ‘China’s Van Gogh’ (Loke 1988). If I had to characterize Li Jinyuan’s relationship to the Western way of ‘seeing’ and painting (locating him between reliance on chiaroscuro and on expressionism, characteristic of Li and Shi respectively), I would suggest that he approaches a landscape in a similar way to Cézanne: keen observation culminates into a decantation of the subject, and an avowed taste for classicism eventually leads to geometric, somewhat abstract compositions. 21. This statement needs to be qualified: from the 1950s onwards, many Chinese artists have created ink and wash renderings of landscapes outside China, occasionally evoking cathedrals and other buildings with effects reminiscent of Chinese mountains. As this has become more common, the language of contemporary ink painting no longer refers exclusively to Chinese landmarks. The collective memory of Chinese painting is slowly universalizing insofar as the artists who maintain the tradition are adventuring outside its frontiers, both literally and metaphorically. 22. I already mentioned the influence he drew from reading books by Lin Jinshui and others. Additionally, in 1998, Kuanchi Program Studio, a TV production company based in Taiwan, entered in discussion with Sichuan TV about jointly realizing a series on Ricci’s travels. Li Jinyuan was involved in the discussions. When the project was rejected by the Ministry of Propaganda, he decided to conduct the itinerary on his own. 23. The Ricci Bulletin (2002) has published the Chinese original of this text along with an English translation by Eddy Chang (see Li Jinyuan 2002). The Chinese original had been first published in a booklet joined to a portfolio of prints of the paintings (private edition). 24. Since the time of Li Jinyuan’s visit, the situation in Macerata has radically changed: his native town has now solemnly memorialized Ricci. 25. They were first exhibited in Beijing during the colloquium organized by the San Francisco Ricci Institute on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Matteo Ricci in the Chinese capital (May 2001), and, in December of the same year, in Tokyo, at Sophia University. An exhibition took place in Paris the following year. 26. For an account of the relationships between Ricci and Li Zhi in the context of the discussions surrounding Ricci’s treatise ‘On Friendship’, see Ana Carolina Hosne (2019). 27. ‘Brocade City’: Chengdu. This verse is preceded by: ‘At daybreak look where it’s wet and red…’. For the translations of Du Fu’s poems, I am indebted to Stephen Owen (2016).

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28. Broadly speaking, ‘Literati painting’ relies on ink and wash techniques, with little reliance on colours, and it favors impressionistic, suggestive renditions of landscape. Its proximity to Chinese poetry (literati being supposed to master an array of expressive means) means that Du Fu’s poems are frequently used in the calligraphic inscriptions that adorn these works, and that some paintings are explicit renderings of Du Fu’s verses. 29. I have tried to articulate the question in my contribution in Vermander (2017). 30. Meaning: what contemporary Chinese painters are interested in. 31. Calligrapher and painter, born in 1938, professor at Beijing University. 32. Strictly speaking, the expression ‘original qi’ should be kept for translating the characters yuanqi 元气 , which Li Jinyuan also uses at times. However, the two are almost interchangeable. Zhenqi may preferentially refer to the original breath or energy as it actualizes itself in specific occurrences, while yuanqi speaks of the original vital force per se. 33. Located in the Garzê Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture (甘孜藏族自治州). Ngawa, Liangshan and Garzê Prefectures are all administrative divisions of Sichuan Province. 34. A film directed by Éric Valli (1999). 35. The story of the Yangjuan Primary School in Yanyuan county, Liangshan Prefecture, is sketched in ‘Cool Mountain Education Fund – Who We Are’, http://www .coolmountainfund.com/Wordpress/who-we-are/, retrieved 7 April 2019. 36. Henri Franses has suggested seeing Byzantine icons as both conductor and partial insulator of the sacred, structuring the experience in a way that is ‘sensory but not visceral, engaging but not terrifying’ (2013: 187). This may also partly characterize the effect created by Li Jinyuan’s ‘ethnic’ paintings. I hesitate to qualify all the paintings concerned in such a way, for they have taken a darker undertone with time, provoked by the artist’s accrued consciousness of environmental degradation and progressive deculturation. 37. At that time, the two of us, in association with an artist from Shanghai, Li Shuang 李爽, were holding an exhibition in the neighbouring city of Lens. See Mercier (2019). 38. Also called the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas. 39. In Chinese classical philosophy, the character qing designates the movement or propensity proper to the nature of a given being. When taking this meaning into account, one understands that, for Li Jinyuan, a trace is the image, the condensed expression of a movement, a dynamic. 40. Daodejing, 8. 41. Confucius’ Analects, 6.23. 42. For example, according to the canonical ‘Ten Wings’ commentary, the image attached to Hexagram 4 (meng 蒙) is the one of a source surging at the foot of a mountain. Such an image carries the idea that the perfect man must be resolute in his conduct, in the way the source shows resoluteness, so as to make his virtue (i.e. the mountain) reach higher. 43. 象生于意。 得意在忘象。(Wang Bi, on Commentary on the Daodejing, sect.4). 44. The determination of a subject (inventio), the structural composition of the piece to be delivered (dispositio), stylistic craftmanship (ornatus), memorization of the discourse (memoria) and oratory techniques (actio) are the five parts of Greek and Latin rhetoric. From the time of Cicero onwards, the balance to be found between these different parts of rhetoric – and notably the relative importance to be given to inventio and memoria – was an object of contention. 45. Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria was fully rediscovered only at the beginning of the fifteenth century, but it then nurtured the learning and study of the various levels of discourse.

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46. Spence quotes from Ricci’s (1596) Xiguo Jifa 西国记法 (Occidental Method of Memory). According to Ana Carolina Hosne (2018), Ricci had discovered that memorization was essential to the learning process required for the civil service examinations, and so he composed this small treatise in order to help candidates. Other perspectives were offered by Jaewon Ahn (2017). Ahn (following Michael Lackner and Yum Jeong-Sam) explores the possibility that Ricci wrote the small treatise in order to teach a way to learn and understand Chinese characters and words. This does not explain why the treatise was originally written into Chinese, but Ricci’s focus is undoubtedly the memorization of Chinese characters through association of images and meanings. 47. Spiritual Exercises, n.47. ‘The composition prelude serves as a centering element of our whole being with the content matter of the Ignatian prayer’. 48. The Spiritual Exercises are divided into four ‘weeks’, which correspond less to affixed time units than to stages within the course of the retreatant’s progress. 49. Spiritual Exercises, n.50.

References Ahn, Jaewon. 2017. ‘On Xiguo Jifa (西國記法) of Matteo Ricci (1552– 1610)’, Journal of Greco-Roman Studies 56(3): 99–121. Andrews, Julia F. 1994. Painters and Politics in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1979. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bach, Jonathan. 2014. ‘Consuming Communism: Material Cultures of Nostalgia in Former East Germany’, in Olivia Angé and David Berliner (eds), Anthropology and Nostalgia. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, pp. 123–38. De Bary, William Théodore. 1970. Self and Society in Ming Thought. New York: Columbia University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1973 [1967]. Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David Allison. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Fleming, David L. 2004. Like the Lightning: The Dynamics of the Ignatian Exercises. Saint Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources. Franses, Henri. 2013. ‘Partial Transmission’, in Glen Peers (ed.), Byzantine Things in the World. Houston: The Menil Collection, pp. 175–87. Grasseni, Cristina. 2004. ‘Skilled Vision: An Apprenticeship in Breeding Aesthetics’, Social Anthropology 12(1): 41–55. Hosne, Ana Carolina. 2018. ‘Matteo Ricci’s Occidental Method of Memory (Xiguo Jifa) (1596): Untranslatable Images of a Classical Art of Memory in Ming China’, Journal of Early Modern History 22(3): 137–54. ______. 2019. ‘Friendship among Literati: Matteo Ricci SJ (1552–1610) in Late Ming China’. Retrieved 2 April 2019 from https://heiup.uni-heidel berg.de/journals/index.php/transcultural/article/view/11362/8707.

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Lagerwey, John. 2019. Paradigm Shifts in Early and Modern Religion: A History. Leiden: Brill. Lin Jinshui (林金水). 1996. Matteo Ricci and China (Li Madou yu Zhongguo 利玛窦与中国). Beijing: Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Press (Zhongguo Shehui Kexue Chubanshe 中国社会科学出版社). Li Jinyuan. 2002. ‘Tian gen licheng – Jinian yidai wei ren Li Madou dao Beijing Sibai Zhounian (天路歷程 – 紀念一代偉人利瑪竇到北京四百週 年 / Pilgrim’s Progress: Commemorating Matteo Ricci’s 400th Anniversary of Arrival in Beijing)’, trans. Eddy Chang, The Ricci Bulletin: 137–60. ______. 2007. Images from the Heart. Aachen: Misereor & ChinaZentrum. ______. 2010. Fire and Water (Huo yu shui [火与水]). Shanghai: Sunbow Art Gallery. ______. 2011a. Landscape / Li Jinyuan. Beijing: Rongbaozhai Press. ______. 2011b. Li Jinyuan / Li Juntao. ‘Famous Chinese Oil Painters’ series. Beijing: China International Publishing. ______. 2012. Sketching Nature: The Vast Expanse of a Peaceful Heart (Ji hua ziran, xin ning guangmou [迹化自然, 心宁广漠]). Chengdu: Sanhe Art Gallery. Li Qiuling. 2007. ‘Historical Reflections on Sino-Christian Theology’, China Study Journal (Spring-Summer): 54–67. Loke, Margarett. 1988. ‘Chinese Modern Masters’, The New York Times Magazine, 7 February 1988. Mercier, Agnès. 2019. ‘Lens La Chine se décline en peinture à l’ancienne Banque de France’, La Voix du Nord, 24 April 2019. Retrieved 29 April 2019 from https://www.lavoixdunord.fr/572839/article/2019-04-24/lachine-se-decline-en-peinture. Owen, Stephen. 2016. (trans). The Poetry of Du Fu. Boston and Berlin: De Gruyter. Ricci, Matteo. 2019 [1596]. Xiguo Jifa (西国记法 [Occidental Method of Memory]). Retrieved 12 September 2019 from https://read01.com/J06 NE3B.html#.XXtXwi2B1TY. Spence, Jonathan D. 1984. The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci. New York: Viking. Valli, Éric (director). 1999. Himalaya/Caravan. Film distributed by Kino International. 108 minutes. Vermander, Benoît. 1996. Veilleur de nuit / Day Watcher, Paintings in MidiPyrénées by Li Jinyuan, Texts and Poems by Benoît Vermander. Toulouse: c.361.

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______. 2015. ‘Humility and Humiliation: Kenotic Experience in Modern Chinese Painting, and in the Historical Experience of Chinese Christians’, in Vincent Shen (ed.), Chinese Spirituality and Christian Communities: A Kenotic Perspective. Washington DC: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, pp. 85–101. ______. 2017. ‘Comment lire les Classiques Chinois?’, in Geschichte der Germanistik, pp. 38–65. Vermander, Benoît, Liz Hingley and Liang Zhang. 2018. Shanghai Sacred: The Religious Landscape of a Global City. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Willerslev, Rane. 2006. ‘To Have the World at a Distance: Rethinking the Significance of Vision for Social Anthropology’, in Cristina Grasseni (ed.), Skilled Visions: Between Apprenticeship and Standards. New York and London: Berg-hahn Books, pp. 24–46. Zhang Pingyi (張平宜). 2011. ‘A Taiwan Woman, a Leper Village, a Story of Love’, China Daily, 23 February 2011. Retrieved 29 April 2019 from http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2011-02/23/content_12067871 .htm.

2



JIA ZHANGKE’S MEMORY PROJECT, 24 CITY Rewriting History, Rethinking Historiography

Chris Berry

Introduction Multiple award-winning Chinese director Jia Zhangke’s films can all be considered as memory projects about recent Chinese history. In different ways, they all provoke reflection on ordinary citizens’ experiences of the social and economic transition from the state-directed command economy to the market economy, which began in the 1980s and took off dramatically in the 1990s. This chapter examines 24 City (Ershisicheng Ji, 二十四城记, 2008) as the Jia film that emphasizes the issue of memory most explicitly. Indeed, the Chinese title of Jia’s film includes a word that is missing from the English title – ‘ji’ (记). Ji by itself can mean ‘notes’, so a fuller translation of the title could be Notes on 24 City. But ji is also the first part of the composite word ‘jiyi’ (记忆), which means ‘memory’. Therefore, Corey Schultz (2014: 276) has pointed out that the full translation of the title could also be 24 City Memories. This chapter asks what 24 City as a memory project can contribute to our understanding of the relationship between memory and history. As detailed further below, many scholars have recognized that 24 City is a memory project. However, where many others accept the conventional opposition between history and memory, this chapter argues that the deployment of memory in 24 City challenges this opposition and asks us to rethink what we understand history to be. It does this in at least two ways.

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First, by recording and disseminating memories using the public medium of the feature film, 24 City takes the private, subjective and ephemeral and turns it into a document – it places memory into the public record. In this way, the film challenges the conventional division between history as public, objective and official and memory as private, subjective and informal by making memory part of history. I call this memory in the public record ‘public memory’. Second, 24 City is more than just an oral history, and it mounts a challenge to our understanding of history that is more fundamental than simply adding in memories – it goes beyond the logic of the supplement. As a discourse, the film is highly heterogenous, composed of various incommensurable elements that resist being understood as a text with a unified voice. I argue that this plural characteristic of 24 City amplifies the singularity of individual memories. Furthermore, if this plurality of singularities is understood as part of historiography, then it challenges the modern idea of historiography as a unified discourse written in a single voice. Instead, I argue that 24 City pioneers a new, more democratic and plural form of historiography that resists closure and unification. The first part of the chapter explores what the recording of memories in 24 City adds to history. The film is built around nine interviews with workers at former state-owned Factory 420 in Chengdu, in which they remember their experiences at the factory. As the second interviewee, former Deputy Head of the Communist Party Committee Guan Fengjiu, explains, the plant was originally established in Shenyang in northeast China as Factory 111, and it repaired MiG-15 fighter planes. Guan explains that after the Korean War had alerted everyone to the potential vulnerability of northeast China to attack, the plant and 60 per cent of its staff moved to Chengdu, southwest China, where it became Factory 420. This relocation marks it as part of the Cold War policy to move strategic industry away from China’s frontiers, later known as the ‘Third Front’ (san xian 三线) policy (Naughton 1988). Guan explicitly cites this policy. However, the earliest known mention of the Third Front Policy has been traced back to 1964 (Meyskens 2020: 4), and it was only spoken of publicly from the late 1970s onwards (Meyskens 2020: 1), revealing a gap between popular memory of the Third Front and the Third Front as a documented policy. When the film was made, the Chengfa Corporation (成发集团), which had taken over the factory, had sold the land and was moving its operations out to the suburbs. Factory 420 was about to be demolished to make way for a luxury apartment and office complex called ‘24 City’. In the process of recording and disseminating memories of Factory 420, the film challenges us to recognize these experiences, including their affective dimensions, as part of the public history of the Third Front policy. The second part of the chapter builds on this use of public memory to contest what the Third Front was and explores 24 City as historiographical

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discourse. Modern history writing is usually understood as a logical argument about the facts of the past from the single perspective of the historian. Historical documentaries that follow this pattern typically deploy a voiceover narration supported by interviews, documents, archival materials and other material as evidence. However, 24 City is far from this pattern. Mostly noticeably, four of the nine interviews are scripted, based on Jia’s research, and they depart from the conventions of re-enactment because they are performed by actors readily recognizable to Chinese audiences. The seeming contradiction between real and ‘fake’ memories has been contentious, drawing most of the critical attention the film has received. In this sense, Jia’s film joins the emphasis on history as storytelling in Hayden White’s famous Metahistory (1973), and Terence Turner’s challenge to the conventional opposition between history and myth (1988), as well as Katherine Swancutt and Jiarimuji’s study of mythopoiesis and the making of a myth-history in their chapter in this volume. However, 24 City is not only a blend of real interviews and scripted ones, but also an even more heterogenous discourse. It combines not only real and scripted interviews, but also extensive poetry, music, ellipses marked by black shots, montages of work at the factory, and tableau-style long takes of posed former workers and their families. What sort of a history is this? With this heterogeneity in mind, I turn to the earliest Chinese history. Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian (1993), as the book is most commonly known in English, was written in approximately 100 bce and is considered as one of the earliest written histories in human civilization. Its Chinese title, Shiji (史记), also includes the character ‘ji’ (记) found in the Chinese title of Jia’s film, which corresponds to the ‘records’ in the English translation of the title of Sima Qian’s history. Like 24 City, Records of the Grand Historian is a highly heterogenous text that has challenged modern scholars to comprehend its structure as a logical consequence of its time and place of production. Considering 24 City in the light of Records of the Grand Historian, this chapter argues that the structure and composition of 24 City has its own logic. This logic corresponds to the film’s prioritization of memory, whose singularity challenges the idea that history should present a unified narrative. Instead, like the Records of the Grand Historian, its heterogenous and incommensurable components propose recognition that the past is not unified and that while selection may communicate the perspective of the historian, other interpretations are possible and should be immanent in historical writing.

24 City Memories Looking at Jia Zhangke’s feature film output so far – he has also made many short films – 24 City emerges as a pivotal work. After a series of dramatic

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features between 1995 and the mid-2000s, he made three feature-length documentaries before returning to dramatic features with A Touch of Sin (天注定) in 2013. Made in 2008, 24 City sits in the middle of this group of three documentaries, and it is the only film so far in which the combination of documentary and dramatic elements is so balanced as to defy easy classification as one or the other. Memory is invoked in various ways in all of Jia’s features, whether documentary or dramatic. Indeed, Jiwei Xiao (2011) considers Jia’s work to be a ‘quest for memory’. Written on the occasion of a Jia retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, Xiao’s essay quotes MOMA’s webpages (2010): ‘Aiming to restore the concrete memory of place and to evoke individual history in a rapidly modernizing society, the filmmaker recovers the immediate past in order to imagine the future’. What Xiao sees as Jia’s project to restore recent memories is invoked directly and indirectly in his films. His first two dramatic features, Xiao Wu (also known as Pickpocket, 小武, 1997) and Platform (Zhantai, 站台, 2000), were set in the recent past, inviting Chinese audiences to compare their experiences with those of his protagonists. In his documentary features, a similar effect is produced when interviewees recount the transformation of their own lives in the transition to the market economy in China. Other invocations of memory are more indirect. At 59 minutes, his first film, Xiao Shan Going Home (Xiao Shan Huijia, 小山回家, 1995) is technically a short. Although it is contemporary in setting, the theme of a young migrant worker in Beijing travelling all over the city in his efforts to persuade someone to go back home with him for the New Year holiday also invokes past experiences. In most of Jia’s films, including his documentaries, the physical signs of demolition and new construction are visible, again provoking memories of recent changes. For example, in Still Life (Sanxia Haoren, 三峡好人, 2006), the gradual flooding of the famous Yangtse River Three Gorges landscape as part of a hydroelectric project is the setting for the entire film. His most recent feature as of the time of writing, Ash Is the Purest White (Jianghu Ernü, 江湖儿女, 2018) makes numerous intertextual references to his own earlier works, as though encouraging audiences to remember and reflect on their own experiences of Jia’s work and what was happening in their lives at the time. This practice echoes the storehouses and layers of memory in Li Jinyuan’s work that Benoît Vermander discusses in the previous chapter in this volume. However, among all of Jia’s features, 24 City is the only one that foregrounds memory in its original Chinese title. And, as Tony Rayns (2010: 48) points out, ‘most of the running time is given’ over to the interviews, all of which recount the memories of the subjects’ experiences in Factory 420. Indeed, Jia’s film is based on over one hundred interviews with former Factory

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420 workers conducted in the course of researching the film (Nochimson 2009: 412), many published later as a book (Jia 2009). In this regard, the total project of the film constitutes part of the global oral history movement (Miroslav 2013). As a broad movement, oral history covers everything from interviews with political leaders to the use of the method in the British tradition since at least the 1970s to record the memories of ordinary people (Thomson 2008). It is this latter tradition that Jia’s work echoes. Indeed, the availability of cheap and easy to use recording equipment has enabled this type of oral history everywhere, including China, which has witnessed a huge boom in academic and popular oral history since the 1990s (Zuo 2015; Li 2020). One running theme about the experiences of the Factory 420 workers concerns how values have changed. For example, the first interviewee is He Xikun, who was born in 1948 and apprenticed to the factory in 1964, at the age of sixteen. His memories circle around an older man who he clearly admired. He remembers how Master Wang, in the spirit of self-reliance and frugality, not only made his own tools but repaired and reused them every time they were worn down. When He Xikun was ready to throw them out, Master Wang showed him that they had more life in them yet. Another theme is self-sacrifice. Hou Lijun remembers how she came with her parents when the factory moved from the northeast in 1958, and they did not return to visit her mother’s parents in Shenyang until 1972, fourteen years later. She explains that at first, she did not understand why everyone was so emotional. But later, when they were preparing to return to Chengdu and her grandfather said they might never meet again, she grasped the significance of the situation and wept, too. Memories of family and suffering run through the analyses in this volume, and 24 City is no exception. But the pain invoked eclipses any hint of nostalgia. In the scripted interview performed by Lü Liping, her character of Hao Dali explains that during the journey from the northeast, she lost sight of her child, but under pressure to maintain discipline and get to Chengdu she could not stop long enough to find him. Jia produced the scripted interviews based on the interviews he conducted while researching the film. If we consider Lü’s character to be a composite, her story conveys to audiences the enormity of the self-sacrifices expected of the workers. The interviews with younger people that come later in the film are more optimistic, because they are doing well and have hopes for the future. But even here, the emphasis is on their realization of the price that their parents’ generation paid. Zhao Gang was born in 1974 and is now a local television presenter. His interview emphasizes the moment when he was apprenticed into a factory as a turning point. He had grown up in Factory 420 and seen his father in worker’s clothes, but it was only when he had to put on the uni-

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form himself and repeat the same labour over and over that he realized he could not do it and quit. In the final interview of the film, Zhao Tao plays Su Na, a cheerful young woman who works as a personal shopper for Chengdu’s nouveau riche. A bit like Zhao Gang, the most emotional moment of her interview is when she recalls trying to find her mother at her factory job and being unable to even distinguish her from the male workers as she did repetitive hard physical labour in a uniform. Whether they are about changing values or self-sacrifice, recollected by the person who experienced them or performed by an actor, all these memories are moving. Indeed, the encounter with Master Wang Zhiren, who is credited as the second interviewee, is almost entirely affective, because he appears to be in the early stages of dementia and unable to speak. The ‘interview’ consists of a reunion between him and his former apprentice, He Xikun, in which, as Thomas Austin (2014: 259–60) points out, memory is embodied. We witness their tearful experience of the emotions conjured up by seeing each other again and watch He’s memories reactivated by reaching out to touch his old master’s face. The only exception to these emotional memories is a brief encounter with a young woman roller skating on a flat roof. We hear Jia asking her name, and she confirms that her parents work in Factory 420. But when she cheerfully says she has never been inside, the would-be tenth interview goes no further, perhaps because she does not have direct memories of the factory. Jia has been clear about the motivations behind his project to collect these memories while there is still time, speaking of ‘my sense that memories of China’s mid-twentieth century history are disappearing: I must use documentary to tell my stories and prevent not only the disappearance of memories but also the disappearance of the architecture, the buildings, the disappearance of the whole generation of people after 1949’ (Nochimson 2009: 413). As this volume emphasizes, memories become materialized through storytelling and art. Jia’s statement in another conversation indicates that he sees this work as adding something that was missing, when he notes, ‘When we look back at the important historical moments in China this century, we only find state-recorded images. We have none from the point of view of regular citizens’ (Jia 2015: 327). Jia’s aim to record the memories of ordinary people that do not necessarily accord with the official story is also an important theme of Yejun Zou’s comparative analysis of the works of East German writer Christa Wolf and Chinese writer Ding Ling. In these remarks and in the film itself, the implications of collecting these interviews ‘from the point of view of regular citizens’ are not further explored. However, in other interviews, mostly made around the time of the release of the film when the Chinese political environment was more relaxed than it is today, Jia suggests the possibility of a more critical dimension to

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his work. For example, he notes that ‘It would be impossible for the government to record the experiences I am recording just because a lot of the memories I am committing to film are actually the unhappy reactions of a lot of common people about recent government policies, and I think an official film team cannot make films criticizing official policies’ (Nochimson 2009: 413). Jia also goes further in this same interview, saying, ‘We’re encouraged to sacrifice ourselves as people are forced to under Fascism’, and ‘We have the power to mobilize a huge part of the public to do major tasks. … But the price is high. What the West is not seeing is the stories behind these mobilizations and the sometimes tragic consequences for the individual under totalitarianism’ (Nochimson 2009: 416). When we think about the emphasis on and rejection of uniformity and repetition in the interviews with Zhao Gang and Su Na, who are more or less the same generation as Jia himself, this emphasis on individualism gains further salience; although Jia listens to and honours the experiences of older generations, the more one examines it the more it becomes clear that this is not a film of nostalgia for the era of the planned economy. This respect without any desire to go back also comes through another much-cited interview with the scholar Dudley Andrew. Jia says of his own experience of shooting the film that I felt as if we were mourning silently for the lives and the stories of the past… For me these portraits are not just people’s faces nor some form complementary to their narration, nor even a mere ritual. For through that ritual we sense the many lives that have been ignored, ordinary people’s lives ignored. We hope that through time, through silence, and through this ritual, the film can help these people achieve some recognition. (Andrew 2009: 82)

In addition to its contribution to our understanding of the perception today and everyday experience then of the Third Front policy for citizens swept up in it, the recording of memories and their dissemination via the public medium of film also has some consequences for our understanding of the relationship between memory and history. Memory is conventionally contrasted to history. Where history is understood to be a public discourse about objective, documented and demonstrated facts concerning the past, memory is understood to be individual, subjective and ephemeral. However, memory studies as a field has always been interested in the times, places and practices where these neat borders fray. If Pierre Nora, Maurice Halbwachs and Jan Assman are considered the founding thinkers in the field, then Nora’s ‘sites of memory’ (lieux de memoire) (Nora 1996–1998), Halbwachs’ idea (1992) of ‘collective memory’ (la mémoire collective), and Assman’s ‘cultural memory’ (which Nora’s sites of memory would be part of) and

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‘communicative memory’ (corresponding approximately to Halbwachs’ collective memory) (Assman 2008) are all primary examples of this focus on the blurring between history and memory. As noted above, in the interview with Dudley Andrew, Jia suggests his interviews in 24 City stand for ‘many lives’. Indeed, in the same interview, he states ‘What I filmed are not individual cases but collective memories’ (Andrew 2009: 82). Furthermore, the English-language title of his book in which the interviews appear is A Collective Memory of Chinese Working Class (Jia 2009). Halbwachs, who is heavily associated with ‘collective memory’ as a concept, distinguishes his research from other approaches in various ways. First, its object of study is contemporary, as opposed to the discipline of history’s efforts to retrieve facts about times beyond actual memory. Writing in the early twentieth century, Halbwachs’ work is also distinguished from that of other contemporary scholars interested in memory, such as Freud and Bergson: where their focus is on the individual mind, his is on the sharing of memory through various informal and everyday interactions from gossip to jokes and songs. In this emphasis on the informal, unofficial and ephemeral, the emphasis of Halbwachs’ work stands in contrast to Nora’s sites of memory, which are usually officially endorsed and material entities, such as museums and monuments. 24 City stands somewhere between these concepts. It does share and circulate individual memories, making them more collective. But, unlike the kinds of social practices Halbwachs has in mind as sustaining collective memory, recording memories on film is not malleable and ephemeral. In this sense, a film is more public and permanent, and in those ways has some resemblance to Nora’s sites of memory. And yet 24 City is a not like a memorial or a museum, in at least two ways. First, as Jia’s comments above underline, it is not and never could be an ‘official’ film, even if it is one of his films made after abandoning his early ‘underground’ filmmaking practice and therefore it has gone through censorship. And, second, although the images and sounds may be fixed, every screening of a film is, in a sense, a performance that is received differently according to the audience, the time and the context. For these reasons, I believe we need to recognize that filming and circulating individual memories may contribute to collective memory, but it also exceeds the malleability and ephemerality of collective memory without being subsumed by the state or becoming fixed and objectified like a monument. I would call this form of memory ‘public memory’ to highlight its participation in the production of dynamic civil society discussion and debate, at the same time as its publicness makes it part of history and, in the case of 24 City, insists on the importance of individual experience and retrospective perception in any complete history of the Third Front policy.

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24 City Records So far, this chapter has examined the relationship between memory and history in 24 City as a supplemental one: the film adds memory to existing historical accounts of the Mao period. Some scholars have understood this addition as a critical intervention, as indeed is often the case in the oral history tradition. For example, Thomas Austin (2014: 258) describes these memories as ‘counternarratives to teleological state-sanctioned accounts of progress in socialist and postsocialist China’. Others have seen it as more of an addendum. Wu Shu-chin (2011: 9) acknowledges Jia’s ‘resentment’ of official history, but she sees his film as ‘an artistic vision that aims to provide a version of history – a personal, alternative vision – to supplement rather than replace the official version’. However, 24 City is not a simple oral history. This chapter now turns to the form of the film as a discourse, to argue that it challenges us to expand our thinking about what historiography can be. In this section, the chapter details how the film is composed of heterogenous and incommensurable elements that resist being understood as a unified text. It argues that in this way it bears comparison with Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian, the Chinese title of which also uses the character ‘ji’ (记). In Sima’s case, the character is usually translated as ‘records’. So, what sort of ‘records’ are 24 City, and how does a ‘record’ differ from our usual understanding of what a history is or should be? The most attention-grabbing deviation from a simple oral history stringing together a series of interviews is the fact that not only are four of the nine interviews in 24 City scripted, but also they are performed by actors. All these actors would be readily recognizable to Chinese audiences, and some, such as Joan Chen, would be internationally known. This deployment of scripted interviews performed by stars takes 24 City beyond the conventions even of docudrama. Indeed, in the most extreme example, which is Joan Chen’s performance of a character named Gu Minhua, the film stages what Thomas Austin (2014: 264) calls a ‘mise-en-abyme’ that makes it clear these scripted interviews are not simply compilations of bits from real interviews. Gu Minhua is known as ‘Little Flower’, which was the name of a character that Joan Chen played in the 1979 movie of the same name. According to the interview, colleagues in the factory felt she looked like the actor in the film, and indeed we see the film playing on a television in Gu’s beauty salon. At this moment of elaborately playful self-referentiality, any idea of authenticity in the conventional sense evaporates. The deployment of actors and scripted interviews in 24 City was controversial. As Hsiu-Chuang Deppman (2014: 207) notes, ‘Many blog posts and movie commentators attack the film’s stylization and “impurity”’. Ac-

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cording to Jiwei Xiao (2011), some critics accused Jia of making ‘fake documentary’. Evan Osnos (2009) reported that at a screening of the film, ‘After the host gave a routine round of praise, the first question from the audience asked Jia, pointedly, “Was the decision to use movie stars made with the market in mind?”’ However, signs of Jia’s dissatisfaction with the conventions of realism had been emerging for some time. Jia’s first films were set in small-town China and made liberal use of location shooting with unknown actors speaking local dialects, resulting in a realist style that built him a reputation for gritty authenticity (McGrath 2008: 136–64; Berry 2008). However, he began to disturb that everyday realism around the same time as he started submitting his films to the Film Bureau for censorship, so that they could be released commercially in China. The World (Shijie, 世界, 2004), his first ‘above ground’ film, was set in a theme park supposedly outside Beijing, where famous buildings from around the world are recreated in miniature form and workers perform various ethnic song and dance routines for the gratification of tourists. While the film itself might have been a realist depiction of the theme park in Jia’s typical style, the location itself draws attention to performance and imitation. His next film, Still Life, contained a very striking scene in which special effects enable a monument to take off like a rocket, crossing the usual boundary between realism and the fantastic. While, as indicated above, some may suspect Jia of chasing the box office, others interpreted the insertion of these unexpected elements differently. Evan Osnos (2009) notes that ‘Jia began to grow frustrated with the limitations imposed by realism. He had come to believe that China’s transformations were so fast and mind-bending that putting them on film virtually demanded surrealism’. Indeed, in his interview with Andrew Chan (2009: 41), Jia himself commented that ‘I think surrealism is a crucial part of China’s reality’. From this perspective, Jia’s output can be understood as moving in two very different directions at the same time. On one hand, as discussed at the beginning of the first section of this chapter, he moves from dramatic features towards what is usually thought of as the realist film form par excellence, documentary. But on the other hand, he simultaneously starts to introduce elements that emphasize performance, fiction and fantasy. Holding both these kinds of elements together in the same text in more or less equal proportions, making the film ‘an unclassifiable hybrid’ (Rayns 2010: 48), is another way in which 24 City is marked as a pivotal text, after which he returns to dramatic feature films, but working with genre conventions rather than the location-based realism his first films are known for. However, although oral history interviews and performed interviews may be the components of the film that have grabbed the most attention, there are a number of other elements that disturb documentary realist conven-

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tions and make the film even more heterogenous. First, there are various poems that appear during the film as text on screen, much as poems often appear written on Chinese paintings, including some of Li Jinyuan’s analysed by Benoît Vermander in his chapter in this volume. The first poem in 24 City is identified as a ‘Tang Dynasty poem’ on the black screen that appears just after the title of the film. According to the translation, it reads ‘The cherished hibiscus of 24 city, in full bloom’. By showing that the new real estate development’s name is linked to a Tang dynasty poem, at the outset the film establishes the pattern of taking the new as a reason to look back at the past, which could be said to characterize the whole film. There are also quotations from two W.B. Yeats poems, ‘The Coming of Wisdom with Time’ and ‘Spilt Milk’. Again, as the titles imply, both reflect back on the past with some poignancy on the inevitability of change: ‘Things we have thought and done / Must ramble and thin out / Like milk spilt upon a stone’. Lines like these occur in the transitions between interviews, creating a general ambience for the interviews. In addition to the poems, there are also non-diegetic songs. Some of these take us back to the period of the interview, creating affective associations for the audience much as He Xiqun’s memory is stimulated by touching his former master’s face. The actor Chen Jiabin plays Song Weidong, who still works for the Chengfa Group but was born and grew up in Factory 420 in the 1960s and 1970s. His interview ends with him reminiscing about a girlfriend who had a ‘Sachiko hairstyle’ modelled after the heroine of a Japanese TV drama imported after China began to open up to the nonsocialist world. Yamaguchi Momoe singing the 1970s romantic ballad ‘Thank you, Darling’ (Arigato Anata) wells up on the soundtrack. Not long after, Sally Yeh singing ‘My Drunken Life’ (Qianzui Yisheng, 浅醉一生) follows. This song from the 1980s featured in John Woo’s iconic Hong Kong action film focusing on the sense of a passing gangster lifestyle, The Killer (Diexue Shuangxiong, 喋血双雄, 1989), which also circulated in China around the time that Song has been remembering. Another noticeable component of 24 City is a series of at least seventeen tableau shots, some of the interviewees, and some of the people we assume are other Factory 420 workers and their family. These are interspersed through the film, mostly as part of the transitional sequences between interviews. As is implied by the title of her chapter on 24 City, ‘Painterly Still Lives and Photographic Poses’, Celia Mello understands these tableaus as a form of freezing of movement that conveys a resistance to change: ‘Jia’s digital cinema responds to the reality of intense transformations in contemporary China by foregrounding the destruction of old factories and of entire cities, while, at the same time, trying to arrest or delay time through an aesthetic interest in still photography, photographic “poses” and paint-

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erly “still lifes”’ (Mello 2019: 178). Corey Schultz (2014) has a different interpretation, emphasizing that the result of filming people who are asked to hold a pose is not the same as photography itself. He calls these tableau shots ‘moving portraits’, because they do move and they also move us, in various ways that he examines in detail in his essay. Finally, there is also a lot of documentary footage of people at work in the factory, as though Jia wanted to capture this before it disappeared forever. There are shots of old heavy equipment being used repetitively to stamp out bolts made of molten iron. The work seems arduous and safety equipment seems minimal. It is difficult to see this as nostalgic. After all, as the reactions of the younger interviewees like Zhao Gang and Su Na indicate, no one would want to labour in these conditions if they could avoid it. Perhaps, as Hsiu-Chuang Deppman points out, these shots are pauses, a bit like Ozu’s famous ‘pillow shots’ (2014: 191). Referring to Deleuze’s thought on cinema and temporality, she considers them to be pure time images (2014: 199). Certainly, their ambiguity opens up possibilities rather than pointing in a particular direction. How should we understand the combination of such heterogeneous components in the one text? Many scholars concur with Stephanie Hemelryk Donald’s assessment that these elements create ‘estrangement’ that constitutes ‘a provocation to reflect on the conditions and events that produced this outcome’ (2014: 271–72). But if we consider 24 City to be a kind of history, then the combination of these heterogenous components requires some further analysis. As texts, modern histories are conventionally expected to be unified arguments about the past in which documents are used to verify the facts those arguments are based on. Of course, it is true that, since Hayden White’s interventions to put the story back in history (1973), it has been more generally accepted that history is a form of narrative and not simply a catalogue of objective truths, no matter what procedures are undertaken to ensure the accuracy of the facts used. Nevertheless, in the face of this established modern way of thinking about history, we could simply say that 24 City is a film about the past, a memory text, and a supplement to history, but that, strictly speaking, it is not history. Indeed, analysts of the film often assume an opposition between history and memory that supports such a position. For example, Corey Schultz (2016: 266) writes, ‘history is the “official” record, while “memory” is the vernacular’, and analyses the film as a memory text rather than a history text. However, as already demonstrated in the first part of this chapter, another way of looking at the film is as a challenge to the exclusion of memory and experience from history. What are the consequences of allowing the boundaries between history and memory to blur? Does historiography only have one form? Cicero

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(2017: 108) proclaimed Herodotus the ‘father of history’. (In the same passage, he also refers to him as a liar, opening up many other debates over the centuries.) Herodotus’ reputation as a historian rests on the argument that his writing distinguishes legend from fact, is based on research in the form of travels and investigations, and that it presents one person’s coherent argument about the facts. In other words, it contains the seeds of the modern understanding of historiography. Contemporary scholars of historiography frequently include another author as an alternative originator of historiography: the Chinese historian, Sima Qian. Slep Stuurman refers to Herodotus and Sima Qian as the ‘two “fathers of history”’ (2008: 4), and Thomas R. Martin (2009) has written a comparative book about ‘the first great historians of Greece and China’. Herodotus’ work was written between 450 and 425 bce, and it is an account of the origins and events of the recently ended wars between the Greek states and Persia. Sima Qian’s book was written between 100 and 90 bce, and it is a comprehensive Sinocentric history of the world. Like Herodotus, Sima Qian’s reputation rests in part on the fact that his writing about the past is distinguished from legend. The text makes it clear that he also travelled far and wide on fact-finding trips. However, Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian is strikingly different from both Herodotus’ history and modern history. Grant Hardy (1999: 28) writes that Herodotus established the pattern whereby ‘Historical rhetoric in the West is a mode of persuasion, the object of which is to convince the reader that this historian’s account of history reflects the truth’. Given that Sima makes it clear that his text is a filial mission to complete his father’s work, it is likely that he was not the sole author, which compromises the idea of the single historian’s account and attempt to persuade. Furthermore, as Hardy points out, ‘The Shiji offers a multiplicity of voices and perspectives, and to read the text is to enter a confusing world of narratives and counternarratives, differing explanations and corrections, and a variety of literary styles and historiographical approaches. It presents neither a unified view of the past nor a consistent interpretation of what history means’ (1999: 28). Just as Jia Zhangke’s film includes a number of distinct and incommensurable components, so too does Sima Qian’s book consist of heterogenous components. Stephen Durrant (1995: xix) identifies five: Basic Annals (ben ji); Chronological Charts (nian biao); Treatises (shu); Hereditary Households (shi jia); and what he calls ‘Arrayed Traditions’ (lie zhuan), and most others translate as ‘Biographies’. Most of these five components present events and facts such as family trees, organized in chronological order, without comment. Others, such as the Treatises, are analyses and commentaries on various issues and customs. Thomas R. Martin (2009: 20) notes that Sima ‘quoted, often in full, so many documents, poems, philosophical ex-

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cerpts, songs, letters, inscriptions, and other texts that his work amounts almost to an anthology of earlier Chinese thought and literature’. In the face of this heterogenous and puzzling collection of materials, I find myself wondering if Borges’ famous ‘Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge’ (1999: 231) might have been inspired by an encounter with Sima Qian’s text: In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies.

Certainly, Sima Qian’s text has perplexed modern commentators, as the title of Durrant’s book, The Cloudy Mirror (1995), suggests. Foucault claimed this passage from Borges as the inspiration for his book, The Order of Things, stating, ‘In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own’ (1970: xv). In other words, in the face of a text like Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian or Jia Zhangke’s 24 City, it is important to resist seeing it as some sort of failure of historiography – a ‘fake documentary’ as some have dubbed 24 City. Instead, the challenge is to comprehend its difference in its own terms. In other words, what does it mean for Sima Qian to claim his history as a ji, or record, and what does it mean for Jia Zhangke to claim the same term in the title of his film? Echoes of Sima Qian’s gathering of facts into various different categories are not only found in Jia’s film. This method is a well-established part of the Chinese historiographical tradition. For example, the local gazetteer (difangzhi) is a mode that goes back to ancient times but was at its height over the last millennium of imperial history (Dennis 2015) and has continued as the foundation of historiography in the People’s Republic of China (Xue 2010). Here, various categories of information about what has happened year by year in a particular local territory are recorded. Another recent example perhaps is the private Jianchuan Museum Cluster outside Chengdu in Sichuan. Fan Jianchuan’s ‘cluster’ consists of twenty-eight different museums focusing on four different themes of modern Chinese history and culture. Each museum is a category for the gathering and presentation of some of the huge quantity of materials Fan has gathered. Kirk Denton has noted that ‘The museum buildings are not arranged in any way that might suggest a chronology or a coherent narrative of the history of modern China’ (2019: 92). Looking at these seemingly disparate pilings up of information, fact

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and material, can an authorial perspective be detected? In the local gazetteer, that is unlikely. But the impulse is stronger to make inferences on the basis of what is included and how it is presented in a museum that is named after its curator. Because the Records also have an authorial name attached, they have also attracted numerous attempts to deduce Sima Qian’s point of view. In the case of Sima Qian’s work, scholars have also sought out the perspective behind the work. Michael Nylan (1998–1999: 203) has pointed out the limitations of most other commentaries: Studies of Sima Qian have tended to interpret the work of China’s greatest historian from one of two angles… either the studies emphasize the extreme care with which Sima Qian gathered and weighed available evidence in an attempt to convey an objective portrait of the Chinese past, or they stress the intensely personal motivations that prompted Sima Qian’s decision to complete the masterwork begun by his father.

Nylan calls the first approach ‘social scientific’ and questions it, noting that Sima Qian did not ‘hesitate to relate with the novelist’s flourish his long-dead subjects’ innermost thoughts and secret activities’ (1998–1999: 206). She calls the second approach ‘lyric/romantic’ and points out that it rests on a relatively small proportion of a work that may well have had multiple authors (1998–1999: 207). Nylan opposes these tendencies to project modern models back into the ancient past. In her essay, she goes on to propose a completely different understanding of the logic that holds together what seem like entirely disparate components. She argues that Records of the Grand Historian operates according to the religious values of the day (1998–1999: 210), with Sima Qian bringing out the underlying order of the cosmos through his observation of the past but at the same time conveying the apparent disorder of the world through his compilation of heterogenous elements. What of Jia Zhangke’s 24 City? Clearly the ancient religious beliefs that Nylan uses to discover a logic in the heterogeneity of the Records of the Grand Historian do not apply here; Jia’s film and Sima’s book may both be ‘ji’ and ‘records’ of the past, but they do not operate on the same principles. One way of understanding the heterogeneity of 24 City is through the lens of Jia’s insistence on memory as part of history. Even if it is recorded and therefore no longer ephemeral, and even if the triangulation of multiple memories constitutes a kind of verification process, individual memories exceed the established conventions of modern historiography because they remain subjective and affective, two characteristics conventional modern history has attempted to avoid. If memory and experience are to become part of history, then historiography itself must change to accommodate the singularity of each individual’s memory.

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Comparing the composition of Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian and 24 City reveals a similar combination of heterogenous elements brought together, but laid out for the reader or audience in a manner that has a logic and an order. In 24 City, that logic is not religious, but the revelation of the heavy price individuals paid for their role in the execution of the Third Front policy, and the deep emotional impact it had on them and on their descendants, as discussed above. To subsume the interviews that communicate these experiences into a more conventional film, where perhaps voiceover narration, archive clips and so on might be used to produce a unified account in which clips from interviews would support the voiceover, would betray the singularity of the experiences recorded in these interviews and defeat the very purpose of introducing memory into history. In contrast, the components that Jia has chosen to compose 24 City, while heterogenous, all work to enhance our awareness of the singularity of memories and their ability to summon up affect. Poems, songs from the era being remembered, ellipses and the tableaus that Schultz (2014) calls ‘moving portraits’ all not only make space for our own memories but also amplify the affective communication of the various memories we hear and underline the focus on the singularity of individual experience. In light of this logic, the inclusion of scripted documentaries performed by stars is perhaps at first sight the most puzzling component in the film. These scripts, compiled and composed as an outcome of multiple interviews, stand in contrast to the interviews with individuals who recount their unique memories. In this sense, it is understandable that many audience members found it difficult to accept them because they seem to undermine the authenticity of the film. But what is also striking is that others were as moved by them as they were by ‘real’ interviews. Corey Schultz (2014: 273) notes accounts of audiences crying when Zhao Tao, playing the personal shopper Su Na, ends her interview with a statement of her faith that she can earn enough to buy her parents an apartment in 24 City, ‘because I am the daughter of workers’. He goes on to argue that ‘fiction produces real emotion’ (2014: 273) and that ‘these film memories – real and fictional – offer the viewer what Landsberg describes as “prosthetic memory”’ (2014: 276). For Schultz, just as he sees the film as about memory rather than history, he takes these characteristics to indicate that the film is about emotion rather than a ‘history of the veracity of the memory’ (2014: 273). However, it can also be argued that, like the other fictional and fantastic elements of Jia’s films, the scripted interviews blur the line between the historical or documentary and the fictional, underlining the composed quality of all history writing at the same time as they fold memories of multiple, singular subjective experiences into historiography.

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Conclusion This chapter has examined 24 City as a memory project, not to distinguish it from history, but instead to argue that the film’s focus on memory challenges our understanding of history, both in the sense of what happened and also in the sense of how what happened is recounted. The film demonstrates that no account of history is complete without inclusion of the memories of those who went through it, and especially the memories of ordinary people that are usually overlooked. But the film also underlines how the singularity of individual memories resists being subsumed into the rhetoric of conventional modern history with its objective and unified account from a single viewpoint. Therefore, the film develops a different historiographical model in which the singularity of experience is underlined by the heterogeneity of the materials. Even though Jia’s book of the research for the film is titled in English as The Collective Memory of Chinese Working Class (2009), the combination of scripted composite memory interviews and interviews with individuals who went through the experiences they are recounting underlines that collective memory is also derived from the singular experiences of individuals. This argument has drawn on the different meanings and uses of the Chinese character ji (记), which appears in the original title of the film. It can mean ‘memory’, but it can also mean ‘record’, and it is used this way in the title of Sima Qian’s The Records of the Grand Historian, itself a highly heterogenous text whose composition traces the disorder that it finds an underlying order in. Although ji is a relatively common character and there is nothing to indicate that Jia Zhangke was making any intentional link to Sima’s texts, the value of the comparison can be extended further than formal similarities. Commentators have pointed out that Sima Qian produced his text as a private family project and not as part of his or his father’s official job at court (Nienhauser 2015: 462). Jia worked initially as an independent filmmaker who did not submit his films for censorship for as long as he could, and it could be argued he has tried to maintain a distance from both the state and commercial film systems to this day. Furthermore, Sima’s text was produced in an intensely authoritarian era, when his own death sentence, commuted to castration (Nienhauser 2015: 468), demonstrated the extreme risks of criticism. Today’s one-party Chinese state is also an authoritarian state that does not tolerate much dissent. For Sima Qian, constituting most of his text as a compilation of other materials rather than writing in his own voice was relatively politically safe – he could not be blamed for what others had said. Perhaps the same is true for Jia (and for Fan Jianchuan and his

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museum cluster). But Sima also implied judgements by omitting certain individuals and documents. Perhaps Jia’s focus on the experiences of ordinary people rather than party and state leaders or officially recognized experts can be read in a similar way. But in addition to the specific circumstances of Jia’s own time and place, perhaps we should also consider the broader implications of bringing memory into history, as realized in 24 City. By emphasizing the singularity of memory, Jia produces a text that resists the idea of a single and absolute truth of history. At the same time as his own individualist reading of the Maoist era is clear in the narratives he selects and the structure that moves from the memories of the older generation to those of a younger generation, he does not attempt to invalidate the perspectives and memories of his interviewees or the possibility of other understandings. For example, when he asks Hou Lijun about whether her redundancy was a result of policy, and she replies that it was just that the factory needed fewer workers, the answer is allowed to stand and we the audience are left to think it over. In this way, the inclusion of memory in history rather than the segregation of memory from history has the potential to pioneer a more democratic and plural type of historiography. Chris Berry is Professor of Film Studies at King’s College London. In the 1980s, he worked for China Film Import and Export Corporation in Beijing, and his academic research is grounded in work on Chinese-language cinema. His publications include: China on Screen: Cinema and Nation (Columbia University Press and Hong Kong University Press, 2006); Postsocialist Cinema in Post-Mao China: the Cultural Revolution after the Cultural Revolution (Routledge, 2004); Chinese Cinema, 4 vols. (Routledge, 2012); Public Space, Media Space (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record (Hong Kong University Press, 2010); Electronic Elsewheres: Media, Technology, and the Experience of Social Space (University of Minnesota Press, 2010); Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia: What a Difference a Region Makes (Hong Kong University Press, 2009); TV China (Indiana University Press, 2009); Chinese Films in Focus II (British Film Institute, 2008); and Island on the Edge: Taiwan New Cinema and After (Hong Kong University Press, 2005).

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References Andrew, Dudley. 2009. ‘Encounter: Interview with Jia Zhangke’, trans. Jiwei Xiao, Film Quarterly 62(4): 80–83. Assman, Jan. 2008. ‘Communicative and Cultural Memory’, in Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (eds), Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 109–18. Austin, Thomas. 2014. ‘Indexicality and Inter/textuality: 24 City’s Aesthetics and the Politics of Memory’, Screen 55(2): 256–66. Berry, Chris. 2008. ‘Xiao Wu: Watching Time Go By’, in Chinese Films in Focus II. London: BFI, pp. 250–57. Borges, Jorge Luis. 1999. ‘The Analytical Language of John Wilkins’, in Selected Nonfictions, trans. Eliot Weinberger. Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 229–33. Chan, Andrew. 2009. ‘Moving with the Times’, Film Comment 45(2): 40–43. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. 2017. On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, trans. James E.G. Zetzel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dennis, Joseph. 2015. Writing, Publishing and Reading Local Gazetteers in Imperial China, 1100–1700. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Denton, Kirk A. 2019. ‘Can Private Museums Offer Space for Alternative History? The Red Era Series at the Jianchuan Museum Cluster’, in Sebastian Veg (ed.), Popular Memories of the Mao Era: From Critical Debate to Reassessing History. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp. 80–111. Deppman, Hsiu-Chuang. 2014. ‘Reading Docufiction: Jia Zhangke’s 24 City’, Journal of Chinese Cinemas 8(3): 188–208. Donald, Stephanie Hemelryk. 2014. ‘The Poetics of the Real in Jia Zhanke’s 24 City’, Screen 55(2): 267–75. Durrant, Stephen W. 1995. The Cloudy Mirror: Tension and Conflict in the Writings of Sima Qian. Buffalo, NY: State University of New York Press. Foucault, Michel. 1970. The Order of Things: The Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Random House. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1992. On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Hardy, Grant. 1999. Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo: Sima Qian’s Conquest of History. New York: Columbia University Press. Herodotus. 2014. The Histories, trans. Tom Holland. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Jia, Zhangke. 2009. Zhongguo Gongren Fangtanlu: Ershisi Chengji. Jinan: Shandong Huabao Chubanshe.

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______. 2015. ‘Deciphering China Through the Eyes of a Film-Poet: A Conversation with Dudley Andrew, Ouyang Jianghe, Zhai Yongming, Lu Xinyu, and Jia Zhangke’, trans. Alice Shih, in Jia Zhangke Speaks Out: The Chinese Director’s Texts on Film. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, pp. 319–32. Li, Na. 2020. ‘History, Memory and Identity: Oral History in China’, The Oral History Review 47(1): 26–51. Martin, Thomas R. 2009. Herodotus and Sima Qian: The First Great Historians of Greece and China: A Brief History with Documents. London: Palgrave Macmillan. McGrath, Jason. 2008. Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mello, Cecília. 2019. The Cinema of Jia Zhangke: Realism and Memory in Chinese Film. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Meyskens, Covell F. 2020. Mao’s Third Front: The Militarization of Cold War China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miroslav, Vanek. 2013. Around the Globe: Rethinking Oral History with Its Protagonists. Prague: Karolinum Press. MOMA. 2010. ‘Jia Zhangke: A Retrospective’. Retrieved 2 July 2019 from https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/1043?locale=en. Naughton, Barrie. 1988. ‘The Third Front: Defence Industrialization in the Chinese Interior’, The China Quarterly 115: 251–386. Nienhauser, William H. Jr. 2015. ‘Sima Qian and the Shiji’, in Andrew Feldherr and Grant Hardy (eds), The Oxford History of Historical Writing: Volume One: Beginnings to AD 600. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 463–84. Nochimson, Martha P. 2009. ‘Passion for Documentation: An Interview with Jia Zhangke’, New Review of Film and Television Studies 7(4): 411–19. Nylan, Michael. 1998–1999. ‘Sima Qian: A True Historian?’, Early China 23/24: 203–46. Nora, Pierre. 1996–1998. Under the Realm of Memory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. 3 vols. New York: Columbia University Press. Osnos, Evan. 2009. ‘The Long Shot’, The New Yorker [online] 4 May 2009. Retrieved 7 May 2019 from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/ 2009/05/11/the-long-shot. Rayns, Tony. 2010. ‘Factory Records’, Sight and Sound 20(5): 48–49. Schultz, Corey. 2014. ‘Moving Portraits: Portraits in Performance in 24 City’, Screen 55(2): 276–87. ______. 2016. ‘Memories in Performance: Commemoration and the Commemorative Experience in Jia Zhangke’s 24 City’, Film-Philosophy 20: 265–82.

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Sima, Qian. 1993. Records of the Grand Historian, trans. Burton Watson. New York: Columbia University Press. Stuurman, Slep. 2008. ‘Herodotus and Sima Qian: History and the Anthropological Turn in Ancient Greece and Han China’, Journal of World History 19(1): 1–40. Thomson, Alistair. 2008. ‘Oral History and Community History in Britain: Personal and Critical Reflections on Twenty-Five Years of Continuity and Change’, Displacement 36(1): 95–104. Turner, Terence. 1988. ‘History, Myth and Social Consciousness among the Kayapó of Central Brazil’, in Jonathan D. Hill (ed.), Rethinking History and Myth: Indigenous South American Perspectives on the Past. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, pp. 235–81. White, Hayden. 1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wu, Shu-chin. 2011. ‘Time, History and Memory in Jia Zhangke’s 24 City’, Film Criticism 36(1): 3–23. Xiao, Jiwei. 2011. ‘The Quest for Memory: Documentary and Fiction in Jia Zhangke’s Films’, Senses of Cinema 59 [online]. Retrieved 6 June 2019 from http://sensesofcinema.com/2011/feature-articles/the-quest-for-mem ory-documentary-and-fiction-in-jia-zhangke%E2%80%99s-films/. Xue, Susan. 2010. ‘New Local Gazetters from China’, Collection Building 29(3): 110–18. Zuo, Yuhe. 2015. ‘Oral History Studies in Contemporary China’, Journal of Modern Chinese History 9(2): 259–74.

 Part II

FRAMING MEMORIES THROUGH LITERATURE AND THE BODY

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‘Swimming against the Current’ The Mediation of Cultural Memory in the Writings by Christa Wolf and Ding Ling

Yejun Zou

Introduction The commodification of socialist memories in China and Germany has tended to obscure their complex histories of socialist revolutions and everyday life under socialism. In Germany, museums about East German history, culture, and souvenir shops selling symbolic East German cultural products, such as the Ampelmännchen (the little traffic light man, which is the pedestrian signal in East Germany), have become cultural icons of Berlin and, more broadly, of Germany. Yet today the cultural images and products of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) serve to obfuscate its ‘socialist-ness’, reducing it to one niche aspect of the diverse cultural scene of Berlin. A similar dynamic has arisen in China with the flourishing of ‘red tourism’ since the early 2000s,1 which has made former revolutionary base areas, such as Yan’an 延安, Jinggangshan 井冈山, Ruijin 瑞金 and Xibaipo 西柏坡, the key sites upon which officials have projected their narrative of the history of the Communist Revolution, thereby encouraging visitors to develop nostalgia towards the revolutionary past through these same places (Denton 2012: 245).2 Here, the commodification of the Chinese socialist past presents visitors with a particular historical window onto revolutionary sites, even as it often mythologizes the history and legacy of the Chinese Communist Revolution (1945–1950) through reductive narratives.

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What these various lieux de mémoire (Nora 1989) of East German and Chinese socialism reveal is their shared cultural connection, which, however, often obscures the tensions and complexities of socialism itself. By contrast, literary works of the socialist past, and more specifically of the GDR and Chinese Communist Revolution, encourage readers to reflect upon what it means to be a socialist citizen in both the historic and present moment. I therefore set out to show in this chapter that literature, as a creative form of storytelling, invites readers to uncover the multiple (and changeable) ways in which Chinese and German Socialist history have been portrayed, as well as the socialist identities that ostensibly have arisen from them. In his analysis of the GDR literature after the German Reunification in 1991, Holger Helbig (2007: 1–8) outlines four features that characterize the changing literary landscape of East Germany: continued-writing (Weiterschreiben), recovered-writing (Nachschreiben), new-writing (Neuschreiben) and rewriting (Umschreiben). He suggests that prominent former East German writers such as Christa Wolf and Sascha Anderson who continued to write in spite of the political changes unfolding around them belong to the first category (Helbig 2007: 1). However, the new generation of writers, such as Jana Hensel and Thomas Brussig, who grew up in or self-identified with the GDR, exemplify the new-writing of East German literature, while the opening up of various archives has led to the recovered-writing of GDR literature and history (Helbig 2007; Robinson 2011). Helbig’s first three categories thus encompass the modes of writing specific to the former GDR in post-unified German culture. His final category of rewriting, though, refers not only to the shifting reception of literary works written in the GDR, but to the wider collective process of rewriting the GDR literature that, he suggests, has been mobilized by the many individual readings of East German literature. Thus, Helbig’s conceptualization of rewriting suggests that there is always a dialectical relationship between reader and writer (2007: 7–8). Building upon Helbig (2007), I propose that today’s readers of literature about the socialist past become, through what might be called a dialectics of storytelling, active producers of a new kind of memory that simultaneously extends and transcends the meaning of the history of socialism. Although Helbig’s analysis focuses upon German literature, the relational dynamics between reader and writer exhibited in his concept of rewriting also can be applied to Chinese socialist literature that has its own history of shifting meanings.3 I draw upon Helbig’s concept of rewriting here as an interpretative tool for examining the socialist realist novels Der geteilte Himmel (1963)4 by the former East German woman writer Christa Wolf (1929–2011) and The Sun Shines Over the Sanggan River 太阳照在桑干河上 (1948) by the Chinese woman writer Ding Ling 丁玲 (1904–1986).

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Ding Ling entered the Chinese literary scene in the 1920s with stories exploring figures of ‘new womanhood’, feminine psychology and sexuality. After joining the communist party in 1932, she brought her feminist literary perspective into productive tension and interaction with socialist narratives of class and collectivity. While Ding Ling’s work moves from exploring the inner perspective of individuals to a more socialist realist style, focusing on the impact of the collective on the individual, Christa Wolf’s literary trajectory seems to flow in the opposite direction. Christa Wolf joined the Socialist Unity Party in 1949 and established her literary reputation in the 1960s with her early socialist realist novels, while later developing a mode of experimental semi-autobiographical narration, termed subjective authenticity, which enabled her to explore the gendered relationship between self and history. Despite their differing literary trajectories and cultural backgrounds, both authors offer insights into the making of narratives about life under socialism, albeit within two very different national settings. Their depictions of memories of the socialist past transcend national boundaries and form an internationalist language of memories in socialist states. Through my comparison of their works, I show how works of literature can mediate collective memories of historical events, such that writers become both producers and receivers of the memories they create. I start by outlining the complexities and contradictions found within the literary principles of socialist realism, before turning to a discussion of how both authors shaped literary discussions of socialist realism in their respective national contexts. I then turn to a detailed textual analysis of these novels in order to show that they comprise an innovative form of storytelling and art, which challenges the understanding of socialist realist novels as reductive and formulaic literary forms. In the conclusion, I illustrate how rereading, and thereby rewriting, German and Chinese socialist realist novels in the present can diversify and enrich our understandings not only of the past of socialism, but of how it continues to unfold as a cultural memory (sensu Assmann 2008) that stretches across historical and geopolitical borders.

Complexity and Contradiction in Socialist Realism Socialist realist writings transmit imagined memories of the socialist past that are characteristically both ‘socialist’ and ‘realist’ (Brecht 1967: 547– 49); yet, the ‘reality’ depicted in this kind of literature often gives rise to tensions and contradictions. The questions, then, arise: to what extent is any narration ‘realistic’ and able to speak to the kinds of lives experienced under socialist regimes? In what ways do socialist realist writings construct

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a collective socialist identity, upon which the memories of this historical period are projected? And how does the rereading of these texts formulate and rewrite (sensu Helbig 2007) a new cultural memory of the socialist past? The complexity and diversity of socialist realist writings are in part a product of the national contexts in which they emerged. Literary exchanges between socialist countries and the varying interpretations of socialist realism within them have given rise to their distinctive ways of approaching the creation and production of socialist writing. In part, the definition of socialist realism sanctioned by the Soviet officials in the 1930s provoked debates on its literary principles, which later affected not only the writing styles of East German and Chinese writers and intellectuals, as well as the contents of their works, but altered the literary landscape of socialist writing in these two countries. To examine the literary debates on socialist realism in East Germany and China, then, one needs to consider Soviet approaches to socialist realist writing. At the first All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, Andrei Zhdanov (1934: 15–26) defined the principle of Soviet literature as socialist realism, which he described as ‘a truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development. At the same time, truthfulness and historical concreteness of artistic representation of reality must (or should) be combined with the task of ideologically remaking and training the labouring people in the spirit of socialism’ (cited in Chung 1996: x). For Zhdanov, the ‘truthful, historically concrete representation of reality’ is not the objective representation of what reality actually is, but rather what reality ought to be. Socialist realist novels thus assume the highly political task of educating the labouring people. These novels are not primarily written for the mere pleasure of the readers; rather, they ideally are didactic works that serve to encourage the masses to commit themselves to the task of constructing a socialist society. Here, the rigidity of the Zhdanovian definition of socialist realism lies in its depiction of a typified reality – the reality of what life under socialism ought to be, which prevents other possibilities from emerging in literary works, not least in ‘reality’ itself. The definition of socialist realism by Zhdanov limits considerably the extent to which writers and artists are able to explore aesthetic and literary creativity. Socialist realist novels exhibit a form of positivistic thinking that runs in parallel with the optimistic and teleological atmospheres mobilized within the political circles of socialist countries, which, in turn, are transcribed into literary practices.5 The inseparability of politics and literature during this period is a clear reminder that any given reading of socialist realist literature should be analysed in conjunction with its historical moment. This is a literary genre that is deeply set in a particular political moment, which, in spite of its rigidity, proposes the construction and development of

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socialism, nationally and internationally. Seen in this light, socialist realism is both a form of storytelling and a creative art that strives to bring about the revolutionary emancipation of all human beings. Just as the political system and socialist ideology in the Soviet Union shaped other socialist countries and regions, the officially supported Soviet socialist realist novels had a huge influence across the socialist bloc, which has not only provoked transnational debates on the application of this principle to specific national contexts, but has also encouraged literary interaction with its canonical texts. For instance, Maxim Gorky’s Mother, written in 1906, narrates a story about factory workers that was praised in the 1930s by Soviet functionaries for exemplifying the success of socialist realist novels. It is also the same novel on which Brecht’s theatrical work Die Mutter: Leben der Revolutionärin Pelagea Wlassowa aus Twer (1932) was based. Similarly, Zhou Libo’s Hurricane (1948) can be regarded as an intertext of Mikhail Sholokhov’s Virgin Soil Upturned (1935) – while the former depicts the progressing land reform in China, the latter, set in the context of the Soviet Union, demonstrates what the accomplished land reform should look like (Volland 2017: 39–61). Literary attempts as such illustrate leftist writers’ endeavours to form a type of transnational socialist literature that speaks both for the commonality of socialism on the one hand and the specificity of localized contexts on the other. In spite of the heavy influence of the Soviet model of socialist realism on both the GDR and China, it is problematic to assume that authors of both countries fully adopted socialist realism as defined by the Soviet intellectuals. While the aforementioned examples of transnational intertextuality demonstrate something of the reception of the Soviet definition of socialist realism within the socialist bloc, uncertainty about this literary principle gave rise to discussions and debates that still form a crucial part of how Zhdanov’s view of socialist realism is being envisioned to this day, through questions such as: can socialist realism illustrate the struggles in socialist revolution or the tasks of socialist construction for all socialist nations? Should socialist realism be adapted or recreated in different localized contexts? Does the alleged reality of socialism demonstrate what reality really is in different socialist states? In other words, tensions between the international and the local still underpin the core of these debates. Each country had its own discussions about what socialist realism should look like and how it should relate to its national literary traditions. It is against this background that German and Chinese leftist writers joined the debates over the search for their own versions of ‘socialist realism’ and participated in a collective project of literary experimentation that, in turn, shaped the diversity and multiplicity of socialist realism as a literary genre in the socialist bloc. In this regard, it is, as Dennis Tate (1988) argues,

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misleading to examine socialist realism in the GDR schematically, in terms of how far German socialist realist novels conform to or deviate from the Soviet model. Yet it is equally erroneous to assume that the development of socialist realism in the GDR was a smooth and harmonious process (Buehler 1984, Dobrenko and Jonsson-Skradol 2018). As Tate (1988: 60) notes, socialist realism in the GDR was a complex literary phenomenon, influenced on the one hand by exiles, such as Bertolt Brecht, Anna Seghers and Johannes Becher in the 1930s, who were critical of the Soviet interpretation of socialist realism as proposed by Zhdanov in 1934, and yet agreed that compromises with Soviet officials should nevertheless be made. On the other hand, the development of socialist realist literature in the GDR was intertwined with the struggle between the national and international, especially after the German division in 1945. Debates amongst writers and intellectuals were focused upon whether socialist realism should be a contribution to a developing national literature or a product of the newly established state that aspires to socialist ideals beyond national boundaries. These many different types of debates thus complicate the interpretation and literary practices of socialist realism in East Germany (Tate 1988: 61). In the Chinese context, the production of socialist realist writings reached its climax in the 1950s – most discussions on socialist realist literature also took place during this time. These debates were furthermore impacted by the large volume of European literature being translated into Chinese in the late 1940s, including nineteenth-century Russian and French critical realist works such as the writings of Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky, Gustave Flaubert and Émile Zola, which allowed Chinese writers to explore alternative narrative techniques for illustrating ‘realism’ from a socialist perspective (Hong 2007). Apart from the influence of these translated works, Soviet exemplars of socialist realist novels played a significant role in shaping the Chinese literary scene for decades; yet, the Soviet literary guideline did not remain unchallenged. While critics such as Zhou Yang and Shao Quanlin followed the Soviet guideline rigidly and sought to apply the doctrine of socialist realism directly in Chinese literature, writers such as Hu Feng and Feng Xuefeng, influenced by Lu Xun and his critical thinking, were reluctant to adopt the Soviet method in creating socialist realist writings. Instead, these writers placed their emphasis on artistic freedom and the autonomy of writers in the writing of socialist realist novels, which is also the cause that led to their condemnation and punishment in the late 1950s. In spite of these disagreements and struggles, Chinese writers shared the view that the relation between politics and literature should be reciprocal – in other words, they dismissed the idea of l’art pour l’art (Hong 2007). They all strove to bring forth a kind of socialist writing that would reveal socialist ideals with local characteristics, in particular through their use of language

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and thematic content, all of which was meant to speak to the reality of the Chinese revolution. The debates over the Soviet model of socialist realism in the GDR and China exemplify the struggle to participate in an international literary project on the one hand and the endeavour to uphold localized particularities in literary creation on the other. I suggest that the complexity of socialist realist writings within specific national contexts and in the wider international socialist outlook is what makes this genre both diverse and ambivalent. Rather than a monolithic form of writing filled with highly political content, socialist realism is a collection of writings that encompass a wide range of literary techniques and different national specificities, which, taken together, reveal its own internal, and indeed political, contradictions. As Volland (2017: 41) suggests, these writings ‘were embedded within a revolutionary geospatial imagination, a continuous and contiguous literary space that spanned the socialist world’. Although Ding Ling and Wolf found themselves in different stages of the discussions over socialist realism, they encountered similar ambivalences and struggles in their efforts to shape socialist realist writings in their respective nations. Faced with these challenges and restrictions, they each sought to approach life and experience under socialist regimes in their literary works through a critical lens. At the same time, they upheld the socialist ideal, as can be seen in the future-oriented and optimistic endings of their novels. The glorified yet critical form of storytelling about life under socialist regimes in both authors’ writings reveals their hope in socialism – with the view that the road toward socialism is always full of thorns, but the ability of socialist citizens, or the proletariat, to overcome these struggles will eventually lead to the arrival of socialism.

Writing, Remembering and the Socialist Family in Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel (1963) In her own account of her writings in the late 1960s, Wolf states, ‘[r]emembering – like writing – means swimming against the stream: against the apparently natural stream of forgetting. It is movement, exertion’ (Wolf 1968: 32). For Wolf, memory should not be treated as something that is static, like a medallion that functions only as a token reminder of past events; instead, Wolf believes that memory can only be activated through revisiting and reworking fragments of memories (Wolf 1968: 31). This understanding of memory resonates with Benoît Vermander’s study of the layers and traces of an artist’s memory in this volume. In particular, the process of writing, according to Wolf, is a form of activating and thus preserving memories ‘because there is a lot you have to forget, a lot you have to rethink and

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reinterpret before you can present yourself to advantage on each and every occasion’ (Wolf 1968: 31). Although Wolf articulated her view of the relationship between writing and memory in the late 1960s, early traces of this approach can already be seen in her socialist realist novels from the early 1960s. Drawing on Helbig’s concept of rewriting, I thus suggest that Wolf’s view of writingcum-remembering allows a shifting memory of life under the GDR to emerge for the author and her readership. This shifting memory surfaces when reexamining the textual connections that Wolf makes to the socialist past, which throw light on the diversified, fragmented and contested memory of the GDR as a socialist state. It is this re-emergence of a new kind of memory and storytelling narrative of the socialist past in East Germany that I seek to scrutinize in Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel (1963). In particular, I focus on the complexity of Wolf’s depictions of the ‘socialist family’. I propose that by reconsidering this particular depiction of the collective in socialist states, it is possible to reconstruct a rewriting of the reconciliation between the collective and the individual under the German socialist regime. Der geteilte Himmel narrates a love story between the female protagonist Rita Seidel and Manfred Herrfurth, her lover who is ten years older than her. Through this narrative, Wolf presents a fictional response to Germany’s National Socialist past, postwar division, and the construction of the Berlin Wall. The novel is primarily concerned with the theme of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or coming to terms with the National Socialist past, on the one hand, and the construction of socialism in the GDR, as well as the further division – with the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 – of Germany on the other. But the novel is also partly a result of the Bitterfelder Weg – the collaborative work between writers and workers that took place in the GDR during the 1960s. Following the Bitterfeld Conference in 1959, intellectuals were encouraged to participate in and experience the life of workers while depicting the problems that emerged in working environments, just as workers were encouraged to create their own literary pieces at this time (Chiarloni 1985). In response to the Bitterfelder Weg, Wolf completed practical training in the Waggonwerk Ammendorf between 1960 and 1961, which gave her the chance to incorporate her own experience of working in a railway factory into a fictional narrative. The structure of the novel follows a non-linear and non-chronological narration with flashbacks and frequent shifts between a third-person and a first-person narrative perspective. The novel comprises four interwoven layers of temporality: the period between the summer of 1959 and October 1961 traces the beginning and end of the love story between Rita Seidel and Manfred Herrfurth; the time between the end of August and the beginning of November in 1961 encompasses Rita’s suicidal attempt and her

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subsequent reflection on her relationship with Manfred; then the National Socialist past and the Second World War are periodically evoked, providing the background history of the Nazi generation like Manfred’s parents and Rolf Meternagel, while contrasting this with the period of newly established socialism with which Rita identifies herself more than Manfred is able to; lastly, the novel alludes to the division of Germany after the Second World War, and especially to life in Soviet-occupied Germany. The fragmented and complex temporality and the shifting narrative perspectives in the novel create a montage-like effect, which relies on readers to fill in the gaps and to combine ‘the shifting narratives – both authorial and personal – with various literary characters’ (Nagelschmidt and Schnell 2016: 76).6 These narrative techniques later become a signatory style of Wolf’s writing: while Der geteilte Himmel represents one of her early attempts to experiment with different narrative techniques, her later work such as Nachdenken über Christa T. (1968) exemplifies her mastery of this montage-style of narration but with a more overt exploration of the inner perspectives of characters. In the novel, the female protagonist Rita Seidel, after weathering numerous struggles, strengthens her commitment to the construction of socialism and determines to stay in the GDR, while her lover Manfred Herrfurth, from whom Rita separates, feels isolated from the East German academic system and never returns to East Berlin after his conference trip to West Berlin towards the end of the novel. After recovering from a nearly fatal accident, Rita becomes optimistic and ready for a new beginning after her separation from Manfred. The epilogue of the novel outlines the scene Rita sees on the street at dusk: thousands of actions are carried out every night even if they only produce a bowl of soup, a warm stove, a little song for the children. Sometimes a man’s eyes will follow his wife as she leaves the room with the dishes, and she doesn’t notice how surprised and grateful he looks. Sometimes a woman will stroke a man’s shoulder. She hasn’t done that in a long time, but at the right moments she can feel: this is what he needs. (Der geteilte Himmel, hereafter GH, 203)7

This depiction emphasizes the cosy and warm atmosphere of the family – the heart-warming soup, the gentle song for children, and the loving interaction between wife and husband – which captures Rita’s view of a perfect family in a socialist state and yet stands in stark contrast to her failed relationship with Manfred. As Karin McPherson (1995: 25–26) writes, Rita is portrayed as an outsider looking in on all of these happy scenarios, since this is what she lacks but longs for. Yet, at the same time, Rita is also the receiver of this happiness, because after witnessing the delightful familial interaction, ‘[s]he is not afraid that she might not get her share of it [endless amount of the kindness]’ (GH, 203). For McPherson (1995: 26), Rita’s ‘faith that she will

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have her share in this source of friendliness has almost a hint of resignation’, because becoming part of the collective is ‘the price to be paid for peaceful living’. Here, McPherson interprets the friendly and happy scene as Rita’s inevitable compromise of allowing herself to be assimilated into the collective, which, in contrast to Manfred’s choice of maintaining his ‘individuality’ – and particularly without the restriction of the Wall in the capitalist West – seems to ‘put an element of doubt on the optimistic conclusion’ (McPherson 1995: 26). This kind of reading also reveals the tensions and contradictions that underpin socialist realist storytellings of revolutionary emancipation. Yet, while McPherson outlines Rita’s conflicted sentiments toward the new stage in the construction of German socialism, her interpretation overlooks Wolf’s own genuine yet short-lived optimism towards the future of socialism at the time of writing Der geteilte Himmel: ‘We had the feeling that reality is moving, in the long run, in the same direction as our own [vision]. And we can, together with people from the economic world, leverage this progressive direction with our scientific expertise’ (Wolf 2001: 87).8 Wolf articulated this optimistic statement when recalling the years between 1961 and 1965, during which her tentatively positive attitude towards the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands) was gradually replaced by disillusionment, especially after its 11th Plenary in 1965 where censorship was further intensified and restrictions on literary and artistic productions were tightened. The perfect image of family in the epilogue signifies Rita’s hope for experiencing this type of family life due to her lack of it. But while the novel’s ending suggests an idealized family image, other families in Wolf’s novel seem to be dysfunctional: Rita’s father, for instance, went missing during the war and her mother later became sick, leaving to Rita the responsibility of taking care of the family (GH, 9). However, Manfred’s family is even more problematic than Rita’s. Manfred, who witnesses his parents’ transition from serving the National Socialist regime, which had bourgeois attributes, to embracing the new socialist order, becomes indifferent and even develops a sense of resentment towards his parents on account of their opportunism and lack of credibility. The first time Manfred expresses his explicit hatred of his parents, he says, ‘I dreamed my father raised his glass to me. And – in my dream! – I grabbed all the plates and glasses I could get my hands on and threw them at the wall’ (GH, 12). This violent scene, when compared with the cosy family scene observed by Rita in the epilogue, creates a stark contrast between the protagonists that foreshadows their failed relationship: while Rita maintains an optimistic view of family life in socialist states, Manfred, by contrast, is eager to break away from his own family. Yet Manfred concludes that the reason Rita fails to comprehend his own indifference is that she does not have the experience that his own generation

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went through (GH, 42). Manfred sees himself as the ‘broken generation’ and suggests that ‘we’ve all grown up without parents’ (GH, 13). Scholars (McPherson 1995, Hell 1997, Kuhn 1988) regard the ‘we’ here as signalling Manfred’s – and Wolf’s – own generation, whose parents were absent during their childhood. This interpretation accentuates the generation gap between Rita and Manfred, accounting for their separation and different ways of dealing with the past; however, Rita, as seen in her familial situation, also grows up in the absence of parents. In this regard, the ‘we’ here does not simply symbolize the generation who grows up in the absence of their parents, but rather refers to those whose parents, due to the Second World War, were ‘physically and mentally deformed’, and whose ‘function as a role model has either got lost or been forfeited over the years’ (Nagelschmidt and Schnell 2016: 64). While Rita, in a political as well as a metaphorical sense, finds a parent substitute – Rolf Meternagel, a committed socialist who went through the Second World War – to compensate for her parents’ inability to act as role models and provide guidance for leading a life in the GDR, Manfred, by contrast, is not capable of finding this kind of figure to guide him through the process of coming to terms with his own and his parents’ past (Nagelschmidt and Schnell 2016: 64). The two seemingly incompatible attitudes adopted by Manfred and Rita towards the ‘family’ reveal the conflicted nature of traditional German storytelling about family relations. Although the dysfunctional family is a desirable feature of the socialist realist narrative, it does not fit with the more conventional view that familial relations are based on kinship connections. Still, readers who empathetically identify with the literary manifestation of these family tensions can be moved by socialist realist writings that jog their own memories of the history of socialism in the GDR. What socialist realist literature, such as Wolf’s Der geteilte Himmel, thus sets out to do is to invite readers to ‘rewrite’, in Helbig’s (2007) sense of the term, their own memories, histories of familial interaction, and tensions in the socialist context – and to thus empathetically identify not only with Wolf’s characters but with the larger project and transformative goals of socialist realist writing.

Land Reform and the Landlord in Ding Ling’s Sanggan River (1948) In the early 1940s, writers and artists in Yan’an were encouraged to experiment with various narrative techniques, exploring both negative and positive aspects of the revolution, but they needed to stay within the political framework outlined by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). These literary debates were settled shortly after Mao’s seminal report ‘Talk at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Arts’ (1942), which endorsed optimistic tones over negative depictions in literary narration and asserted positive

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literary representation as the only means for depicting life and experience in the revolutionary base areas. Despite their different opinions on narrative techniques and tones, both the CCP officials and leftist writers agreed that literature and the arts possessed a significant role in disseminating socialist ideals to the masses – the workers, peasants, and soldiers – as well as developing class-awareness.9 As Mao (1942) states, writers and artists should ensure that ‘literature and art fit well into the whole revolutionary machine as a component part, that they operate as powerful weapons for uniting and educating the people and for attacking and destroying the enemy, and that they help the people fight the enemy with one heart and one mind’. In a similar vein, Ding Ling acknowledged the difficulty of introducing political organization and even propaganda amongst the peasants. Reflecting on her life during the late 1940s, Ding Ling (1955: 416) insists on the importance of writing about the peasants’ struggles and maintains that ‘it is not an easy task to provoke the peasants’ awareness and to form a solidarity amongst themselves; this is not only a matter of propaganda, especially in the atmosphere of wartime’. For Ding Ling, socialist literary writings should speak true to the struggles faced by both peasants and communists. She did not therefore consider that politics was imposed onto literature and the arts in the 1940s in a way that led exclusively to the political repression of artists and, indeed, of their autonomy. Instead, she envisioned a reciprocal relationship between politics and literature that would encompass not only the revolutionary imaginings of writers and artists, but their full participation in a project that promised an emancipatory and humanistic future. Ding Ling thus invites contemporary readers to reread and rewrite China’s socialist past by empathetically identifying with the characters in her novels. Through her stories of China’s socialist history and its revolutionary experiences, Ding Ling further encourages her readers to develop imaginative empathy for the social, public or ‘collective’ memory of China (Halbwachs 1925; see also Assmann 2008: 109) and to envision this as a distinct form of socialist identity. Ding Ling’s novel The Sun Shines Over the Sanggan River (1948) was based on her own participation in China’s land reform in three villages from 1946 to 1947. This experience, in part, led to her literary shift from depicting urban intellectual revolutionary passions and imagination to narrating a complex image of peasant life and the challenges of land reform. Her story illustrates how an entire village undergoes a political transformation from the start to the end of the land reform and she introduces over forty characters to accomplish this. Each character has his or her own story, struggles and sufferings, such that the novel unfolds through a narrative perspective which avoids a single clear focus on any particular type of character. This allows a dynamic picture of the land reform to emerge. The plot traces how

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the villagers of Nuanshuitun village attempt to establish land reform on their own, and yet are unable to identify their ‘arch-enemy landlord’ who should be the target of criticism. Towards the end of the novel, the villagers, with the help of the communists, decide that the landlord Qian Wengui should be the one to be criticized. Qian is shown to have manipulated the villagers in subtle ways that the peasants are not able to articulate but which they all suffered from, to various degrees, under his exploitation. After condemning and punishing Qian during organizational meetings, the land redistribution goes more smoothly, and as the land reform in Nuanshuitun village is accomplished, the communists set off to the next village. The novel thus has something of an open ending that hints at the promising future outlook of both Nuanshuitun village and the next village that is about to go through its own supposedly successful land reform. The land reform started in 1946, following Liu Shaoqi’s Instructions on the Land Issues, which outlined the CCP’s new policy on the distribution of lands. During the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance (1937–1945), the CCP’s policy on the land issue in revolutionary base areas was primarily jianzu jianxi 减租减息 (a reduction on the rent of lands and on interests of loans). When the war ended, tenant peasants urgently hoped to possess their own lands, instead of working for landlords; facing the peasants’ demands, the CCP shifted their main policy to gengzhe you qitian 耕者有其田 (whoever farms should possess their own lands) (Liu 1946). However, the process of the land reform, as Feuerwerker (1998: 127) notes, ‘was not just a matter of redistributing land and material possessions but, as the novel repeatedly emphasizes, a process also of fanshen 翻身, a “turning over”, a literal “revolution” in one’s being and self-perception’. In other words, the struggles of land reform were meant to overturn the social hierarchies that led to material inequalities. The CCP wanted peasants to become more aware of their oppression and to develop class-consciousness through the struggles orchestrated during the land reform. Thus, the land reform was designed to unfold as a process of self-transformation among the peasants who, for the first time, would find themselves no longer oppressed by their exploitative landlords. In Sanggan River, this overturning of the peasants’ oppression is achieved by condemning the landlord Qian and participating in the act of suku 诉苦 (recalling or speaking bitterness). Thus in chapter fifty, Qian wears a high paper hat and is cursed and beaten by the villagers:10 ‘At this time, Qian crawls up again, kneeling on the floor and kowtowing to the villagers; his right eye is beaten until it swells, making his eyes appear even smaller. His lips are broken, smeared with blood and dirt; his dirty moustache droops down, what a shabby look’ (Sanggan River, hereafter SGR, 218). This scene in Ding Ling’s novel attracted significant attention in the earlier scholarly

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discussions of her socialist realist writings, and in discussions about the representations of the violence and politics of the CCP more generally (Wang 2004, Feuerwerker 1982, Liu and Lin 2007). These discussions focus upon how the landlord Qian Wengui weathers the struggles between Marxist theory and practice, while Ding Ling’s literary representation masks the efforts that were undertaken to falsely construct enemies in the Chinese revolution. However, recent scholarship suggests that this interpretation of Qian Wengui is not only narrow, but pivots around the political pressures and constraints imposed onto literary creativity, which in turn fails to capture Ding Ling’s emphasis on the roles of peasants in the Chinese revolution and her own revolutionary imagination. As Yan Haiping (2006: 232) observes, ‘through the prism bodied and troped by the “arch-class enemy” Qian Wengui, Sanggan River discerns and illuminates another “enemy” that the villagers of Warm Springs [Nuanshuitun] must confront and work through’. The other ‘enemy’, in Yan’s analysis, is the bioethnic relationship – or the kind of relationship determined by kinship and bioethnic inheritance – that dominates the hierarchical relationship between the peasants and the landlord. Qian is not the kind of malicious landlord who gains his wealth through extreme exploitation of the peasants. Instead, he benefits as best he can from manipulating relationships within different social systems. Readers find that Qian always has a way to get along with the baozhang 保长 (officials under the Nationalist regime) or the officials of the Japanese regime, while he urges his son to join the army under the CCP and lets his daughter marry the security official in the village (SGR, 6). Everyone thus ‘hides from him and fears to be disliked by him, as he will do harm to you from an invisible place’ (SGR, 6). According to Feuerwerker (1982: 124–25), the novel, and in particular the depiction of Qian, ‘meticulously establishes the bonds created by blood, property, custom, and power, because the complex human network that is formed by them defines each person’s place in the world’. Qian thus becomes a symbol of the struggles that peasants should confront and overcome in the process of their own class-awakening – the struggles to break away from their entangled relationships of kin-defined networks in rural China and the fear and anxiety that come with it. The endeavour to explore these ambivalent networks in peasant life lies at the core of Ding Ling’s Sanggan River, which resonates with Mao’s (1941) view that the Chinese revolution is in its essence a peasants’ revolution and that the question of the peasantry should be regarded as the basic question of the revolution. But the depiction of Qian as the ‘arch-class enemy’ causes the CCP official Zhou Yang’s unease; he criticizes Ding Ling’s depiction as a sign of her sympathy toward landlords and rich peasants (Ding 1956). For Zhou Yang, the image of Qian is not typified enough to agitate the peasants’ hatred

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against the landlords. However, from Ding Ling’s perspective, the character Qian represents the most common and typified landlord that she had encountered during her participation in the land reforms. When Ding Ling recalled the writing process of the landlord in 1952, she maintained that she at first ‘thought of writing a malicious bureaucratic landlord, because this character would stand out in the novel, leaving the novel to be more lively’, but decided nonetheless to write a ‘silent but evil landlord’, because, in her own experience, ‘this is the most common type of landlord who rules the entire village on a political level, while those malicious landlords who rape women are not often seen’ (Ding 1952). These divergent opinions on the ‘typified’ landlord demonstrate the rupture between Ding Ling and the CCP officials: while Zhou Yang upholds the Soviet model as the basis of Chinese socialist realism and understands what reality ‘ought to be’, Ding Ling, by contrast, demonstrates through her own experience of land reform and peasant life what reality ‘actually is’. Although Ding Ling did not portray Qian as the kind of landlord sanctioned by Zhou Yang, she incorporated, nevertheless, a more ‘typified’ landlord through an intertextual reference in her novel. In Sanggan River, the peasant Gu Yong’s eldest daughter went to Ping’an County to watch the performance of an opera and ‘praised the play as so good [that] a lot of the audience cried’ (SGR, 10–11). Although the title of the opera is not directly mentioned in Ding Ling’s novel, the plot and time references imply that it ought to be The White-Haired Girl.11 The narrator continues: ‘A woman who is their [the Gu’s daughters’] neighbour cried the most after watching the performance; her life is similar to that of the play, as she was also sold in this way [to be a maid]’ (SGR, 11). Here, the suffering of the anonymous woman is analogous to that of the female protagonist Xi’er in the opera – both oppressed by the malicious landlord. The intertextual link in this case illuminates Ding Ling’s awareness of villain-like landlords. This awareness, and perhaps even acknowledgement of villain-like landlords, is also evidenced in her characters’ empathetic attitude towards the sufferings of Xi’er, as they very quickly develop hatred toward the landlord in the opera: ‘on the way home, everyone was strongly criticizing the landlord’s son in the opera’ (SGR, 11) (Yan 2017: 266–84). Feuerwerker (1982: 139) suggests that the emotional response of the villagers ‘comes from the empathetic recognition that there on the stage is something finally and truly “about us”, about our actual experiences’. While Feuerwerker’s analysis illuminates how an onstage performance allows the peasants to recognize their own experiences within it, for Ding Ling, this type of ‘actual experience’ does not in fact realistically reflect the peasants’ everyday experiences. Ding Ling, then, does not consider the reactions of Gu’s daughter to be a reflection of actual peasant experience, but rather a technique for imparting the novel with a ‘more lively’

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atmosphere. Through this literary device, she stirs up the emotions of her readers and agitates their hatred. Emotional provocation, then, does occur in Ding Ling’s novel and forms an important part of the land reform; yet, this is not the aspect of Ding Ling’s work that she herself regards as revealing the peasants’ actual experiences of ‘the most common type of landlords’. Ding Ling’s effort to bring to the fore the complexity of land reform is built upon her own revolutionary vision, in which the revolution is filled with tensions, ambivalence and contradictions. She offers a detailed examination of what reality is not only through this complex picture of the revolution, but also through her own long process of writing, rewriting and publishing literary works. Her socialist realist storytelling of the tensions in the communist revolution in China is therefore meant to contribute to China’s public or collective memory of the social gains made through revolutionary acts. Owing to the popularity of her work and the literary genre of socialist realism, Ding Ling manages to draw contemporary readers into a process of rewriting, in Helbig’s (2007) sense, which enables them to empathetically identify with her own memories of the past. It is through this type of storytelling that history and memory are rewritten and transformed by Ding Ling and her readership time and again.

Conclusion: Configuring the Cultural Memory of Socialist Identity ‘Fictions’, Astrid Erll (2008: 389) reminds us, ‘possess the potential to generate and mould images of the past which will be retained by whole generations’ (emphasis my own). Yet, the ‘rhetoric of collective memory’ adopted by different storytellers does not suffice to turn literature into a medium of ‘cultural memory’, which can ‘create and mould collective images of the past’ (Erll 2008: 390). Rather, it is the ‘phenomena within, between, and around those media which have the power to produce and shape cultural memory’ (ibid., emphasis in the original). In other words, the production of literary works (or some kind of storytelling) is the prerequisite for making cultural memory, while the institutionalization and reception of literature play a pivotal role in shaping its contours. Seen in this light, the configuration of cultural memory is deeply connected to the dialectical relationships between storytellers and the readers/audience of their storytelling. While my analysis of both Ding Ling and Christa Wolf’s socialist writings is concerned with narrative strategies and thematic concerns, or what Erll calls ‘the rhetoric of collective memory’ on the ‘intra-medial’ level (2008: 390, emphasis in the original), it is important to outline the role of the social context and that of the readers/audience in the making of the cultural memory. In Erll’s conception of cultural memory, the ‘pluri-medial networks’, or ‘the collective contexts [constituted by] advertisements, comments, discus-

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sions and controversies’, could turn the potentialities of memory-making literature into actualities (2008: 396, emphasis in the original). Here, Erll’s understanding of cultural memory foregrounds the role of the sociohistorical contexts of memory-making media, which chimes with Jan Assmann’s (2008) discussion of the distinction between the notion of ‘collective memory’, as developed by Maurice Halbwachs (1925), and that of ‘cultural memory’. Assmann redefines Halbwachs’ ‘collective memory’ as ‘communicative memory’, which is a form of memory situated within the temporal frame of the recent past and disseminated through informal traditions and genres of everyday communication (2008: 117). For Assmann, communicative memory is non-institutional and its transmission is thereby limited by temporal and sociohistorical circumstances; cultural memory, by contrast, demonstrates a form of memory in the form of mythical history articulated through institutionalized and formalized languages (ibid.). Assmann suggests that it is cultural memory, rather than communicative memory, that shapes, stabilizes and shifts the collective memory with regards to the configuration of a collective identity, both on the personal and cultural level (ibid.). At the same time, Assmann cautions against the rigid demarcation of these two types of memories, as they often shift and overlap with each other (2008: 113). The comparison of Wolf’s storytelling of familial relations in the GDR and Ding Ling’s storytelling of the land reform in Chinese revolution illustrates the interaction between communicative memory and cultural memory. While their literary works, at the time of writing, document the recent past and thereby encapsulate the communicative memory of the socialist past, the reception and discussion of these socialist realist novels, in turn, form the cultural memory of socialism in their respective national contexts. More importantly, a comparative reading of these two novels shows the particular ways in which the process of memory-making is determined and shifted by sociohistorical contexts. In the present context, the formation of the cultural memory of a socialist past and the construction of a socialist identity differ vastly in Germany and China. The year 2020 marks the thirtieth year of the German Reunification, which took place on 3 October 1990. Celebratory events, talks and debates flourished in German media, bringing about a new wave of discussion of the socialist past of the GDR (Wir Ostdeutsche 2020). Wolf’s novel contributes to this pluri-network of the cultural memory of East Germany by serving as a reminder and a textual witness of what actual everyday life was like under socialism. Wolf’s depiction of the ‘socialist family’ – a metaphor of a socialist collective and a political metonymy of human relations under socialism – illustrates the ambivalence and contradiction of being a socialist citizen in the GDR. While the narrative strategies in Der geteilte Himmel invite read-

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ers to preserve and activate memories of life as socialist citizens, the reality of a unified Germany – particularly, upon the collapse of the GDR – poses challenges to the extent to which the cultural memory of socialist identities can be maintained. The communicative memory of the socialist past in Wolf’s storytelling thus gradually shifts into a lost cultural memory of the identification with the socialist collective. In contrast, the cultural memory of the socialist past in present-day Germany unfolds through articulatory practices of a remorse of and a reflection upon a certain historical period in German history. Sociohistorical circumstances in contemporary China, unlike Germany, continue to serve as a factor that stabilizes the cultural memory of the collective socialist identity. Celebration and commemoration of the revolutionary past take place regularly in China. A new edition of Ding Ling’s Sanggan River, for instance, was included, along with ten other socialist novels that depict different aspects of the Chinese revolution, in the series ‘hongse changpian xiaoshuo jingdian’ 红色长篇小说经典 (classic red novels). This book series was published on 1 October 2018, which marked the sixty-ninth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Through this pluri-network of cultural memory about the socialist identity, communicative memory about the complexity of peasant transformation, and the complex process of fanshen, documented in Ding Ling’s novel, readers who have not experienced the land reform may empathetically and imaginatively identify with the collective identity of socialist citizens in China. In other words, Ding Ling’s storytelling of the revolution contributes to the institutionalization and reinforcement of the cultural memory of the past, present and future of socialism in China. The reading of Ding Ling’s novel, in this regard, rewrites, in Helbig’s sense, the cultural memory of socialist identity in the sense that it preserves and updates the understanding of contemporary Chinese socialism. Although the socialist realist storytelling of these two authors reveals different modes of rewriting histories and cultural memories of socialism in two distinctive national contexts, these diverse modes of socialist storytelling, in fact, form an internationalist language of memories of socialism. This internationalist language, rather than a homogenous form of art and culture, is a form of storytelling narrative that constantly invites tensions, interactions with, and, above all, the active process of rewriting the past, present and future of socialism. More significantly, this kind of storytelling provokes the activation of the rewriting of socialist cultural memories and the reconfiguration of socialist identities. The reading of Ding Ling’s text in parallel with Wolf’s novel repositions the Chinese memories of the Communist Revolution in a global context. Rereading what speaks (and historically has spoken) true to ordinary people

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under socialist regimes, then, both exhibits and provokes memories of what it means to be a socialist citizen in the contemporary Chinese context. The examination of the cultural memory of a socialist past in the German context, though, brings forth the memory of an international socialist collective that is lost to the present. Yejun Zou  completed her PhD studies in German and Comparative Literature at King’s College London and the Humboldt University of Berlin. Her work examines relational comparisons of socialist women’s writings in China and East Germany, in particular in the works of Ding Ling and Christa Wolf. She has published in the British Journal of Chinese Studies and won the 2019 Women in German Studies Book Prize at King’s College London. Her current research focuses on cultural contacts, linguistic interplays and literary affinities in German and Chinese leftist women’s writings during the 1920s and the 1930s.

Notes 1. The National Development and Reform Commission of the People’s Republic of China have issued continuous plans on the development of red tourism since the late 1990s (National Development and Reform Commission of the People’s Republic of China 2004); these plans cover the period of 2004–2010, 2011–2015 and 2016– 2020 and aim, through the promotion of tourism, primarily at enhancing patriotic education amongst youth while stimulating the economic growth of the former revolutionary areas. 2. Denton’s analysis focuses mainly on the way in which the CCP officials instil a patriotic education through the promotion of ‘red tourism’, as he believes the revisiting of these revolutionary places connects abstract historical events with palpable revolutionary sites. 3. In a similar vein, see also Benoît Vermander’s discussion of traces and layers of memory in this volume. 4. The direct English translation of the title should be The Divided Sky or The Divided Heaven; yet the most recent version of the English translation by Luise von Flotow translated the title into They Divided the Sky (2013). While this translation demonstrates the implicit meaning of the German title, it nonetheless bears a different form from the original title. In order to preserve both the form and content of the title, I have decided to use the German original here. 5. For Zhdanov (1934: 15–26), socialist realist literature is optimistic ‘in essence, because it is the literature of the rising class of the proletariat, the only progressive and advanced class’ and thus it is serving a new cause – ‘the cause of socialist construction’. 6. Translations are my own unless stated otherwise. 7. The translation used here is the version translated by Luise von Flotow in 2013. 8. The original sentence is, ‘[w] ir hatten das Gefühl, die Realität bewege sich auf Dauer in die gleiche Richtung wie wir und wir können, zusammen mit den Leuten aus der Wirtschaft, aus der Wissenschaft dieser progressiven Richtung zum Durchbruch verhelfen’.

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9. For instance, although intellectuals such as Zhou Yang had divergent opinions from those of Hu Feng and Feng Xuefeng, both groups believed that the Chinese literary movement should be an important part of the Chinese revolution – that is, both saw the relationship between politics and literature as interwoven and inseparable (Hong 2007: 48). 10. The high paper hat is used as a tool to uglify people who are under condemnation – this was especially the case during the Cultural Revolution. 11. Baimao nü 白毛女, or The White-Haired Girl, was an opera ballet created by a group of leftist writers and was first performed in 1945. The story of The White-Haired Girl depicts how the tenant Yang Bailao’s daughter Xi’er is bullied by the landlord Huang Shiren’s family – Yang is forced to commit suicide due to his inability to pay his debts to the landlord and Xi’er is sold as a maid/slave to the landlord, whereupon she is beaten by the landlord’s mother, raped by the landlord’s son, and escapes to live in a cave upon the birth of her illegitimate son. She is rescued at the end by the communists. The theme of the opera is to reveal ‘jiu zhengquan ba ren biancheng gui, xin zhengquan ba gui biancheng ren’ (The old regime [of the Nationalist party] turns human beings into ghosts, while the new regime [of the CCP] turns ghosts into human beings). Although this opera was not performed in the late 1940s, it later became one of the eight revolutionary model operas (yangbanxi) during the Cultural Revolution.

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Tate, Dennis. 1988. ‘“Breadth and Diversity”: Socialist Realism in the GDR’, in Michael Scriven and Dennis Tate (eds),  European Socialist Realism. Oxford: Berg, pp. 60–78. Volland, Nicolai. 2017. Socialist Cosmopolitanism: The Chinese Literary Universe 1945–1965. New York: Columbia University Press. Wang, David Der-Wei. 2004.  The Monster That is History: History, Violence, and Fictional Writing in Twentieth-century China. Berkeley: University of California Press. ‘Wir Ostdeutsche: 30 Jahre im vereiten Land’. 2020. Das Erste, 28 September. Retrieved 14 November 2020 from https://www.daserste.de/ information/reportage-dokumentation/dokus/sendung/wir-ostdeutsche100.html. Wolf, Christa. 1963. Der geteilte Himmel: Erzählung. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. ______. 1993 (1968). ‘Reading and Writing’, in Alexander Stephan (ed.), The Writer’s Dimension: Selected Essays, trans. Jan van Heurck. London: Virago. ______. 2001. Essays, Gespräche, Reden, Briefe 1987–2000, ed. Sonja Hilzinger. Munich: Luchterhand. ______. 2013. They Divided the Sky. Translated from German by Luise von Flotow. Ottawa: Ottawa University Press. Yan, Haiping. 2006. Chinese Women Writers and the Feminist Imagination, 1905–1948. London and New York: Routledge. Yan, Haogang. 2017. ‘Ding Ling de tugai xushi yu “wuchan jieji geming yishixingtai”’ [Ding Ling’s Narration of the Land Reform and ‘Proletarian Revolutionary Ideology’], in Ershi shiji zhongguo geming yu ding ling jingshen shi [Chinese Revolution in the 20th Century and the History of Ding Ling’s Spirit]. Beijing: Tsinghua University Press, pp. 266–84. Zhdanov, Andrei A. 1934. ‘Soviet Literature – The Richest in Ideas, the Most Advanced Literature’, in Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934: The Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism in the Soviet Union, trans. Helen Gifford Scott. 1977. London: Lawrence & Wishart, pp. 15–26.

4 CHINESE BODY-EXPRESSION AND CULTURAL MEMORY IN MO YAN’S BIG BREASTS & WIDE HIPS

 Wei Luan

Guan Moye (管谟业), pen name Mo Yan (莫言), the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012, is one of the most famous contemporary writers in China and abroad. Big Breasts & Wide Hips (丰乳肥臀) is his most important and longest work. The novel was first published in 1995, in a major literary magazine, Dajia (大家), and it was awarded the first Dajia Literature Prize of 100,000 Chinese yuan, which was the highest prize in 1996. Although the Literature Prize is a nongovernmental prize, it shows that the novel is loved by Chinese readers. And the writer himself considers Big Breasts & Wide Hips to be his greatest masterpiece, saying: ‘If you like, you can skip my other novels, but you must read Big Breasts & Wide Hips. In it, I wrote about history, war, politics, hunger, religion, love, and sex’ (Mo Yan 2004: xi–xii). Big Breasts & Wide Hips is about the story of the Shangguan family in Northeast Gaomi Township. The family is mainly comprised of Mother Shangguan Lu, her nine children, and her seven grandchildren. Mother Shangguan Lu, a woman with bound feet whose maiden name was Xuan’er, had married a blacksmith, Shangguan Shouxi, a sterile man. Mother has seven daughters and a set of twins – but all of these children were fathered by men other than her legal husband. This family secret is exposed with

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the birth of the central male character, Shangguan Jintong, who is the only son in the family and the child of the Swedish missionary, Malory. To those outside of his own family, Shangguan Jintong’s mixed parentage makes him an alien ‘Other’. The main content of the work, then, focuses upon the life experience of all the family members through nearly a hundred years of history. While the novel opens with the birth of Shangguan Jintong and his twin sister on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War (1936), its narration actually begins at the turn of the century in the wake of the failed Boxer Rebellion (1900), when troops from eight foreign nations crushed an indigenous, antiforeign rebellion and solidified their presence in China. This is the time of Mother’s childhood, her marriage, and the birth of her first seven daughters. The story ends with the death of Mother in the 1990s, with each of her daughters dying before her. Big Breasts & Wide Hips is well known for its long-term narrative pattern and unique characters. The work covers almost all of the major historical events of China in the twentieth century, from the failed Boxer Rebellion (1900) to the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), the Civil War (1945–1949), the events that followed the creation of the ‘New China’ (1949), including the Korean War (1950–1953), the disastrous ‘Great Leap Forward’ (1958–1960), the Three Years of Natural Disasters (1959–1961), the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), and the period after the Reform and Opening-up (1978). Many plots in Big Breasts & Wide Hips contain not only a wealth of historical information, but also social or public memories that (like Maurice Halbwachs’ [1985] ‘collective memories’) take place in social time. Mo Yan’s plots are also filled with what Jan Assman (2008: 109) calls the ‘cultural memories’ of myth-historical time, which, in this case, resonate with China’s philosophy and popular religion. Through his plots, Mo Yan makes the novel more than a realist work; he renders it a new historical fiction that stretches the boundaries of ‘realism’ and ‘historicism’ in new directions. Official histories and recorded ‘facts’ are of little interest to this writer, who routinely blends folk beliefs, bizarre animal imagery, and a variety of imaginative narrative techniques with historical realities – national and local, official and popular – to create unique and uniquely satisfying literature, writing of such engaging themes and visceral imagery that it easily crosses national borders (Mo Yan 2004: vii). Throughout the novel, this breadth of historical information and cultural memory is brought to life through the experiences of particular characters. Mo Yan creates a unique Mother and a strange son as his main characters. The only mother in the story, Shangguan Lu, has big breasts, wide hips and tiny bound feet. She brought up her nine children as well as her grandchildren, who were handed over to her care as soon as they were born due to questions about the legitimacy of their blood relationship to their families.

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Mother, who had been pressured to go against the so-called feudal morals and standards of her day, and who perhaps is not always politically correct, is quite different from any other literary mother. Mo Yan considers her to be great, and in many respects, more representative of a mother than any other fictional mother (2012: 1). Yet this great Mother has an incapable son, Shangguan Jintong, who relies on breastfeeding until he is fully grown. This only son of the family imbibes nothing but milk, mainly Mother’s milk but sometimes goat’s milk. He acquires a heavily, even morbidly, addictive illness manifest through his fascination with female breasts. Although Shangguan Jintong is handsome, clever and healthy, he is useless. In Big Breasts & Wide Hips, Mo Yan thus creates an incompetent ‘Hero’ character, the likes of which had never appeared in Chinese contemporary literary history before. The novel Big Breasts & Wide Hips arose out of Mo Yan’s own life experiences. Mo Yan and his mother are the archetypes of the roles of Shangguan Jintong and Shangguan Lu, respectively. Mo Yan’s mother was an illiterate woman with bound feet born in 1922, who died in 1994 with Mo Yan as her youngest child. According to Mo Yan, all of his memories are related to his mother, including his earliest memory, most painful memory, clearest memory, and most remorseful memory (2013: 4–5). After his mother died, in the midst of almost crippling grief, Mo Yan decided to write Big Breasts & Wide Hips for her. In his Nobel Lecture, Mo Yan said: Once my plan took shape, I was burning with such emotion that I completed a draft of half a million words in only eighty-three days. In Big Breasts & Wide Hips, I shamelessly used material associated with my mother’s actual experience, but the fictional mother’s emotional state is either a total fabrication or a composite of many of Northeast Gaomi Township’s mothers. Though I wrote ‘To the spirit of my mother’ on the dedication page, the novel was really written for all mothers everywhere, evidence, perhaps, of my overweening ambition, in much the same way as I hope to make tiny Northeast Gaomi Township a microcosm of China, even of the whole world. (Mo Yan 2013: 7–8)

In this chapter, I discuss the relationship between what I propose to call ‘Chinese body-expression’ and Chinese memory by taking Mo Yan’s novel as an example. Chinese body-expression is to be understood here on two levels. On the one hand, Chinese body-expression is the literary technique that Mo Yan uses in the novel to portray his characters and organize his plots. Yet on the other hand, Chinese body-expression is a rhetorical device that facilitates the visualization, sensorialization and conceptualization of abstract thoughts in iconically recognizable ways, even as it deepens the novel’s themes. Chinese body-expression thus presents Chinese collective memories to readers in memorable ways that are filled with historical information that has been handed down across generations. Writers such as

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Mo Yan use Chinese body-expression as a literary technique to share their private memories with their readership, with the ambition of turning their personal memories into social memories. At the same time, they use Chinese body-expression to rhetorically evoke memorable features of ancient Chinese philosophy, thus connecting their stories to the cultural memories of myth-history. In light of this, I suggest that Mo Yan approaches the body as a mnemonic that enables him to portray ‘self-image, historical imagination or express briefly but vividly values and standards as well as those forgotten and those unutterable in memory culture’ (cited in Erll 2012: 242).

The Physical Body: A Memory Bridge Between Writer and Reader As the process of writing is unique to every novelist, Mo Yan prefers to write his own life experience and tell his own stories. He once stated that:1 Some writers write for the common people; others write as the common people. I belong to the latter group, which produces personalized and original works. I believe that writing as the common people is a spontaneously creative act that bears the stamp of one’s own individuality; this is because it involves recounting the author’s own profoundly painful experiences and emotions that come from the heart, touch people’s souls, and are filled with richer meaning and manifold significance. (Mo Yan 2003: 150)

Yet Mo Yan also calls attention to the impact that his work has on others and Chinese society at large when he says that ‘when the novelist’s own spiritual pain [can awaken the reader’s pain because it] is consistent with the spiritual pain of the times, then the novelist produces truly great works of social and contemporary significance’ (Mo Yan 2003: 150). It is for these reasons that Mo Yan, in a rather literary sense, stresses the need to infuse a novel with ‘life’ such that, much as Katherine Swancutt suggests in the introduction to this volume, the novel possesses sensorial, material and even certain conceptual qualities: ‘When writing a story, a writer must mobilize all of his organic senses, such as taste, vision, hearing, feeling, or any other miraculous sense from beyond above. Then the work will have the breath of life. It will no longer be a heap of inanimate words, but a living entity with its own smell, sound, temperature, image, and feelings’ (Mo Yan 2001: 3). Seen in this light, Mo Yan harnesses Chinese body-expression in order to imbue inanimate words with feelings that imaginatively capture his own experiences, knowledge and peculiar memories. Novels that are filled with these kinds of feelings are designed to stir the reader’s imaginative empathy and identification with the author’s own experiences. Somewhat different to the paintings of Li Jinyuan (李金远), which are the products of his personal memory palace (see Vermander, this volume), the

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work of Mo Yan unfolds as a memory field that is meant to draw the memories of both writer and reader into an imaginatively empathetic dialogue. Big Breasts & Wide Hips is also different to Liliane Willens’ memoir, Stateless in Shanghai, as discussed by Reading (this volume), although Mo Yan fills the novel with his own real-life experiences and, to some extent, many of his plots are personal autobiographical records. What Mo Yan sets out to do through his use of bodily descriptions is to make the past visualizable and indeed palpable on a broad sensory level to his readers, who are encouraged in their own process of reading to re-envision their personal memories in light of the novel’s presentation of the past (see Yejun Zou’s chapter, this volume, for a related discussion). This is certainly no easy feat. But Mo Yan spares no effort in describing his characters’ physical bodies and in creating visible and concrete images to facilitate the reader’s imaginative empathy with his work. He uses Chinese body-expression to close the gap between his own private memories and the responses of his readers, thus connecting his creativity to the social reception of his work. Born in the 1950s, Mo Yan was influenced by many momentous historical events. In his childhood, he lived through the Great Leap Forward and the Three Years of Natural Disasters, while his adolescence was spent during the Cultural Revolution and, as an adult, he experienced the rapid social changes that followed the Reform and Opening-up period. The feeling of hunger stands out as his strongest memory, leading Mo Yan to state that: ‘It is hunger that makes me a writer who has specific life experience… Our generation never lives life like nowadays. We never know what surplus food means. We thought it is normal that there is nothing to eat and always cried for food’ (2000: 169). Each of Mo Yan’s memories appear to be related to hunger or food in some way. In his Nobel Lecture, he cites several examples of the hunger he faced: My earliest memory was of taking our only vacuum bottle to the public canteen for drinking water. Weakened by hunger, I dropped the bottle and broke it. Scared witless, I hid all that day in a haystack. Towards evening, I heard my mother calling my childhood name, so I crawled out of my hiding place, prepared to receive a beating or a scolding. But Mother didn’t hit me, didn’t even scold me. She just rubbed my head and heaved a sigh. My most painful memory involved going out in the collective’s field with Mother to glean ears of wheat. The gleaners scattered when they spotted the watchman. But Mother, who had bound feet, could not run; she was caught and slapped so hard by the watchman, a hulk of a man, that she fell to the ground. The watchman confiscated the wheat we’d gleaned and walked off whistling. As she sat on the ground, her lip bleeding, Mother wore a look of hopelessness I’ll never forget… …

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My clearest memory is of a Moon Festival day, at noontime, one of those are occasions when we ate Chinese dumplings at home, one bowl apiece. An aging beggar came to our door while we were at the table, and when I tried to send him away with half a bowlful of dried sweet potatoes, he reacted angrily: ‘I’m an old man’, he said, ‘You people are eating dumplings, but want to feed me sweet potatoes. How heartless can you be?’ I reacted just as angrily: ‘We are lucky if we eat dumplings a couple of times a year, one small bowlful apiece, barely enough to get a taste! You should be thankful we’re giving you sweet potatoes, and if you don’t want them, you can get the hell out of here!’ After reprimanding me, Mother dumped her half-bowlful of dumplings into the old man’s bowl. (Mo Yan 2013: 4–5)

Private memories such as these are literarily revised in Big Breasts & Wide Hips.2 Mo Yan takes some obvious artistic licence in plots that focus on the shapes of the characters’ starving bodies, which he renders according to the different historical periods of modern China. He produces shock scenes that are meant not only to exhibit the physical sufferings and memorably strange features of his characters but also to attract the reader’s imaginative and empathetic identification with them – including through rhetorical references to the Daoist imagery of immortals or ‘fairies’ (xianren 仙人) that have a changeable and often feathered body. For example, during the Sino-Japanese War, Mo Yan writes of a period when there is no food in the Shangguan family, which must live from offerings brought by pilgrims. The offerings are given to the family’s Third Sister, also known as the Bird Fairy, and include locusts, silkworm chrysalises, aphids, scarab beetles and fireflies. Reflecting on this literary scene as if it were a memory, Mo Yan declares in his novel ‘Of course, we gave it all to Third Sister; what she didn’t eat was divided up among Mother, my other sisters, and the little Sima heir. My sisters, wonderful daughters all, would get red in the face over trying to present their silkworm chrysalises to others’ (2004: 152–53). Mo Yan further encourages his readers’ imaginative empathy with his characters when evoking the widespread experience of starvation during the Great Leap Forward, which he presents in a fantastical light that is reminiscent of the aforementioned scene where offerings of insects are given to Third Sister to eat. Here, Mo Yan recounts how, in the spring of 1960 when the countryside was littered with the corpses of famine victims, members of the Flood Dragon River Farm rightist unit were transformed into nothing other than a herd of ruminants, scouring the earth for vegetation to quell their hunger. At that time, everyone was limited to an ounce and a half of grain daily, minus the amount skimmed off the top by the storekeeper, the manager of the dining hall and other important persons. What remained was enough for a bowl of porridge so thin they could see their reflections in it. Thus, when the millet crop was knee-high and all sorts of vegetables

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were ready to be picked, the rightists out in the field crammed whatever they could find into their mouths as they worked. During rest periods, they would sit in trenches, regurgitating the leafy mess in their stomachs to chew it up as finely as possible. Green saliva gathered at the corners of their mouths, on faces so bloated from malnutrition that their skin was translucent (Mo Yan 2004: 430–31). In a literary parallel to this event, Mo Yan produces another scene where, on the Shuangguan family farm, Seventh Sister dies of eating too many bean cakes, as her just dessert for having given her body to the cook, Pockface Zhang, in an exchange of sex for food. To evoke her demise in a memorable and imaginatively identifiable way, Mo Yan presents the reader with the graphically sensorial image that her dead belly poked out like a water vat (2004: 434–35). However, Mo Yan’s most shocking scene reveals that Mother used her own stomach to bring back food for her son. In the novel, Shangguan Jintong returned from the Flood Dragon River Farm in 1961. As he heard the door being unbolted, he looked up in time to see Mother, by then little more than skin and bones, rushing in from the side room. Seemingly surprised to see him, she managed to not say a word. Instead, with her hands over her mouth, she turned and ran outside, straight to the water-filled wooden basin beneath the apricot tree, where she fell to her knees, grabbed the rim with both hands, stretched out her neck, opened her mouth, and vomited. A bowlful of still dry beans gushed out, sending water splashing out of the basin. Once the retching had stopped, she reached into the water and scooped up the dried beans, a satisfied look spreading across her face. Mother took a garlic mortar out from under the stove and crushed the beans in it, added cold water to make it into a paste, and then handed him the bowl. She said ‘Go ahead, son, eat it.’ (Mo Yan 2004: 439–40) Although starvation is not an uncommon experience, Mo Yan does not rely upon close descriptions of the foods eaten during periods of shortage in order to stir the imaginative empathy of his readership. Nor does he focus upon the emotions aroused by hunger. He instead describes suffering bodies with a cold attitude – rhetorically evoking a multiplicity of body images that are based upon his own private memories and presented as literary fantasies – with which his readers can imaginatively identify. Mo Yan is aware that imaginative and empathetic identification requires readers to draw upon the particular affective mode that I call Chinese body-expression, which is rooted in wider Chinese understandings of history, philosophy and memorymaking. Although there are obvious differences between the memories of any given writer and reader, Mo Yan harnesses the particularities of Chinese body-expression to create, in dialogue with his readers, a shard and memorable vision of China’s recent past. Readers of Big Breasts & Wide Hips are thus invited to enter into Mo Yan’s artistic memory field, which serves as a

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bridge between the writer’s imaginative presentation of his own memories and literary fantasies, and the reader’s experience of empathetically envisioning the experience of living through them.

The Distorted Body and Traumatic Memory Chinese body-expression works on a rhetoric level. It is the visible and palpable body that often makes abstractions feel concrete and underscores their conceptual or symbolic weight (see Swancutt’s introduction, this volume). This is all the more so because Chinese body-expression holds an important relationship to ancient Chinese philosophy. With referents that stretch far back in time, Chinese body-expression evokes not only social or public memories, but the cultural memory of Chinese myth-historical time. Mo Yan often uses Chinese body-expression to present the reader with abnormal bodies which, on account of specific historical events, had become physically disabled, unusual in appearance, tortured, or deformed in ways that resonate with myth-historical themes. Traces of human suffering are especially emphasized in Mo Yan’s work as a way of evoking the hardships of modern life. Zhang Jingze observes that Mo Yan’s literary emphasis on physical suffering resonates with the author’s own personal experiences when he states: ‘It is true that Mo Yan, born in an era of intense cultural conflict, had encountered prejudice, misunderstanding, and an uncompromising opposition’ (2016: 1). But Mo Yan is even more blunt in characterizing himself as unhandsome: I was born ugly. Villagers often laughed in my face, and school bullies sometimes beat me up because of it. I’d run home crying, where my mother would say, ‘You’re not ugly, son. You’ve got a nose and two eyes, and there’s nothing wrong with your arms and legs, so how could you be ugly? If you have a good heart and always do the right thing, what is considered ugly becomes beautiful’. Later on, when I moved to the city, there were educated people who laughed at me behind my back, some even to my face; but when I recalled what Mother had said, I just calmly offered my apologies. (2013: 5)

Mo Yan revisits this experience in Big Breasts & Wide Hips with some artistic exaggeration in his portrayal of Shangguan Jintong, who is a beautiful boy but is often humiliated by other children because of his peculiar appearance. They stopped me on the path between the school and the village, each holding a springy mulberry switch, the bright sunlight casting a waxy sheen on to their faces. … ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I asked timidly. ‘What are we doing,

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you little bastard?’ The whites of his crossed eyes leaped in their sockets like moths. ‘We’re teaching a lesson to the bastard son of a redheaded foreign devil!’ ‘I didn’t do anything to you’, I complained… … I was pinned down under their knees while they attacked the backs of my legs with their switches, like wolves ganging up on a sheep and driving it into the wildwoods. … By then my backside was wet – blood or urine, hard to tell. Red rays of sunset were draped across their bodies as they stood in a line. The trip of their mulberry switches was torn and ragged, and so green they looked black. … They’d kicked me to the ground, taken out their impressive peckers, and were pissing in my face. The wet ground was spinning, and I felt as if I were flailing in a pool of water. (Mo Yan 2004: 345–48)

Physical sufferings are not easily forgotten. Painful memories caused by injuries to the flesh may become traumatic memories that are highly personal and built upon the person’s own sensorial experience that cannot easily be shared in full. Mo Yan thus incorporates the distorted body as a leitmotif within the artistic memory field of Big Breasts & Wide Hips. Abnormal bodies, the strange and the Other in his novel are rendered typical – and his readership is encouraged to empathetically identify not only with the abnormalities attributed to physical sufferings in social memory, but with certain fantastic physical transformations that bring those social memories into conversation with certain recurrent themes within Chinese cultural memory and myth-history. Here I discuss several vignettes from Mo Yan’s work in which strange, distorted, abnormal and fantastically Other characters are presented as persons with whom readers may, in point of fact, eminently identify. Let us recall that Mother was a woman with tiny bound feet. Mo Yan recounts how, when Mother reached the age of five, her aunt fetched some bamboo strips, a wooden mallet, and some heavy white cloth and bound her feet. Mother thus spent her youth in an era when ‘a woman without bound feet cannot find a husband’ (Mo Yan 2004). Thereafter the possessor of perfect lotus feet, Mother was viewed as a marketable treasure. Yet at the age of seventeen in 1917, Mother was asked to stand up in public, as an example of a freak with disgusting bound feet, as was required during the official announcement to prohibit foot binding. ‘Every time Mother talked about having her feet bound, it was a mixture of the blood-and-tears indictment and personal glory’ (Mo Yan 2004: 48). Similarly, Eighth Sister, who is the twin of the protagonist Shangguan Jintong, was born blind. She speaks so few words in the novel that she has the least presence in it. In order to save food in the Three Years of Natural Disasters and not to be the family burden, she drowns herself in the river away from home. Only on the day of her suicide does the reader come to know what she looks like. ‘Not many people had seen the face of this Shangguan girl. She had a high nose, fair skin, soft, yellow hair, and a long, thin neck,

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like that of a swan’ (Mo Yan 2004: 442). Although Eight Sister is disabled and possesses certain features that make her stand out like her brother as an alien Other, she is a beautiful girl. By contrast, Fourth Sister presents the ugliest appearance when she returns home to the Shuangguan family after having sold herself into prostitution for money to support the family. Mo Yan describes Fourth Sister’s last moments during the Cultural Revolution immediately after Eighth Sister’s suicide, telling the reader that her nose had rotted away and left behind only a black hole, while she had become blind in both eyes. Nearly all her hair had fallen out, and all that remained were a few rust-colored wisps here and there on her shriveled scalp. Red Guards had nailed a row of placards to the gate of their compound, with labels such as Traitor’s Family, Landlord Restitution Crops Nest, and Whore’s House. But as the protagonist Shangguan Jintong listened to his dying sister, he had the urge to change the word ‘whore’s’ to ‘Filial Daughter’s’ or ‘Martyr’s’ (Mo Yan 2004: 443–44). Of all the characters in the novel, it is Third Sister, also known as the Bird Fairy, whose distorted physique becomes the most quintessentially recognizable, at least when viewed against the celebrated figures of Chinese myth-history. Mo Yan uses body-expression to portray her mysterious transformation in detail: On the third day after Birdman Han was taken away, Third Sister got up off the kang, barefoot, shamelessly tore open her blouse and went outside, where she jumped up into the pomegranate tree, bending the pliant branch into a deep curve… she leaped acrobatically from the pomegranate tree onto a parasol tree, and from there to a tall catalpa tree. From high up in the catalpa tree she jumped down onto the ridge of our thatched roof. Her movements were amazingly nimble as if she had sprouted wings. She sat astride the roof ridge, staring straight ahead, her face suffused with a radiant smile… she had changed into a bird, and no longer understood human language… she began pecking at her shoulder as if preening feathers. Her head kept turning, as if on a swivel; not only could she peck her own shoulder, she could even reach down and nibble at her tiny nipples… Third Sister had already entered the avian realm: she thought like a bird, behaved like a bird, and wore the expression of a bird. (Mo Yan 2004: 147–48)

Unlike Franz Kafka’s character, Gregor Samsa, who turned into a beetlelike monstrous vermin in The Metamorphosis, Third Sister is transformed by unrequited love into a beautiful bird fairy with a female body and the soul of a bird. As she contributed much to her family during the period of food shortage, she did not disgust people, but instead was cherished by them. At the heart of Third Sister’s transformation is Mo Yan’s evocative reference to the Daoist theory of transformation where Qi (气) is the basic element of the world. Everything in the world is accordingly composed of two parts: the physical body, which is external and visible, and the intan-

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gible soul that is internal to the body and thus invisible. These varied and complicated combinations of body and soul elements are what make up the world. Tao Hongjing (陶弘景), a famous Daoist of the Southern Dynasty who lived from ad 420–589, suggests in The Collections of Huayang Taoyinju (华阳陶隐居集) that: Every living being is an integration of the body and the soul. When merged together, this combination will form a person or any other living being. When detached, they will become a deity or a ghost. When they are neither merged nor detached, they are the being that exists in Buddhism. When they are both merged and detached, they are the being that exists in Daoism… When the body is mixed with the soul, one can ride a dragon (long 龙) or fly above the clouds. And when the body is neither merged with nor detached from the soul, one is living or dead. (Tao Hongjing 2004: 231)

In Daoism, people undergo transformations between different life forms through persistent self-cultivation, with the highest transformation making the person into an immortal or a fairy. Yet unlike the Daoist fairy, Third Sister didn’t escape her tragic fate. During a moment when Mother was away from home, Third Sister was raped by the mute leader of the fifth squad of the railway Demolition Battalion. The rape took place at the far end of the path in her yard, beneath a pile of dried grass (Mo Yan 2004: 179). Thus, when Babbitt, an American pilot, taught Sima Ku (another of Mo Yan’s characters) how to parachute, Third Sister echoed this flight by jumping off a cliff. Mo Yan narrates her death in detail: She had transformed almost completely into the Bird Fairy: her nose had hooked into a beak, her eyes had turned yellow, her neck had retreated into her torso, her hair had changed into feathers, and her arms were now wings, which she flapped up and down as she climbed the increasingly steep hillside, shrieking as if alone in the world and heading straight for the precipice. … By the time we snapped out of our bewilderment, she was already soaring through the air below the precipice. A thin green mist rose from the grass below. (Mo Yan 2004: 223–24)

Through these memorable passages filled with fantasy, Mo Yan calls attention to the ways in which human sufferings leave marks on the body, turning it into something abnormal, strange and Other. As Mo Yan’s literary work suggests, the memorably transformed body may enter into social memory in cases where persons, like Fourth Sister, rot away from privation and disease; or they may resonate with cultural memory, as with Third Sister, whose Bird Fairy qualities conjure up the Daoist and myth-historical qualities of beings that are remembered for having lived extraordinary lives. Each of the distorted bodies that Mo Yan presents, then, is meant to offer

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one particular portrait of how memorable suffering produces the strange and Other – much as it could be said to do in Pablo Picasso’s Guernica.

The Same Body: Person and Motherland Big Breasts & Wide Hips, then, is a literary creation filled with deep philosophical contemplations and social meanings communicated through the rhetoric of Chinese body-expression. Mo Yan’s use of body-expression goes a step further, though, as it also posits a relationship between the female body and the nation. Through this politicization of the female body, Mo Yan tasks his readership with imaginatively and empathetically reflecting upon how the strange and Other appear as a recurrent theme in the social and cultural memories not just of Northeast Gaomi Township, but of wider China. The question of how to understand one’s own identity – and how to come to terms with any confusion over one’s own strange qualities – is a highly memorable problem posed to the reader in Big Breasts & Wide Hips. It is Mo Yan’s character, Pastor Malory, the biological father of the protagonist Shangguan Jintong, who first raises the question ‘who am I?’. Pastor Malory was Swedish, with red hair, blue eyes and a hawkish nose. When he first laid eyes on his son, born to a Chinese woman, he asked: ‘What sort of child was I?’ He had been in China for such a long time that even he could not remember the exact time he had arrived. ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘I’m not Swedish after all, and my so-called past has been nothing but a dream’. Self-confusion caused the death of Pastor Malory. This man speaking in perfect Northeast Gaomi Chinese was considered to be a strange monkey by the musket soldiers of Mo Yan’s novel. They beat and humiliated Malory, who out of despair flung himself off of the bell tower that had been named after his twin children (Mo Yan 2004: 105–106). Like his biological father, Malory, the protagonist Shangguan Jintong had a self-identity crisis. Shangguan Jintong was Mother’s only son. He was a mixed-race child raised without a father, who had received his surname from one man (who died on the day he was born) and then subsequently lost his biological father on the day of his own baptism and naming. When he turned eighteen years old, Shangguan Jintong got his first good view of his own features in the mirror: ‘I had a shock of yellow hair, pale, fleshy ears, brows the color of ripe wheat, and sallow lashes that cast a shadow over deep blue eyes’ (Mo Yan 2004: 386). The distinctive appearance and social position of being a ‘bastard’ made him confused about his own self. Mo Yan invites the reader to ask how persons confirm their identity and ethnicity through their bodily features or given name. He also probes the question of whether people who do not share similar physical traits can be

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members of the same ethnic group and even of the same nation. To this end, he produces further vignettes that are meant to be received by his readership as disorienting, strange and evocative of the Other. One key example of this is his description of the moment when Seventh Sister, who was sold to a Russian woman when very young, makes herself known years later to her brother, the protagonist Shuangguan Jintong. She does this in a strange way that accentuates her Otherness, namely by speaking in Russian to another character, Huo Lian, who then translates her passage into Chinese as ‘I’m your seventh sister’ (Mo Yan 2004: 429). Yet another example is Mo Yan’s choice to refer to one of his characters by more than one name, through passages that are replete with body-expression and draw attention to the strange qualities of his characters, as when he writes that ‘Ma Ruilian opened her mouth and released wails from Shangguan Pandi’s throat’ (2004: 428). Through these two strange passages, Mo Yan reveals that one’s name can be more important to the Chinese sense of self than even one’s own body. In China (as in many places elsewhere), names evoke the social lives of persons, while bodies evoke their natural lives. Names thus carry reputations within them and impart Chinese persons with social responsibilities, which in some cases may become memorable enough to enter the annals of both social and cultural memory. Mo Yan asks readers to further explore questions of self-identity and self-confusion in terms of ethnic and national identity. He frequently shows through the lives of his characters that it is only when a person identifies with his or her social group that answers arise to the questions of ‘who am I?’ or ‘who are we as persons?’. To this end, Mo Yan seeks to put into perspective who the ‘Chinese’ might be as a particular socio-ethnic group with a long-term history enhanced by rich social and cultural memories. This has brought him recognition as a contemporary writer with a distinct historical consciousness who pays persistent attention to Chinese lived experiences of the twenty-first century. Zhang Qinghua, for example, considers that Mo Yan’s attention to history and personal experience reveals both his humanity and his mastery as a novelist of modernity (2013: 150). But Mo Yan put it this way himself: the full-length novel should be written into multi-volumes that are not an accumulation of words, but a big and grand artistic creation. … I think that the writer who can create a full-length novel possesses a ‘novelist bosom’. The novelist bosom enables a writer to portray long-term history, write about deep themes on the human condition, and have a big picture of the world. (Mo Yan 2012: 1–2)

Thus, Mo Yan’s memory field (rendered above in his own words as a ‘novelist bosom’) makes ample use of body-expression as the key method for offering up a memorable vision, often embellished with fantasies, of

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Chinese persons who have their own particular social, political, ethnic, gendered, strange and Other qualities. His term ‘novelist bosom’ furthermore adds an extra layer of meaning to his title, Big Breasts & Wide Hips. While the title is meant to describe the body of a Mother, Mo Yan dedicated his novel ‘to Mother and Land’ – a line that appears on the back cover of the original version from 1996. Through this dedication, Mo Yan suggests that the character of Mother Shangguan Lu is both the literary counterpart to his own mother and a metaphor for the Chinese people and nation as a whole. The novel’s setting of Northeast Gaomi Township is presented in a similar light, namely as a microcosm not only of the lives of Chinese people, but of China the motherland writ large. Big Breasts & Wide Hips is, then, meant to be not only an anthem to Mo Yan’s mother, but an epic of his ‘Motherland’. Mo Yan underscores these connections between Mother and the Chinese nation when reflecting in the novel that ‘to comprehend Mother’s afflicted ravings was to have an understanding of the universe itself; to commit Mother’s afflicted ravings to memory was to know the entire history of Northeast Gaomi Township’ (Mo Yan 2004: 164). In another related and highly memorable vignette, he presents the life-giving female body as a metaphor for the land of Northeast Gaomi Township, where the building of a bridge on the Flood Dragon River is compared to a caesarean birth: That rail line was Jiaoji Line, built by the Germans. The Wolf and Tiger Brigade warriors had fought a heroic, bloody battle, employing every conceivable tactic to slow down the construction, but in the end, they’d been unable to stop the unyielding steel road from slicing through the soft underbelly of Northeast Gaomi Township, dividing it in two. In the words of their forebear Sima the Urn: ‘Goddamn it, that’s the same as slicing open the bellies of our women!’ The metal dragon had belched thick black smoke as it rolled through Northeast Gaomi as if rolling right across our chests. (Mo Yan 2004: 125–26)

Here, the relationship between the human body and the nation can be traced back to the traditional Chinese notion that the bodily composition of a person is interlinked with the composition of heaven and earth. There is a Chinese myth in which the world originates from the body of a dead hero named Kua Fu (夸父). Some rather ancient works, such as the Yellow Emperor’s Canon of Medicine: Plain Conversation (黄帝内经・素问), further suggest that: Heaven has jing (精 the essence of Qi气) and Earth has form… This is why Heaven and Earth are the parents of all things. The Qi of Heaven corresponds to human lungs, the Qi of Earth corresponds to the pharynx, the Qi of Wind corresponds to the liver, the Qi of Thunder corresponds to the heart, the Qi of Grains corresponds to the spleen, and the Qi of Rain corresponds to the kidney. (Yao 2010: 66)

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Yet it is Confucianism that first connects the person’s body to national politics in a school of thought known as ‘Confucian body-politics theory’ (儒家身体政治理论). A well-known passage from The Great Learning (大学) thus states that ‘The ancients who wished to illustrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom, first ordered well their own States. Wishing to order well their States, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts’ (Confucius 2014: 32). Similarly, in the Confucianist Doctrine of the Mean (中庸), it is said that: All who have the government of the kingdom with its States and families have nine standard rules to follow; – viz. the cultivation of their own characters; the honoring of men of virtue and talents; affection towards their relatives; respect towards the great minister; kind and considerate treatment of the whole body of officers; dealing with the mass of the people as children; encouraging the resort of all classes of artisans; indulgent treatment of men from a distance; and the kindly cherishing of the princes of the States. (Confucius 2014: 67)

Confucius famously emphasized that ‘Their persons being cultivated, their families were regulated. Their families being regulated, their States were rightly governed. Their States being rightly governed, the whole kingdom was made tranquil and happy’ (2014: 227). Mencius, a fourth-generation disciple of Confucius, reaffirmed that ‘the root of the empire is in the state. The root of the state is in the family. The root of the family is in the body of a person’ (2010: 130). Within Confucian body-politics theory, the body of a person is not only a natural phenomenon, but the ruling basis of the government. Thus, the condition of a person’s body, whether healthy or tortured, is an index of whether the government’s rule is good or not. It is largely for this reason that the distorted bodies in Big Breasts & Wide Hips have, since the novel’s publication, been considered an ironic criticism of the government of the People’s Republic of China. The novel was censored in 2003 due to the many bodily and sexual descriptions that it contains and the purportedly incorrect political view it gives of some historical events. There is, however, a double irony here too, since Mo Yan is not a member of the Confucian body-politics school. He is a patriot who professes love of his compatriots and country: ‘I must admit that were it not for the thirtyodd years of tremendous development and progress in Chinese society, and the subsequent national reform and opening of her doors to the outside, I would not be a writer today’ (Mo Yan 2013: 6). What Mo Yan intends to focus upon is not politics, but humankind. He says as much when suggesting that ‘As a member of society, a novelist is entitled to his own stance and viewpoint; but when he is writing he must take a humanistic stance, and

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write accordingly. Only then can literature not just originate in events, but transcend them, not just show concern for politics but be greater than politics’ (Mo Yan 2013: 8). In Big Breasts & Wide Hips, Mo Yan harnesses Chinese body-expression to enliven both personal and collective memories, in Halbwachs’ (1985) sense of the term, that display the archetypal qualities of being Chinese. He produces Chinese characters who are tough and resilient, industrious and hard-working, loving of life and fearless in death. This sense of Chineseness is neatly captured in the text printed on the flyleaf of Big Breasts & Wide Hips, which was selected by its translator, Howard Goldblatt: First Sister was stunned. ‘Mother,’ she said, ‘you’ve changed’. ‘Yes, I’ve changed,’ Mother said, ‘and yet I’m still the same. Over the years, members of the Shangguan family have died off like stalks of chives, and others have been born to take their place. Where there’s life, death is inevitable. Dying’s easy; it’s living that’s hard. The harder it gets, the stronger the will to live. And the greater the fear of death, the greater the struggle to keep on living’. (Mo Yan 2004: 379)

In 2008, the ban on Big Breasts & Wide Hips was lifted in China and interest in rereading Mo Yan’s work surged. In his Nobel lecture of 2012, Mo Yan gave the honour of winning this prize to his mother, who was on his mind then. While the pen name ‘Mo Yan’ means ‘don’t speak’ in Chinese, he perhaps chose the best way to speak to others through his writing. As a writer and a storyteller, Mo Yan said ‘You will find everything I need to say in my works’ (2013: 9).

Conclusion Taking Big Breasts & Wide Hips as an example, in this chapter I have shown that Mo Yan built an artistic memory field on Chinese body-expression. Readers who enter into this memory field are invited to imaginatively and empathetically identify their own personal memories with the literary memories and fantasies of Mo Yan. They are further encouraged to envision Chinese persons, society, history and the nation in highly memorable ways that juxtapose China with the strange and Other. Mo Yan thus makes liberal use of Chinese body-expression to rhetorically open up a conversation, so to speak, between his readership and the literary, social and cultural memories that he sets out to share. By encouraging readers to identify closely with his work, Mo Yan suggests that it is iconic not only of his own personal memories, but of the public memory and myth-history of wider China too. He memorably im-

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parts his characters, plots and storyline with the material, sensorial and conceptual qualities of beings that appear in Chinese philosophy, are a part of Chinese myth-historical time, and evoke China’s history as well as its public memories of ethnicity, gender, belonging and nation-building. But perhaps Mo Yan’s most unique contribution is to be found in his decision to go beyond memory. Drawing upon his own unique sense of fantasy, Mo Yan stirs the reader to ask what it means to be a person, and more specifically, to imaginatively empathize with what it means to be Chinese. Through this roundabout, often disorientating and yet highly evocative literary approach, Mo Yan encourages readers not only to relate to his characters and plots – many of which were inspired by his own personal memories – but to identify them as quintessentially Chinese memories. It is for this reason that Big Breasts & Wide Hips has been received so well. Wei Luan is based at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and is also Associate Professor in Literature and Dean of the Chinese Language and Literature Department at Heilongjiang International University. Her field is comparative literature and cultural theory, with research interests spanning ancient Chinese culture, Sino-foreign cultural exchanges, cultural memory, mythology, literary anthropology and world literature. Recently, she has published a new book, Moon Festival (2018), in both Chinese and English.

Notes 1. Translations are my own unless stated otherwise. 2. Big Breasts & Wide Hips was first published in 1996 and was followed by a final revised edition that appeared in 2009. The English version of the novel was translated by Howard Goldblatt and published by Arcade Publishing in 2004 as a shortened version of the original with some changes and rearrangements. A list of principal characters was added to the English version, which also rearranged the novel’s structure so that what originally appeared as Part Seven was presented as Part Two. This rearrangement has hindered Mo Yan’s use of body-expression by revealing early in his work what originally had remained a puzzle until much later, namely: that none of the children born by Mother were fathered by her legal husband. Mo Yan uses Chinese body-expression to hint at the unravelling of this puzzle throughout the original version of the novel, which makes clear that each of Mother’s children have different facial features. He also puts his personal life experiences into most of the main text, such that the second to the fifth parts of the novel are devoted to the life experiences of Shangguan Jintong – Mo Yan’s alias. In each plot that centres around Shangguan Jintong, Mo Yan selectively offers up physical images that would be familiar to Chinese readers who, due to the standardized education system in the People’s Republic of China, will have come to acquire a similar knowledge of Chinese history. By encouraging his readers to identify imaginatively, empathetically, and sensorially with his own personal memories – which resonate with those of his own mother and her generation – Mo Yan creates a memory field that encompasses himself, his readers and the generation of his own parents. Thus, I focus upon Mo

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Yan’s use of Chinese body-expression in his (2009) Chinese version, although I borrow from the English expressions used in Goldblatt’s (2004) English edition when quoting specific passages from Mo Yan’s novel.

References Assmann, Jan. 2008. ‘Communicative and Cultural Memory’, in Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (eds), Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 109–18. Confucius. 2014. The Chinese Classics: Confucian Analects, The Great Learning, and The Doctrine of the Mean, trans. James Legge. Shanghai: Sanlian Press. Erll, Astrid. 2012. ‘Wenxue Zuowei Jiti Jiyi de Meijie文学作为集体记忆的 媒介’ (Literature as the Medium of Collective Memory), in Astrid Erll and Feng Yalin (eds), Wenhua Jiyi Lilun Duben (文化记忆理论读本, The Cultural Memory Theories Reader). Beijing: Peking University Press, pp. 227–46. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1985. Das Kollektive Gedächtnis (The Collective Memory). Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. Mencius. 2010. The Works of Mencius, trans. James Legge. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press. Tao, Hongjing (陶弘景). 2004. Huayang Tao Yinju Ji华阳陶隐居集（The Collections of Huangyang Taoyinju). Beijing: Huaxia Publisher. Yan, Mo. 2000. Ji’e yu Gudu shi Wo Chuangzuo de Caifu – Zai Shitanfu Daxue de Yanjiang 饥饿与孤独是我创作的财富——在史坦福大学的演 讲（Hunger and Loneliness Were My Fortunes of Creation: A Speech at Stanford University), in Mo Yan, Mo Yan Wenji Juan 12 (莫言文集 卷12 The Collected Works of Mo Yan. Vol 12). Beijing: Dangdai Shijie Chubanshe, pp. 167–72. ———. 2001. Xiaoshuo de Qiwei 小说的气味 (The Smell of a Novel), in Mo Yan, Mo Yan Wenji Juan 12 (莫言文集 卷12 The Collected Works of Mo Yan. Vol 12). Beijing: Dangdai Shijie Chubanshe, pp. 1–5. ———. 2003. ‘Zuojia yu Tade Wenxue Chuangzuo 作家与他的文学创作’ (The Writer and His Literary Creation), Wen Shi Zhe (文史哲) 275(2): 149–52. ———. 2004. Big Breasts & Wide Hips: A Novel, trans. Howard Goldblatt. New York: Arcade Publishing. ———. 2012. Fengru Feitun 丰乳肥臀 (Big Breasts & Wide Hips). Shanghai: Shanghai Literature and Art Press. ———. 2013. ‘Jiang Gushi de Ren – Zai Nuo Bei’er Wenxue Jiang Banjiang Dianli shang de Yanjiang讲故事的人——在诺贝尔文学奖颁奖典礼上的

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演讲’ (Storytellers: A Speech on Nobel Prize in Literature’), Dangdai Zuojia Pinglun当代作家评论 (Contemporary Writers Review) 1: 4–10. Yao, Chunpeng (姚春鹏). 2010. Huangdi Neijing黄帝内经 (Yellow Emperor’s Canon of Medicine). Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company. Zhang, Jingze. 2016. ‘Mo Yan and the Chinese Mind’, in Jiang Lin and Jin Luobin (eds), Chinese Perspectives: Essays on Mo Yan’s Novels, trans. Jiang Lin and Li Yan. Beijing: Tsinghua University Press, pp. 1–10. Zhang, Qinghua (张清华). 2013. ‘Mo Yan yu Xin Lishi Zhuyi Wenxue Sichao 莫言与新历史主义文学思潮’ (Mo Yan and the New Historicism Literary Trend), in Yang Shoushen (杨守森) and He Lihua (贺立华) (eds), Mo Yan Yanjiu Sanshi Nian莫言研究三十年 (Thirty Years of Research on Mo Yan). Jinan: Shangdong University Press, pp. 149–56.

5



Remembering Statelessness in Food Stories from Jewish Shanghai

Anna Reading

In February 1943, a Proclamation was issued in Shanghai by the occupying Japanese military forces that required all stateless refugees to register at an internment camp: ‘Men who had never washed a plate in their lives were now scrubbing floors, washing their clothes in cold water and lining up dejectedly with their tin plates for their meals’ (Willens 2010: 145). Recollections of food, its presence and absence, its ingredients and its technologies, are the staple narrative of Liliane Willens’ memoir. Taking a multi-disciplinary and context-led approach to the memoir’s food stories, in this chapter I seek to illuminate how the Jewish diasporic presence within the ‘polycentric, decentred city’ of Shanghai left complex and contradictory memories caught between the tensions of European colonization and Jewish displacement (Abbas 2000: 774). Little attention has been given to the complexity of the tensions between colonialism and statelessness in studies of ‘cultural memory’, which, in Jan Assman’s (2008: 109) sense of the term, stretches across historical, mythical and cultural time, making it an important baseline for cultural identity. Western Memory Studies, in its earlier years, analysed cultural memory primarily in relation to the nation state (Erll and Rigney 2018) and it was not until the mid-2000s that the field reconceptualized memories as ‘travelling’ (Erll 2011: 4–18), cosmopolitan (Levy and Sznaider 2010), globalized (Assman and Conrad 2010), transcultural (Bond and Rapson 2014) and

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trans-nationalized (Erll and Rigney 2018). Yet, these Western and largely Anglo-centric mobility paradigms remain troubled by Western-Chinese cultural memories of 1930s and 1940s Jewish refugees in Shanghai (Zhuang and Erll 2014). Memories of the Jewish community from that period in Shanghai are complicated by being positioned betwixt and between identities and experiences of Western colonialism, historical Jewish identity, Japanese occupation and the Communist Revolution. Jewish people started to arrive in Shanghai after the first Opium War in 1842, fleeing European and Russian antisemitism, with new waves of antisemitism and subsequent Nazism in the 1930s leading to Jews taking refuge until the end of the Second World War in the European Concessions of Shanghai (Pan 2019; Ristaino 2001). As in other colonized countries in Asia, while Jews arrived having lost their loved ones, their professions and their homes, they were at the same time unusually privileged as Europeans in a ‘racialized hierarchy of “exotic” non-Western, colonial spaces’ (Das 2018: np). In Willens’ (2010) Statelesss in Shanghai, memories of food materialize some of the contradictory experiences of Jewish people between the colonizers and the colonized, the nation and diaspora, between citizenship and statelessness. I set out to show in this chapter that Willens routinely recounts memories of being stateless in Shanghai through a synaesthetic drawing together of her recollections of food, of her family’s privileged colonial position, and of the eventual loss of that position. By assembling the fragrances, tastes, preparation and consumption of food from her childhood, her youth and her return visit in adulthood to Shanghai, Willens evokes for both herself and for her readers what Katherine Swancutt, in the introduction to this volume, refers to as the ‘conceptual, material and sensorial qualities’ of memories. Seen in this light, Willens reflects upon food, statelessness and even her efforts to remake her cultural identity in the face of what might otherwise have been its imminent loss through a process that I propose here to call ‘metabolizing memories’.

Metabolizing Memories The crafting of food memories within Willens’ memoir, I suggest, metabolizes memories in a way that transforms her difficult personal memories into cultural memory. My analytical metaphor of ‘metabolizing memories’ builds on Jean Seaton’s (2009) idea of ‘metabolizing’ identities to express the ways in which people publicly express their relationships to nationality. The idea of the analytical metaphor within memory studies is developed by Jessica Rapson in her work in the American South in which she uses ‘refining memory’ as the guiding idea to ‘bring attention to the hidden memories of slave labour as well as the process of segregation since the process of

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refining sugar to make it white involves separation’ (Rapson 2018: 1–2). I use ‘metabolizing memory’ similarly as a guiding metaphor for the ways in which personal experiences that may have been difficult to digest, that is to process, assimilate or express within communicative memory, are transformed into public memory through a repeated mnemonic theme, metonym or trope within artistic or cultural expression. In Willens’ memoir, food memories are frequently served with detailed stories of shopping for food, different culinary arts and a variety of manners and foodways, thus offering a rich foci for cultural memory analysis. Food – its lack or abundance, its sourcing and cooking, its serving and eating, its gift and exchange, its digestion and indigestion – is both essential and commonplace to all human experience and forms some of our earliest and lasting memories (Holtzman 2006). Wherever human beings travel to or settle in, they find or grow food, often domesticating and raising animals that they kill, cook and eat. And in retelling stories of settlement and movement, they tend to remember vividly how food was adapted, remixed and remade (Rozin and Gohar 2011). Food materializes and dematerializes practices and encounters between cultures and identities, acting as a metonym for understanding migratory memories (Holtzman 2006). Food thus involves a complex mnemonic exchange, leading to the ingestion of experiences that cross the inside/outside boundaries of the self, as well as the self and the other with the meal or food changing and losing its original state and form. How then do food memories metabolize the displacements and continuities of mnemonic exchange between the West and China? More specifically what do they reveal in terms of the experience of being without nationality or citizenship within a colonial enclave as with the stateless Jewish community in Shanghai?

Nationality, Citizenship and Statelessness Ideas of nationality, citizenship and statelessness have different aetiologies within and outside of China. Within Western history they have their origins in ancient Greece and Rome in which citizens of a city-state, according to Aristotle, were required to fulfil seven criteria for citizenship that included age, class, nationality, nation, property, profession and sex. It was only with the development of the nation state in the eighteenth century that the citizen became defined in relation to only one state (Li and Wu 1999: 157). In China, although the word citizen emerged about two thousand years ago, meaning ‘a person who worked for, and would be protected by, the state or emperor’, the Western concept of citizenship was largely absent from law (Li and Wu 1999: 158). Even with the ‘modern notion of citizenship’ in the Law

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of Election of the People’s Republic of China in March 1953, there have been effectively ‘three notions of the political subject: “people”, nationals and citizens’ (Li and Wu 1999: 158). Most people do not have to think about their nationality since it is normally granted by the state through meeting one or more requirements. If a person is born into a particular territory, then they have the right of citizenship of that country under what is termed jus soli – the law of the soil. Or the person acquires or inherits citizenship through one or more of their biological parents under what is termed jus sanguinis – the law of blood. In addition, in most countries it is possible for a person to acquire citizenship through ‘naturalization’. At the international level, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 15) adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948 made nationality a human right and states that ‘no-one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his (sic) nationality nor denied the right to change his (sic) nationality’ (United Nations 1948). This implicit legal recognition of statelessness was ‘motivated by the impulse to respond to the atrocities committed during the Second World War, among them mass denationalizations and huge population movements’ (Goris, Harrington and Kohn 2009: 4). However, when the UN Convention for Refugees was first created in 1951 it did not include any definition for those who were stateless. Recognition of statelessness was only ratified in international law in 1954, following the need to identify those whose status was not covered by the 1951 Convention. Statelessness in international law nowadays refers to a person who ‘has no national home, and is considered without a national identity or citizenship’ (ibid., 4). While some refugees may be stateless, not all stateless people are refugees. In many cases, people who are stateless have never crossed an international border. The prime reason for a person to lose their nationality is as a result of racial or ethnic discrimination – as well as gender-biased citizenship laws. In addition, though, there are those who are unable to prove their nationality or who ‘despite documentation, are denied access to many human rights that other citizens enjoy’ (ibid., 4). In the case of the latter, a person may be ‘stateless in practice’ and as a result cannot rely on the state for protection (ibid., 4). In China, nationality was something constructed through the legal system as well as through language, culture and territorial loyalty. Until the 1909 Nationality Law people born in China were required to demonstrate perpetual allegiance to China, which included not emigrating beyond China’s borders. However, towards the end of the nineteenth century this began to change: ‘This doctrine of perpetual allegiance, tolerable as it might have been at a time when nations were sufficient unto themselves, was incompatible with the adventurous and commercial spirit of the nineteenth century’ (Tsai 1910).

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After the first Opium War of 1839–1842, large numbers of Chinese citizens began to emigrate from China to seek what they considered to be a better life for themselves. Nonetheless, despite these changes, China did not change its law on citizenship in the nineteenth century, believing that to do so would be against the principle of divine right. Instead, it just ‘let matters drift’ resulting in an anachronism in relation to citizens who moved to European countries (Tsai 1910).

Shanghai’s Jewish History and Memory After the first Opium War waged by the British State, the city of Shanghai was colonized by other European States. European powers seized Chinese territories which were termed ‘concessions’ providing Britain and other European countries with trade ports advantageous to them and supported by an infrastructure of European emigrants (Eber 2012). In addition to thousands of Europeans who had officially moved to work and reside in the International Settlement, the city permitted entry to tens of thousands of visa-less refugees in the 1920s and 1930s (Ristaino 2001; Eber 2012). This included many Jewish families forced to move to escape pogroms in Eastern Europe and Russia, White Russians escaping the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and after 1933 Jews escaping Nazi Germany, including its occupied territories after 1938 (Goldstein 2015). These refugees and stateless Jews mingled with Middle Eastern Jews who had started to arrive in Shanghai in the 1840s fleeing earlier pogroms in Europe and Russia (Eber 2012; Goldstein 2015). By 1942 there were around 25–30,000 Jewish residents, both Sephardic and Ashkenazi. In Shanghai about 10 per cent of the non-Chinese population were interned with other ‘enemy nationals’ (Jakubowicz 2009: 101–102). By the outbreak of the Second World War there was a vibrant Jewish refugee community with six synagogues which became part of the Shanghai Jewish ghetto (Gruenberger 1950). After the war Jews sought exit papers and visas to leave China. Most went to Israel, Australia and the US (Iwry 2004; Finnane 1999). The majority of the Chinese Jewish population had migrated abroad by 1959. Jewish homes, cultural buildings and synagogues were then taken over by the Chinese State and turned into public buildings (Pan 2019). In 2007, the Government of Hongkou District in Shanghai restored the Ohel Moshe synagogue to its original architectural style, based on historic drawings in the municipal archives, and opened it as a museum commemorating the Jewish refugees of Shanghai (Wang 2017; Pan 2019). In the twenty-first century, digital technologies afforded new kinds of access and mobilization of archival stories and memories about and by the Chinese-Jewish population (Jakubowicz 2009).

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Modern Shanghai might suggest itself then as an historically emerging cosmopolis – a utopian transnational place where people can move across the usual boundaries required in national life. However, as Belinda Kong suggests, Shanghai ‘presents a complication’ (2009: 280). On the one hand it has a cosmopolitan reputation yet ‘its status as a modern metropolis (literally a “mother city” replete with imperial overtones) originated precisely at the historical moment of its colonisation, when it was forcibly opened to Western trade and settlement’ (Kong 2009: 280). Mnemonically, Shanghai is a city that ‘brings together location and globality but simultaneously reminds us that a world city may emerge, not from civilizational self-development or democratic consent, but from military and imperial conquest’ (Kong 2009: 280). Once at the periphery of cultural memory, accounts of Jewish exile in Shanghai have, in recent years, undergone a degree of uneven globalization through digitization. Eyewitness accounts written during the 1930s and 1940s rendered through the material memories of letters, diaries, newspapers and written testimonies have been re-mediated and further materialized through a range of artistic forms including novels, films, museums exhibitions and comic books. These bring into global view accounts of the Jewish community expanding and settling in Shanghai between the two world wars (Zhuang and Erll 2014). Shanghai has since been interpreted through its sense of futurity dialectically bound up with memory (Lagerkvist 2013) as well as the fractured sense of multiplicity and mobility in accounts by both Chinese and Western authors born into Shanghai’s cosmopolitan colonialism (Kong 2009: 281). Liliane Willens’ Stateless in Shanghai (2010), although part of the wider emergence of memoirs by the Jewish diaspora from Shanghai (see Tobias 1999; Heppner 1993), is distinct because Willens was born in Shanghai and her memoir tells the story of inherited national displacements combined with colonial privilege, as well as of a navigating between multiple national identities, histories, cultures and languages. Born in the French Concession of Shanghai, Willens eventually learns that her father obscures the memory of her Russian identity and feeds her instead a false memory of a EuropeanRomanian identity. It is only when it becomes apparent that the family should leave Communist China after the Second World War that it becomes clear that in fact Willens and her family are stateless. The memoir begins by recounting how Liliane Willens’ father was born in 1894 in Radomyshel, then part of the Russian Empire known as the Pale of Settlement created by Catherine the Great in which the one million Jewish population was frequently subjected to violent antisemitic pogroms from their non-Jewish neighbours. The violence led to her father fleeing to Vladivostok in 1916, to Harbin in Manchuria in 1919, and then to Shanghai in

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1920, where he claimed he was a Romanian national. Liliane’s mother, we are told, was born in 1902 in Novosibirsk in Siberia: her great-grandfather, having served twenty-five years in the Russian army, was allowed to live outside of the Pale of Settlement (Willens 2010: 8). The food stories in Willens’ memoir begin with the inherited memory of Willens’ great-grandfather’s bakery, which they had to sell before fleeing to Harbin in China because of the Russian Revolution. Unable to make a living baking in Harbin, they moved again to Shanghai. Then in 1921 they lost their Russian citizenship because the Soviets ‘denationalised all the Russians who fled the Rodina (Motherland) during and immediately after the Revolution’ (Willens 2010: 8). At the same time, in Shanghai her parents experienced for the first time living without being subject to antisemitic laws or prejudice: ‘Here it was the Chinese who were being treated as second-class citizens in their own country. Once settled, stateless refugees would often act in the same discriminatory manner towards the Chinese as did the treaty power’s nationals’ (Willens 2010: 17). The stateless place of exile in Shanghai for Willens is thus the home where she was born in 1927 and where she subsequently spent her childhood and young adulthood until 1951. Within Willens’ memoir, stories of food feature regularly. Studies by John S. Allen (2012) and Deborah Lupton (1994) suggest that it is through memories of food that people craft cultural tastes and complex identities. Both food and memory are what Jon D. Holtzman characterizes as ‘a floating signifier, albeit in different ways’: food is a multi-layered and multi-dimensional subject, while cultural memory likewise may range from literary accounts to the personal nostalgia of the ‘tea-soaked biscuit’ (2006: 362). Stories about food articulate the tensions between local, ethnic and national memory cultures as well as diasporic and mixed or hybrid memories. As discussed in the chapters by Wei Luan (this volume) and Yejun Zou (this volume), food (or the lack of it) relate to the mnemonics of a person’s embodied identity. But in addition, Willens uses her food memories to help process, or ‘metabolize’, the ways in which the usual roots/routes to citizenship through blood, soil or naturalization become at times blocked or complicated by her statelessness. For example, Jewish dishes that might in other situations be remembered as being inherited through ‘blood’ or family are recalled on a material, sensorial and even synaesthetic level through descriptions of how they were prepared and served by her Chinese cook and servants. Food stories that otherwise might be reminders of a much loved homeland are crafted in terms of her family’s displacement and fear of contamination from European and Chinese national soil. Here, then, the food and culinary arts often acquired as part of a process of naturalization by a host nationality or national culture are absent. In the next section I analyse Willens’ food memories and how she draws upon these to metabolize

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the absences of cultural identity brought about by statelessness relating to blood, soil and naturalization.

Blood Early on in Willens’ autobiography there is a black and white photograph tellingly entitled ‘Birthdays with Amah’s’ (2010: 32). As the title of the photograph suggests, citizenship acquired through one’s parents or through ‘blood’ is complicated by the fact that in Shanghai, as in many other British and European colonies in China and elsewhere, the children of colonizers were raised by local inhabitants. In China it was poor peasant women or ‘Amahs’ who came to the city and lived in cramped conditions in colonizers’ homes and who did the affective and practical caring, including shopping for food, feeding and eating with the colonizers’ children. Thus, the photograph shows European children celebrating a child’s day of birth. Rather than sitting on the laps of their blood mothers, the white colonial children sit uneasily on the laps of their Amahs around a table laden with European style baked cakes with cream and decorations served with tea in teacups on a white tablecloth with silver cutlery. On the right hand-side we see two European mothers and at the back a European mother and father. They stand uninvolved, observing the scene, at a distance from their children. Willens extends this sense of alienation from her blood mother through recollections of shopping for and eating Chinese street food with her Old Amah. The intimate moments she shares are not memories of eating European food or Jewish food with her mother, but memories of sampling Chinese and Shanghainese food sold by street vendors and in the local markets. She describes how in the 1920s and 1930s, when she was around the age of six, she would accompany Old Amah on her shopping trips. They would pass ‘the moo dong man’ who collects human waste in wooden buckets (Willens 2010: 30). She recollects how she would look forward to these outings because ‘old Amah’ would bite off small pieces of meat, fish and baked dough and give them to Willens to eat. With this, the story told then is of the Chinese Amah’s saliva literally mixed up with the food that the child takes, chews, swallows and ingests. The descriptions are mouth-watering, detailed and rich: When old Amah had a few extra copper coins to spare, she bought a piece of dough fried in sizzling oil which she blew upon before handing it to me. She would also share with me breakfast food, small da bing pancake and the you tiao, strings of dough fried in boiling oil and then twirled by the vendor into an elongated shape.… When Old Amah was feeling extra generous, she bought and shared with me the pyramid-shaped zongzi filled with glutinous rice and wrapped in palm leaves, which I munched with delight. For dessert, which she bought me

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when I nagged her sufficiently, there were the sticky yuan xiao balls of rice covered with sesame seeds. (Willens 2010: 31)

Food memories in other studies have been shown to be seasonal and include prospective memories with the anticipation of eating again a particular seasonal delicacy or feast related food, with the repetition and rituals associated with the creation and consumption of certain foods and drinking events (Sutton 2000 and 2001). With Willens’ food stories, these root the seasons and changes of the year predominantly through Chinese rather than European or Jewish festivals: ‘I especially enjoyed the Chinese mid-autumn festival since old Amah would always buy me dousha bao, a cake filled with mashed sweet red beans that she knew I preferred to the cakes and sweets we ate at teatime in our home’ (Willens 2010: 31). As the narrative progresses, Willens recalls teenage adventures on her bicycle particularly in the autumn and winter, ‘to buy sweet potatoes and chestnuts. When the weather started getting warm we purchased sugarcane, enjoying the sweet taste of juice and spitting out the husks as we cycled to our respective homes’ (Willens 2010: 77). David E. Sutton (2000 and 2001) has shown that people remember temporally and geographically distant events through what they recall they were eating at the time and in that place, with embodied and sensorial experiences constructed through both the absence and presence of a given food. This synaesthetic experience becomes evident when Willens is forced to leave Shanghai and finally obtains her exit papers to travel by train across China, at which point she realizes that the forbidden Chinese food that she loved and secretly ate with her Amah is particular to the city of Shanghai (Willens 2010: 261). Food in other studies has been shown to validate and maintain ethnic identities (Brown and Mussell 1984, Comito 2001, Douglas 1984, Gabbacia 1998, Gillespie 1984, Humphrey and Humphrey 1988, Kalčik 1984, Lockwood and Lockwood 2000, Powers and Powers 1984, Shortridge and Shortridge 1998). However, as Holtzman (2006) notes, there is a problem in that such accounts rely uncritically on ideas of cultural resistance to acculturation. Thus, while Willens’ food memories seem to show her acculturation of Chinese culture, they are also the means for coming to terms with a number of contradictions arising from her statelessness within a colonial concession. It is useful here to expand on this point. Migrant memories often include food deprivation (Diner 2003) but Willens’ experience of nurture and repletion through Chinese food with her Amah is juxtaposed with memories not of her own deprivation but of Chinese peoples’ hunger: as they eat, Old Amah shoos away the starving street children. ‘I thought it was silly of them to stare at me while I was eating and wondered why their mothers did not

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buy them food’ (Willens 2010: 32). Further on, Willens recalls ‘the sight of near-starving adults and children in the streets not far from the warm and safe enclave of our home in the French Concession’ (Willens 2010: 35), with beggars a ‘permanent fixture’ alongside the disturbing image of Chinese mothers with emaciated breasts trying to suckle their starving infants (Willens 2010: 37). The ‘emaciated breast’ of the Chinese mother is a reminder of what Orlando Patterson terms the ‘natal alienation’ created through the destruction of maternal bonds that are a feature of relationships within colonization (Patterson 1982: 7). Willens recollects that her consumption of Chinese street food acquired with her Amah was a secret. The Chinese treats are not validated through being bought openly from the family shopping allowance but are purchased from Old Amah’s own money. These memories of secret treats with her Amah are recalled, and I suggest, ultimately metabolized through Willens’ own realization that Old Amah perhaps paid for the Chinese delicacies out of her own money because Willens’ parents forbade her to eat food made in ‘such unsanitary conditions’ (2010: 32). She then confesses that she never told her own mother about eating these forbidden delicacies because if she had done so, then her trips into the markets and streets beyond the colonial concessions would have ended. The shopping for and eating of Chinese delicacies and food thus acts as a cultural metonym through which memories of statelessness – the displacement of European citizenship and the absence of Chinese citizenship – are recalled, recounted and effectively metabolized by Willens, who invites readers to imaginatively empathize with her own experience. Old Amah’s choice to take her on market trips and buy treats for her with her own money suggests that Old Amah envisaged herself as a ‘dry mother’ (ganniang 干娘) or godmother to Willens, treating her within Chinese custom as she would her own daughter. At the same time, however, Willens is not and can never be a Chinese citizen jus sanguinis – by blood.

Soil Memories of food within Willens’ memoir are also associated in complex ways with soil and land, which is suggestive of the loss or impossibility of gaining citizenship through being born on a particular national territory, land or ‘soil’. Soil in Willens’ narrative is not remembered as something that food is grown from, or that provides her with cultural or mnemonic roots. Rather, soil is recalled as a source of contamination, potential poisoning and disease. When Willens describes how she eats at street vendors with her Amah, she says ‘We slurped the soup from the same bowl and spoon’ (Willens 2010: 33). Yet this intimate pleasure is followed with a recollection of the Chinese street vendors’ equipment and culinary practices in which the

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spoon and bowl had been ‘washed earlier in grayish water with a soiled rag the vendor dried on his sleeve’ (Willens 2010: 33). The vivid descriptions of eating with her Old Chinese Amah or dry mother are juxtaposed with recollections of European food as a bland, colourless list of items: ‘The food I ate in the marketplace was much tastier than the meat, chicken, potatoes, vegetables and soup we ate at home’ (Willens 2010: 32). European food is associated with chewing and taking her time: ‘I was always told to eat slowly’ (Willens 2010: 32). As Sebastian Abrahamsson notes, ‘Food can be ‘wolfed down or savoured slowly; and it can be ingested, digested and metabolized at different speeds in relation to an eating body’ (2014: 1). Meals are recalled as served on a table with linen, crockery and metal cutlery and associated with the meticulous ritual removal of all external evidence of the meal entering the body: I was always told to ‘wipe my mouth with the napkin’ (Willens 2010: 32). Fear of contamination through or by food for the stateless Willens, then, is not only remembered in relation to Chinese food but also European food. The contamination from the Chinese soil that the food grows in, however, is developed further through recollections of how ingredients sourced from land near Shanghai were prepared by their Chinese cook, Shao Wang. Willens recalls how he was required daily to wash the locally grown vegetables and fruit with a strong solution of potassium permanganate ‘to cleanse them properly’ because ‘all had been fertilized in the countryside with human manure’ (Willens 2010: 38). Potassium permanganate was an imported chemical compound routinely used within European countries from the mid-1850s as disinfectant: in this case it removes Chinese ‘soil’ as both land and faecal matter. Similarly, the water is recollected as undrinkable and heavily chlorinated, requiring first to be ‘boiled’ and then cooled in the refrigerator (Willens 2010: 38). The memories thus articulate a well-worn colonial household obsession with keeping the dirt and disease of the colonized at bay (Leong-Salobir 2011). The epitome of this contamination is the story of herself as a child trying to copy the Chinese children going to the toilet on the street. However, unlike Chinese children, her trousers are not split on the backside and she defecates in them, thereby soiling herself with the indigestible waste products of her secret consumption of Chinese food. In the final part of the memoir, Willens describes returning in the late 1990s to Shanghai and her experience of vivid moments of synaesthesia and gustatory nostalgia: ‘vendors still crowded the streets selling the food I had always enjoyed eating, especially the crispy, oily da bing and you tiao. When I bit into the latter after so many years, the aroma lured me back in time to the voice of Old Amah’ (Willens 2010: 295). Just as Benoît Vermander (this volume) and Yejun Zou (this volume) demonstrate, the significance of nostalgia has been shown to provide a mne-

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monic link to a lost time and place. In Willens’ case, this lost time and place might be reached through the consumption of particular foods (Sutton 2000 and 2001). Gustatory nostalgia is invoked through a variety of materialities, ‘ranging from the sensory clues the shops evoke, the cultural mnemonics of the commodities purchased, and how the goods acquired allow for practices that foster historically validated forms of identity’ (Holtzman 2006: 367). Food memories become the nexus for diasporic identities in the context of globalization (Ray 2004), such that persons recall, recount and imaginatively identify with stories of gustatory nostalgia. By sharing nostalgic stories of food, persons open up social spaces in which they can reflect upon, and metabolize, their longing for a time or place that they had previously experienced. Willens in this case is also able to contrast recollections of dirt, contamination and poverty with both the recent shift in China towards a perceived cleanliness and the absence of poverty or hunger sampled from her secure and no longer stateless position as an American citizen. She thus recounts that on her return trip to Shanghai as an adult, years after she had left China, ‘the vendors now wore white cotton caps and clean smocks over jeans and T-shirts and cooked food at much cleaner stalls than in the past’ (Willens 2010: 295).

Naturalization Naturalization is the third way in which a displaced individual or migrant may acquire citizenship. Naturalization requires not just residency but acquisition of particular knowledge and understanding of the culture that one resides and, indeed, cooks and eats in. While the acquisition of citizenship through naturalization in some states might include a civics or loyalty test and an oath of allegiance, in terms of food, naturalization involves acquiring knowledge of local produce, as well as the skills and manners to cook, serve and eat dishes within the culture of one’s adopted home. Willens’ experience of growing up in Shanghai does not lead to citizenship through naturalization and this is articulated through her recollections of denaturalization in relation to foodways. When Willens recalls being on the street with her Amah, she describes ‘picking up’ ‘native habits’ that include ‘spitting sunflower seeds in the streets, belching loudly after gulping down my bowl of rice’ (Willens 2010: 34). Gulping food noisily and consuming quickly may have been considered rude in Willens’ household, but this is also considered to be rude within China. As Eugene Cooper suggests, even on the street the mode is to think of others: ‘At the macro level of China’s great tradition, one finds such behaviour characteristic of the chun-tze, the individual skilled in the li (etiquette, rites, and ceremonies)’ (1986: 183). Willens’ choice of language –

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‘spitting’, ‘belching’ and ‘gulping’ – suggests an awareness that street food may be consumed through Chinese ways of eating (2010: 34). Yet her language also connotes a partial knowledge, a de-naturalized colonial mindset that overlays disgust with relish and thereby ‘others’ the manner of Chinese food consumption in relation to the ‘refinements’ of the West. This of course raises the question of how far Willens identified empathetically with, or metabolized, her statelessness as a child and youth in Shanghai. Although Willens was born in Shanghai and lived there into her twenties, her stories of food and foodways reveal that she never acquired the skills of Chinese cooking or, indeed, cooking of any kind including that of European, Jewish or Russian cuisine. She does not even make a picnic herself or lay a table. Her memories of all culinary arts and surrounding food cultures are thus one important key to how she comes to identify, and ultimately metabolize, the impossibility of citizenship through any kind of naturalization. Other studies suggest how migrant food memories construct ‘traditions’ that may in fact be a relatively recent adoption (Tuchman and Levine 1993) or may be crafted in new environments by migrant communities or for migrant communities with particular adaptations by a proxy local chef or cook around the absence or presence of particular ingredients, skills or technologies (Abarca 2004). Willens tells us that her mother, because her father insisted, kept a partially kosher home including going to a shop that sold meats cleaned under the supervision of a rabbi. For Passover ‘Cook and Old Amah would have to clean all the cupboards and replace all the china, cutlery, tablecloth and napkins with those set aside for Passover week’ (Willens 2010: 60). It is the Chinese cook Shao Wang who is taught by her mother to create Jewish feasts (Willens 2010: 60) while Willens and her sister remain ignorant of how to cook Jewish food, with no culturally inherited culinary skills from their mother. As the narrative progresses through the late 1930s, it is memories of the colonizers’ European and sometimes American foodstuffs that are described, the latter perhaps prefiguring her later acquisition of US citizenship (Willens 2010: 85). Willens recalls children’s parties with ‘ice-cream, candies and cake’ (2010: 58) and the refined cakes served at tea parties in the homes of French, Swiss, Italian, stateless Russian and other European nationalities. Her mother would make ‘her mouth-watering cream cakes while Shao Wang baked his celebrated sponge cake’ (Willens 2010: 59). Yet it is not her mother but Shao Wang who would spend days scouring the market for exactly the right ingredients. After the guests arrived, ‘when my mother indicated the guests were ready’, it was Shao Wang who ‘carefully poured the tea into delicate little cups, adding a slice of lemon, and then cut the cake, which we children later ate’ (Willens 2010: 59).

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Stories of food may signify the memory of the loss of a place or time that the individual has not directly suffered (Appadurai 1996: 78). Thus, Willens describes how her mother taught Shao Wang to prepare Russian dishes including ‘zakushi’ and ‘pirochki’ (meat in an oily dough) and ‘pelmeni, small dumplings with meat or vegetable’, a native dish of Siberia (Willens 2010: 60). While dumplings are found in many cultures and there is a sense in which Shao Wang would have found the preparation of these familiar, the story reveals the contradiction that it was the Chinese cook who was ‘naturalized’ into the Jewish Russian household and food of the French concession, rather than Willens and her family becoming acclimated to Chinese culture through Chinese foodways. This imperialist relationship between the stateless Russian Jewish family and their Chinese cook is recounted as having undergone major changes in the late 1930s as increasing numbers of Jewish refugees from Austria and Germany arrived in Shanghai. Although Willens remembers that there were parties and dinners, she also recalls that her father regularly drove her mother to the refugee processing centres to donate ‘foodstuffs and clothing’ (2010: 116). As she learns that the story of her Romanian national identity is a false narrative made up by her parents, she saves up to go to the French bakery to buy croissants, baguettes and chocolate. ‘Since I realised now that I was stateless, the French Concession became my country’ (Willens 2010: 117). After the Japanese takeover of Shanghai in 1937 her father loses his job; Shao Wang is let go and her mother supports the family through sewing clothes with Lao Papa, a Chinese tailor. Her memories change to recollections of directly experienced hunger, food scarcity and food charity, which unfold in tandem with memories of stitching at home with Lao Papa who shares with a hungry Willens his simple lunch of rice, vegetables and fish. As the war progresses, the lack of food in Willens’ memoir serves as a cultural metonym for the removal of any remaining state protection, including any protection by European colonizers. Willens’ memories thus become those of poor nutrition, of toxic fumes from charcoal stoves, and witnessing others’ starvation. In 1942 Shanghai residents are given ration cards and line up on a daily basis to buy bread (Willens 2010: 136). The family can no longer run the Western refrigerator since electricity is curtailed to a few hours a day. Gas for cooking is restricted which leads to her mother buying a Chinese hibachi charcoal stove, which in summer they cook with outside and in winter they cook with inside, opening the window to let out the acrid smoke: ‘The priority for all residents was to purchase rationed food before it disappeared from the specially designated stores. Rice, oil and sugar could be purchased illegally on the black market but at much higher prices’ (Willens 2010: 143). Willens recalls the family’s meagre rations with the memory

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of bundles of dead babies on the streets: in Shanghai around 300 children starved to death each night. Much like Luan (this volume) shows in her discussion of Mo Yan’s novel Big Breasts and Wide Hips, Willens invites her readership to empathetically identify not only with the history and public memories in China of the lack of food, but with the often dramatic experiences of survival that accompany them. By February 1943 a Proclamation required all stateless refugees to register for an internment camp (Willens 2010: 145). Most of Willens’ friends and their families are interned but the Willens family remain free since they had entered Shanghai before 1937. Her Australian Uncle Ralph, and his daughter are, however, quickly interned. Thus, as with Willens’ memories of the starvation of others on the streets, her memories of internment are close but not actually her own: she hears from relatives the complaint of perpetual hunger, ‘meals being limited to a bowl of gruel, a piece of brown bread, rice with cabbage or beans, and tea brewed from overused leaves’ (Willens 2010: 147). They celebrate VE day with iced water and tea. And after Japan surrenders on 15 August 1945, American B-29s airdrop food packages at the internment camps. Quickly, Willens’ family recommences a hectic social life of ‘tiffins’, luncheons, teas and dinners, one highlight of which is a trip aboard HMS Euryalus with a story of food abundance that includes a ‘table laden with scones, biscuits, marmalade, and pineapple juice’ (Willens 2010: 192). When she returns from the internment camp her aunt remarks how strange it was to use china and silverware and to sit at a table with a cloth (Willens 2010: 179). Her memories of Chinese food also become more vivid again: in the celebrations for Chinese New Year Willens remembers buying chestnuts and ‘da bing and you tiao, as well as sweet rice wrapped in palm leaves and buns coloured red for the occasion’ (Willens 2010: 189). At twenty, she admits that despite the War she is in a ‘cocoon in the comfortable last vestiges of colonialism’ (Willens 2010: 195). After she gains her exit visa and leaves Communist China for Japan, Willens lives at the YMCA in Tokyo. She recounts no stories of Japanese food, but rather pre-figures her US citizenship through recollecting how she often ate in an American restaurant across the road from the hostel and how she ‘often purchased the latest delicacies from the United States and other countries from speciality stores reserved for foreigners only’ (Willens 2010: 269). For the first time in the entire memoir Willens describes the purchase and preservation of her own food in the communal refrigerator and describes cooking for herself: while it is only the boiling of water on a hot plate, this food memory simultaneously evokes the end of statelessness and her future American citizenship.

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Conclusion Memories of food and foodways feature prominently in Willens’ memoir, and in analysing some of these, I have sought to highlight some of the contradictory experiences of statelessness for Jewish people in colonial Shanghai. Willens’ stories of food reveal difficult personal or communicative memories. Her stories also recount the experience of holding multiple and contradictory cultural identities as a stateless person that are sometimes fragmented and difficult to personally digest: these include her experience of discovering the false memory of her Romanian nationality, being part of the Jewish diaspora, living within a European concession, and being raised by Chinese servants while attending a French school. Stories of food in the memoir act as metonyms for complex memories of statelessness and the absence and impossibility of citizenship through blood, soil or naturalization as a Jewish person in Shanghai. The exploration of cultural memories of Jewish Shanghai also provides insights into the relatively unexplored tensions between colonialism and statelessness, which is a lacuna within narrative and memory studies. Attention over the past decade has been given to narratives and memories that may be connected, move, travel and migrate beyond national boundaries, thereby leading to cosmopolitan, globalized and transcultural memories. But my analysis of cultural memories within the complex and multi-layered city of Shanghai suggests the need to pay more attention to narratives that invite readers to imaginatively identify with, and indeed metabolize, the personal, social and cultural memories of others who have found themselves trapped by historical conflicts and unable to move, with no citizenship and no clear national identity, despite the privileges they enjoyed through colonial occupation. Historically, not just in China but in many countries of the world, Britain and other European countries left complex colonial legacies from occupation that involved privileged economic concessions for a minority, as well as forced migration and displacement. We might find in these places a collision of cultures, a mixing and intermingling of hybridized identities and memories that are easy to digest, that move. Yet we also need to be attentive, as this chapter suggests, to the fact that there will also be narratives and communicative memories that were clearly difficult to digest. It is through cultural memory forms – such as the memoir – that the complex legacies between Britain and China may be shared and metabolized into a transnational body politic. Anna Reading, PhD, is Director of the Arts and Humanities Research Institute and Professor of Culture and Creative Industries at King’s College, University of London, UK and Honorary Visiting Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia. She is a

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leading scholar in cultural memory studies. She has published seven books, with five authored and edited books examining biographical and cultural memories, including:  Polish Women, Solidarity and Feminism  (Palgrave Macmillan, 1992), The Social Inheritance of the Holocaust: Gender, Culture and Memory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), Gender and Memory in the Globital Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), Save As…Digital Memories (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), and Cultural Memories of Nonviolent Struggles: Powerful Times (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). She is an editor of the international journal Media, Culture and Society. She also writes plays, with seven scripts performed in the UK, Finland, Poland, US and Ireland. Her current work includes a research project on migration, new technologies and memory partnering with migration and refugee museums around the world.

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17 May 2019 from https://www.fmreview.org/sites/fmr/files/FMRdown loads/en/statelessness/goris-harrington-kohn.pdf. Gruenberger, Felix. 1950. ‘The Jewish Refugees in Shanghai’, Jewish Social Studies 12(4): 329–48. Heppner, E.G. 1993. Shanghai Refuge: A Memoir of the World War II Jewish Ghetto. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Holtzman, Jon D. 2006. ‘Food and Memory’, Annual Review of Anthropology 35: 361–78. Humphrey, Theodore C. and Lin T. Humphrey (eds). 1988. ‘We Gather Together’: Food and Festival in American Life. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Res. Iwry, Samuel. 2004. To Wear the Dust of War: From Bialstok to Shanghai to the Promised Land: An Oral History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jakubowicz, Andrew. 2009. ‘Remembering and Recovering Shanghai: Seven Jewish Families [Re] connect in Cyberspace’, in Joanne Garde-Hansen, Andrew Hoskins and Anna Reading (eds), Save As…Digital Memories. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 96–114. ______. 2018. ‘Stopped in Flight: Shanghai and the Polish Jewish Refugees of 1941’, Holocaust Studies  24(3): 287–304.  DOI:  10.1080/17504902 .2017.1387845. Kalčik, Susan. 1984. ‘Ethnic Foodways in America: Symbol and Performance of Identity’, in Linda Keller Brown and Kay Mussell (eds), Ethnic and Regional Foodways in the United States: The Performance of Group Identity. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, pp. 37–65. Kong, Belinda. 2009. ‘Shanghai Biopolitans: Wartime Colonial Cosmopolis in Eileen Chang’s “Love in a Fallen City” and J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun’, Journal of Narrative Theory 39(3): 280–304. Lagerkvist, Amanda. 2013. Media and Memory in New Shanghai: Western Performances of Futures Past. Basingstoke. Palgrave. Leong-Salobir, Cecilia. 2011. Food Culture in Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire. London: Routledge. Levy, Daniel and Natan Sznaider. 2010. Human Rights and Memory. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Li, Buyun and Yuzhang Wu. 1999. ‘The Concept of Citizenship in the People’s Republic of China’, in Alastair Davidson and Kathleen Weekley (eds), Globalisation and Citizenship in the Asia-Pacific. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 157–68. Lockwood, William G. and Yvonne R. Lockwood. 2000. ‘Finnish American Milk Products in the Northwoods’, in Harlan Walker (ed.), Milk: Beyond the Dairy (Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 1999 Proceedings). Oxford: Prospect, pp. 232–39. Lupton, Deborah. 1994. ‘Food, Memory, and Meaning: the Symbolic and Social Nature of Food’, The Sociological Review 42(4): 664–87.

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Pan, Guang. 2019. A Study of Jewish Refugees in China (1933–1945): History, Theories and the Chinese Pattern. Singapore: Springer with Shanghai Jiao Tong University Press. Patterson, Orlando. 1982. Slavery and Social Death. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Powers, William K. and Marla M.N. Powers. 1984. ‘Metaphysical Aspects of an Oglala Food System’, in Mary Douglas (ed.), Food in the Social Order: Studies of Food and Festivities in Three American Communities. New York: Russell Sage, pp. 40–94. Rapson, Jessica K. 2018. ‘Refining Memory: Sugar Cane, Oil and Plantation Tourism on Louisiana’s Rover Road’, Memory Studies (May): 1–15. Retrieved on 20 June 2019 from https://doi.org/10.1177/175069801876 6384. Ray, Krishnendu. 2004. The Migrant’s Table: Meals and Memories in Bengali-American Households. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Reading, Anna. 2002. The Social Inheritance of the Holocaust: Gender, Culture and Memory. Basingstoke: Palgrave. ______. 2016. Gender and Memory in the Globital Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Ristaino, Marcia Reynders. 2001. Port of Last Resort: The Diaspora Communities of Shanghai. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Rothberg, Michael. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Roy, Parama. 2002. ‘Reading Communities and Culinary Communities: The Gastropoetics of the South Asian Diaspora’, Positions 10(2): 471–502. Rozin, Paul and Dina Gohar. 2011. The Pleasures and Memory of Food and Meals: Handbook of Behaviour, Food and Nutrition. New York: Springer. Seaton, Jean. 2009. ‘The BBC and Metabolising Britishness: Cultural Patriotism’, The Political Quarterly 78(1): 72–85. Shortridge, Barbara G. and James R. Shortridge (eds). 1998. The Taste of American Place: A Reader on Regional and Ethnic Foods. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Sutton, David. 2000. ‘Whole Foods: Revitalization through Everyday Synesthetic Experience’, Anthropology and Humanism 25(2): 120–30. ______. 2001. Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory. London: Berg. Tobias, Sigmund. 1999. Strange Haven: A Jewish Childhood in Wartime Shanghai. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Tsai, Chutung. 1910. ‘The Chinese Nationality Law, 1909’, The American Journal of International Law 4(2): 404–11.

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Tuchman, Gaye and Harry Gene Levine. 1993. ‘New York Jews and Chinese Food: The Social Construction of an Ethnic Pattern’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 22(3): 362–407. United Nations. 1948. ‘Article 15’ in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Retrieved 7 November 2019 from https://www.un.org/en/uni versal-declaration-human-rights/. United Nations News .2018. ‘12 Million’ Stateless People Globally, Warns UNHCR Chief in Call to States for Decisive Action’.  Retrieved 13 November 2018 from https://news.un.org/en/tags/statelessness. Wang, Yu. 2017. ‘The Myth of the “Shanghai Ark” and the Shanghai Refugee Museum’, University of Toronto Journal of Jewish Thought 6: 107–30. Willens, Liliane. 2010. Stateless in Shanghai. Hong Kong: Earnshaw Books. Wimmer, Andreas and Nina Glick Schiller. 2002. ‘Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-State Building, Migration and the Social Sciences’, Global Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs 2(4): 301–34. Zhang, Yanhua and Jian Wang. 2016. Preserving the Shanghai Ghetto: Memories of Jewish Refugees in 1940s China. Los Angeles: Bridge 21 Publications. Zhuang, Wei and Astrid Erll. 2014. ‘Notes from the Periphery of Globalising Memory: the Jewish Exile in Shanghai’, Hagar: Studies in Culture, Polity and Identities 12 (Winter): 150–51.

 Part III

PROPAGATING MEMORIES THROUGH STORYTELLING

6 From Personal Connections to Mutual Trust



Building Memories with the Children of the Chinese Staff of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service

Chihyun Chang

For ordinary Chinese, surviving through the political turmoil from 1937 to 1976 was a difficult task, which makes studying their memories difficult. But for the Chinese staff of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS) and their children, the survival and study of their memories is even more difficult. The Chinese staff of the CMCS usually worked not only for their British superintendents, but for the Collaborationist government and the Nationalist government from 1937 to 1949. Navigating allegiances to various superintendents and governments was no easy task. However, among all of the CMCS staff, the ones who worked at the Weihaiwei station were put into perhaps the most difficult position, as they had to work for the Communists from 1945 to 1946 and for the Nationalists from 1946–1949. Their occupational and life experience brought suspicion from the Communists in China and the Nationalists in Taiwan, which could easily have led to political struggles between these two leading powers after 1949. Both the former Weihaiwei station staff and their children have long chosen to hide memories of their experiences during this period of service. Consequently, the children of the Weihaiwei station staff in particular have only recently

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come to recognize their shared social memory and history, or what would be called their ‘collective memory’ in Maurice Halb-wachs’ (1980 and 1992) sense of the term. However, for modern Chinese historians in the Western world, the CMCS from 1854 to 1949 typified what they consider to be the ethos and culture underpinning China’s modernization, professionalism, cosmopolitanism and political aloofness. Through generations of historians’ research on the CMCS, such as H.B. Morse (1910 and 1918), Stanley Wright (1927, 1935, 1935–1938, 1938, and 1950), John K. Fairbank (1953, with co-edited volumes in 1975 and 1995), Takeshi Hamashita (1989 and 2016), Richard J. Smith (1991), Katherine F. Bruner’s edited volume with Fairbank and Smith (1986), Hans van de Ven (2006 and 2014), and Robert Bickers (2006 and 2008),1 the stories of the CMCS have gradually come to be envisaged as encompassing a very particular cultural memory. However, until recently, this cultural memory was neither known nor shared by the children of the Chinese staff of the CMCS. After political tensions lifted in Taiwan, some of the Chinese staff members who had gone there in 1949 and 1950 wrote their memoirs and autobiographies.2 Yet little has been discovered about the Chinese staff and their children after they chose to stay in China in 1949. In this chapter, I uncover the memories of three former Weihaiwei staff members’ children who now live in America, Taiwan and China, namely those of H. Mei Liu, Ta-cheng Wu and Xizhi Shi,3 whose fathers were Sheng-Tung Liu, Tao-Yi Wu and Hsu-Chang Shih, respectively. When I communicated with these three children of the Weihaiwei staff, they were surprised to find that the CMCS had been a nerve centre for studying modern Chinese history and the most efficient institution of China before 1949. The CMCS and its staff, in their eyes, were much less important than modern Chinese historians would seem to have it. Somehow, modern Chinese historians have acquired not only their own social or collective memory of the CMCS, but also a ‘cultural memory’ of it in Jan Assmann’s (2008: 109) sense of the term, such that they envision the CMCS as having its own distinctive ‘cultural identity’ founded upon not just historical events, but events with the aura of myth-history about them that bear the stamp of ‘cultural time’. Yet the modern Chinese historians’ memories of the CMCS either have been quite different – even radically different – from those of the three children of the Weihaiwei station staff, or their social and cultural memories of the CMCS have only just started to be realized in the minds of the three children. It has been a difficult process for me as a historian to connect the memories of the three aforementioned children of the CMCS staff – those of H. Mei Liu, Ta-cheng Wu and Xizhi Shi – for three main reasons. First, each of the fathers of these three children chose to hide their memories of their time

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at the Weihaiwei station, which meant that their three children only learned some fragmented details about them. Second, the three children had not spoken to each other for seven decades since 1946, so most of the details from their own memories had become increasingly vague. And third, as the three children live in China, Taiwan and America, respectively, their attitudes towards the cultural memory of the CMCS are quite different. I accidentally found out in the course of my research that I have three different kinds of personal connections to these three children. On their own, my personal connections to them were neither enough to earn their trust nor enough to enable them to talk about their personal memories openly with me. However, when interviewing them for my research on the Chinese staff and the Service Lists of the CMCS, I gradually earned their trust and inspired their curiosity. Thus, while H. Mei Liu, Ta-cheng Wu and Xizhi Shi still have not had the chance to hold a reunion among themselves after their escape from Weihaiwei in 1946, they have been able to start forming a social or collective memory of sorts between themselves through my interviews and research. Finally, through working with them, I have observed their shared social memory become increasingly similar to how modern Chinese historians envision the cultural memory of the CMCS. Thus, I discuss in this chapter the memory-making processes that, to some extent, my research seems to have facilitated among the three children of the Weihaiwei staff. H. Mei Liu, Ta-cheng Wu and Xizhi Shi grew up together while their fathers served in the Weihaiwei station of the Chefoo Custom House under the Collaborationist Inspectorate General of Customs during the Second World War. However, they lost contact with one another after 1946 and only finally got back in contact in 2015, partly because of my research for this chapter. During the seven decades since 1946, each of their lives followed a different course, but, coincidentally, all three pursued careers as university professors. H. Mei Liu went to the US and retired at Brown University, Ta-Cheng Wu stayed in Taiwan and retired at Taiwan University, Xizhi Shi stayed in China and retired at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. While some parts of this chapter may appear as nothing more than my personal reminiscences, they articulate the core theme under discussion here, which is the production not only of the three children’s social memory (built, as it is, from their personal memories and shared histories), but of a cultural memory that imparts them with a shared cultural identity which extends back to their parents’ generation as Chinese staff of the CMCS. Moreover, the three children and especially Xizhi Shi, who stayed in China after 1949, have undergone long and difficult journeys. Thus, Xizhi Shi in particular only shared his personal memories with me after he had found that my research could help to clarify some of his own deeply hidden questions about his father’s career under the Collaborationist government. My

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process of gathering the personal memories of the three children was thus indispensable for reconstructing overlooked aspects of their past. This chapter begins with two sections on the history of the CMCS: the present section and the next section, which offer background knowledge of the CMCS staff’s educational backgrounds, their social status and living standards. The third section introduces the difficulties of working in the Weihaiwei station from 1937 to 1946. I then offer three more sections that narrate the memories of the three children, H. Mei Liu, Ta-Cheng Wu and Xizhi Shi, as well as some of the memories of their fathers. My role in bringing their memories to light is discussed in these narrative sections as well. Finally, in my conclusion, I suggest that personal, social and cultural memories of the tradition of professionalism in the CMCS helped the three children to navigate the professional challenges and political turmoil they faced in America, Taiwan and China. I also show that their social memory and the cultural memory of modern Chinese historians towards the CMCS have started to merge.

The Chinese Staff of the CMCS and Their Children It was not an easy task for Chinese to become high-ranking administrative officers in the Revenue Department of the CMCS, such as Assistants, Deputy Commissioners or Commissioners.4 The only way to enter one of these posts was to apply to the Customs College, run by the Directorate General of Customs (Guanwushu, better known as Kuan-wu Shu in the twentieth century), which was an entirely Chinese institution. There were three major tasks to complete. The first task was the Customs College’s English test. As the working language of the CMCS was English, the English entrance exam was much harder than the exams required by other Chinese universities. Over half of the Customs College students were usually drawn from the two most prosperous provinces, namely Guangdong and Jiangsu (Chang 2013: 65). Applicants from these wealthier provinces had better chances of acceptance for three reasons: (1) the high schools there offered a higher level of English education; (2) privileged families could afford to send their children to Christian schools or have them tutored by Western missionaries; and (3) the tuition fee of the Customs College was much higher than those of Chinese universities. The tuition was so high that H. Mei Liu’s father, whose family was certainly much better-off than the average Chinese family in the 1910s, could not afford the fee. The reason that her father was able to pay the fee was that ‘by a stroke of luck, one of his friends had won a lottery, and had tried to persuade my father to go to France with him to study Socialism. My father turned down the offer but borrowed money to go to Beijing [Customs College]’ (Liu 2012: 46).

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Completing the College’s course of study was equally difficult. The curriculum of the Customs College was not that of a specialist training centre, but comparable to a European university. The students had to study, among other things, English literature, Latin, Greek, medieval history, economics and Western philosophy. Isidore Cannon has argued that the Customs College’s curriculum could be seen as a ‘particularly literal example of the “pedagogy of imperialism’’’ because it ‘focussed entirely on the Middle Ages in Europe, without even attempting to draw parallels with China, let alone use more appropriate recent political and economic history’ (2009: 122). Completing one’s studies there required not just money but a deep understanding of Western culture. The third task was the most difficult. Every year, all graduates – around twenty of them – would be assigned to the various Custom Houses in China for a year of probational training. At the end of the year, the Inspectorate General evaluated every graduate’s academic record and performance. The best three to five graduates would be appointed as 4th Assistants B and the rest of them as 4th Clerks B. The former consisted of administrative cadres and the latter secretarial. Once on the secretarial track a staff member could never become an administrative officer. The Chinese person who was talented, lucky and privileged enough to survive these three tasks would then join a completely Anglicized workforce. Most of the Assistants were British. They played cricket and rugby, danced at balls, and watched musicals and operas. The Chinese Assistants were paid in accordance with the British staff pay scales but without the 30 per cent Expatriation Allowance. Even without the 30 per cent Expatriation Allowance and 50 per cent Sterling Allotment,5 their children still could enjoy high living standards and received good home educations in the China of the 1930s. H. Mei Liu actually enjoyed the Customs College’s ‘pedagogy of imperialism’ and she also benefited from it (see figure 6.1). She describes the Customs College’s curriculum as ‘equivalent to that of a liberal arts college’ (Liu 2012: 45). Before the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941, H. Mei Liu had an English tutor, who was the wife of her father’s British colleague in the CMCS, and her father guided her through English novels and Western histories with his English textbooks from the Customs College. When she was ten, her father unlocked a box and carefully took out a ‘curious object made of a shiny copper tube mounted on a black metal stand’ (Liu 2012: 107). Her father said ‘This is a microscope. Your grandfather brought it back from overseas. It enables you to see things that are invisible to your eyes … Someday it will belong to whoever takes up a career in medicine’ (Liu 2012: 107). H. Mei Liu would eventually become a pathologist, using microscopes throughout her career.

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Figure 6.1. The Brief CV of H. Mei Liu. © H. Mei Liu EDUCATION: 1950–53

National Taiwan University, School of Medicine, Taipei, Taiwan, graduated with honors (2nd in a class of 102), Awarded M.D. degree.

1946–49

National Shantung University, People’s Republic of China.

HONORARY DEGREE: 1978

Brown University, Master of Art, Ad Enundum.

POSTGRADUATE TRAINING: 1960–61

Research Fellow, Department of Pathology, University of Chicago.

1954–58

Residency in Pathology, Rochester General Hospital, Rochester, N.Y. Anatomical and Clinical Pathology.

ACADEMIC POSITIONS: 1995–97

Professor of Neurobiology, Hunan Medical University, Changsha, Hunan, China.

1990–95

Professor and Chair, Department of Pathology, National Cheng-Kung University, Medical College, Tainan, Taiwan.

1989–90

Visiting Professor, Veterans General Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan.

1988–89

Visiting Scientist, Institute of Biomedical Sciences, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan.

1989–90

Professor of Pathology, Division of Biology and Medicine, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island.

1980–81

Assistant Dean of Medicine, Brown University.

1977–89

Associate Professor of Pathology, Brown University.

1969–77

Assistant Professor of Pathology, Northwestern University, School of Medicine, Chicago, Illinois.

1967–69

Assistant Professor of Pathology, University of Chicago, School of Medicine, Chicago, Illinois.

1966–67

Instructor in Pathology, University of Chicago.

CLINICAL POSITIONS: 1990–95

Pathologist-in-Chief, Cheng Kung University Hospital, Tainan, Taiwan, R.O.C.

From Personal Connections to Mutual Trust

1977–88

Neuropathologist, Miriam Hospital, Providence, R.I. Consulting Neuropathologist for Roger Williams Hospital, Memorial Hospital of Pawtucket and the Medical Examiner’s Office.

1973–77

Neuropathologist, Children’s Memorial Hospital, Chicago, Illinois.

1969–73

Neuropathologist, Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

1966–69

Neuropathologist, University of Chicago Hospitals, Assistant Director of Autopsy service.

1959–60

Assistant Pathologist, Oak Park Hospital, Illinois.

1958–59

Assistant Pathologist, Cook County Hospital, Chicago, Illinois.

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A microscope was certainly not a common object that an ordinary Chinese family could afford at that time. H. Mei Liu’s grandfather was a lawyer, but if her father, Sheng-Tung Liu, had followed the same path he could not have afforded the lifestyle she describes as ‘the Chinese version of a renaissance man’ (Liu 2012: 43). He was a photographer with a Kodak camera, a part-time Peking opera player, and a connoisseur of fine cuisine. The reason why he could afford this sort of upper-class lifestyle was that he ‘had a very good job’ and he was ‘an executive at the Maritime Customs Service’ (Liu 2012: 45). In those days, Chinese referred to the jobs of Indoor staff, and especially the role of Assistantship, in the CMCS as a ‘golden rice bowl’ (Liu 2012: 45).

From Weihaiwei to Qingdao Before the outbreak of the War of Resistance in 1937, the fathers of H. Mei Liu, Ta-Cheng Wu and Xizhi Shi all transferred to the Weihaiwei station. Their transfer would have a great impact on their careers, but they could not have foreseen this at the time. The Weihaiwei station, which operated under the authority of the Chefoo Custom House, experienced dramatic changes between 1937 and 1949, when it came under the control of three successive governments, namely the Nationalist government from 1937 to 1941, the Collaborationist government of Wang Jingwei from 1941 to 1945, and the Communist government from 1945 to 1949. Even after the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 and the Japanese military occupation of Chefoo and Weihaiwei, the Chefoo Custom House and all other Custom Houses in Occupied China and Free China were still administered by the CMCS under Inspector-General (IG) Frederick Maze (1871–1959; 4th IG 1929–1941/1943). After the inauguration of

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the Wang Jingwei Collaborationist government in March 1940, there were two Financial Ministries and two Directorates-General of Customs Administration in Chongqing and Nanjing. However, Maze successfully maintained the status quo and balanced the two chains of command until the outbreak of the Pacific War in December 1941. For twenty months, all the Custom Houses remained under the administration of Maze, who skilfully took instructions from both the Chongqing Nationalist government and the Nanjing Collaborationist government. After the outbreak of the Pacific War, Maze and all British and American staff members were immediately dismissed and put in jail.6 Wang Jingwei’s IG, Kishimoto Hirokishi, then took over the control of the Custom Houses in Occupied China, including the Chefoo Custom House and Weihaiwei station. The Chinese staff were put in a very difficult situation as they were forced to work for the Collaborationist government, so the Chongqing government considered them traitors. Yet the Chinese staff’s situation in Occupied China was different to that of the other civil servants who fled to Chongqing in 1937 as they considered themselves to have been loyal to IG Maze and the Chongqing government from 1937 to 1941. The sudden outbreak of the Pacific War did not allow time to retreat from Occupied China, so they had to continue under the collaborationist government from 1941–1945. Most of the Chinese staff stopped working for the Collaborationist government after the end of the Second World War. However, the staff in the Weihaiwei station were put a far more difficult situation because Weihaiwei was taken by the 8th Route Army of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1945. This meant that the Chinese staff at Weihaiwei again had no choice but to work for the CCP, acquiring along the way some very rare experience from which they could compare the rule of the Nationalists, the Japanese and the Communists. The memory of this comparison in Weihaiwei is still very vivid, as H. Mei Liu recalls: ‘As far as the occupation was concerned, the Japanese would leave people alone unless they had participated in openly subversive activities or voiced anti-Japanese sentiments. The Japanese soldiers in the city were generally well-behaved. We heard stories of soldiers beating or kicking Chinese civilians, but we never saw such a thing ourselves’ (Liu 2012: 71). However, after the Japanese Occupation, the Communist 8th route Army, ‘dressed in shabby, grey uniforms with red stars on their caps’, arrived (Liu 2012: 88). H. Mei Liu recalls that they brought with them the arrival of the Communists’ political campaigns: The Communists wasted no time in arresting the officials who had served in the Japanese puppet regime… the Communists were going to launch a campaign against what they called ‘class enemies’, the rich, the landowners, the bourgeoisie –

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anyone whom they regarded as oppressors of the poor… The Customs House was closed, since there was no business, but the employees did not remain idle. They had to go to the office every day to get indoctrinated about the Communist cause. My father, who had a lot of exposure to Communism in his youth, had to play humble in front of the young Communist cadres… Father had to write lengthy self-criticisms, in which he admitted his past errors of serving the bourgeoisie and collaborating with the imperialist enemies. (Liu 2012: 88)

They witnessed the first ‘struggle meeting’ (Liu 2012: 90). A communist cadre, dressed in a Mao uniform, gave an ‘animated speech about how the old, evil society had allowed wicked people to enslave each other’ (Liu 2012: 90–91) and ‘declared the following as enemies of the people: landlords, owners of shops and brothels and people working for foreigners’ (Liu 2012: 45). The first target was a landowner. A middle-aged and an emaciated tenant farmer began telling the story of ‘how the landowner had taken all the grain his family had harvested, leaving practically nothing for them to live on’ (Liu 2012: 45). The official ordered the landowner to climb on top of three stacked tables and asked the landowner to admit to his crime. H. Mei Liu adds that ‘When no answer came, the leader suddenly pulled a rope that was tied to one leg of the bottom table, causing the tables to collapse and the man to crash to the ground’ (2012: 91). This produced a visceral reaction in H. Mei Liu, who admits that ‘As the man cried out in pain, I had the same sickening feeling’ (2012: 91). Even still, she notes that ‘the audience was deadly silent; no one uttered a sound. Anyone who showed sympathy would be found as guilty as the accused man’ (Liu 2012: 91). The second target was a middle-aged woman with messy hair and rumpled clothing, who was the ‘former owner of a brothel’ (Liu 2012: 91). A young woman ‘tearfully described how the brothel owner had forced the girls to entertain an unbroken stream of men day and night’ (Liu 2012: 91). As a finale, the cadre ‘brought a bucket of night soil and pushed the landowner’s and the brothel owner’s heads into it. They emerged gagging and gasping for breath’ (Liu 2012: 91). At that moment, H. Mei Liu ‘felt cold chills running down my spine’ as her ‘sympathy for the poor farmer and the unfortunate girl could not persuade me to swallow the Communists’ way of using violence to achieve justice’ (Liu 2012: 92). ‘In the eyes of the Communists’, H. Mei Liu thought: it was a crime to be born into the wrong kind of family. They graded people on the basis of their social class: poor farmers were on top, while landowners, wealthy merchants and intellectuals were at the bottom. People of ‘bad birth’ were branded for life; they were prohibited from getting a good education, or a good job, so consequently no one wanted to marry them. There was no way they could get ahead. At the age of fifteen, I made up my mind that I did not want to live in a world like that. (Liu 2012: 92)

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Because of this witnessing of the Communists’ political struggles and the shortage of food supplies and coal by the spring of 1946, Sheng-Tung Liu and Tao-Yi Wu decided to move their families back to their hometowns in the south. To get there, they had to go through ‘a patchwork of territories occupied by Communists and Nationalists, and in some places the fighting still raged’ (Liu 2012: 94). In their desperation, the Lius and the Wus thus ‘decided to take a chance and leave the rest to fate’ (Liu 2012: 95). The Lius left for Qingdao with Tao-Yi Wu and his family of four.7 They first arrived in Laiyang (莱阳), a ‘Communist stronghold during the war’ (Liu 2012: 97). Then the Lius and the Wus approached the suburb of Qingdao, where they were ‘confronted by uniformed guards who had no red stars on their caps, better dressed than the Red Army soldiers’ (Liu 2012: 99). ‘The guards looked at the papers briefly and waved us on. I could see relief spreading over my father’s face’ (Liu 2012: 100). Tao-Yi Wu decided to move to Shanghai but Sheng-Tung Liu decided to stay in Qingdao. H. Mei Liu ‘didn’t know at that time that Qingdao was always our final destination. Father never intended to go back to Hunan where there was no prospect of finding a job’ (Liu 2012: 100). Immediately after he entered the city of Qingdao, Sheng-Tung Liu ‘went straight to the Custom House and reported for duty’ (Liu 2012: 100). Sheng-tung Liu ‘started working the next day and was given an advance stipend’ (Liu 2012: 100). He finally retrieved his golden rice bowl. H. Mei Liu recalls that for her family, ‘It was like the good old days again’ (Liu 2012: 100).8 The Lius ‘were then taken to a high-rise apartment building that housed thirty employees and their families’, where, as H. Mei Liu observes, ‘It was the very first time we saw “automatic water” coming out of a faucet, a flush toilet and a propane stove’ (Liu 2012: 100). All of Sheng-tung Liu’s children then went to the prestigious Guohua (國華) High School. H. Mei Liu passed the college examination and entered the medical school of the National Shandong University (which was the Cheeloo University School of Medicine before the War of Resistance) in September 1946 (Liu 2012: 101). Only forty students remained out of the original sixty-five after the first year of medical school. At the same time, the political situation started to become chaotic in 1947 and Sheng-Tung Liu’s face showed the same kind of worry as it had in Weihaiwei (Liu 2012: 113–14). The Lius had to plan for another escape but this time H. Mei Liu did not follow her father. Neither H. Mei Liu nor Sheng-Tung Liu realized this was to be the last time they would ever see each other. Sheng-Tung Liu could have asked for a transfer to Taiwan as some of his colleagues had done, but he opted to go to Xiamen. H. Mei Liu thought her father ‘wanted to adopt a wait-and-see attitude’ (Liu 2012: 114). However, she alone ‘had to stay

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behind [in Qingdao] because Xiamen University did not have a medical school’ (Liu 2012: 114). She felt deserted as her father ‘resigned and left her in Qingdao to fend for herself’ (Liu 2012: 114). During her last days in China, H. Mei Liu began to notice that her ‘classmates were avoiding me as if I had contracted a fatal contagious disease’ because of her ‘casual disapproving remarks about the Communist regime’ and the suspicion that she was ‘anti-Communist’ (Liu 2012: 115). However, the most lethal evidence of anti-Communism was that she was from ‘an upper-class family background’ and that she ‘had once fled from Communist occupied territory’ (Liu 2012: 115). It turned out that she had not been abandoned by her father. Her father sent her a letter instructing her immediately to see his colleague, also with the surname of Liu, in the Tsingtao Custom House. This colleague and his family were to be officially transferred to Taiwan. Sheng-Tung Liu asked his colleague to take H. Mei Liu with him, claiming her as his dependent younger sister. At that time, he also promised H. Mei Liu that, ‘circumstances permitting, her family might join her in Taiwan’ (Liu 2012: 115). However, H. Mei Liu’s family never found an opportunity to leave the Chinese mainland. After H. Mei Liu had fled to Taiwan, the fact that she was a mainlander from China, rather than a Taiwanese, affected her considerably once she decided to continue her studies and enrol in the medical school of National Taiwan University. The university was still affected by Japanese colonial attitudes and was rather prejudiced against Mainland Chinese and especially against female students from China. However, she still graduated from the NTU medical school and ranked as the second out of 102 students in 1953. As a female mainlander, H. Mei Liu did not feel she could stay in Taiwan forever, so she moved to Rochester General Hospital in New York as a resident in pathology from 1954 to 1958. Then she became an Assistant Pathologist in the Cook County Hospital and Oak Park Hospital in Illinois from 1958 to 1960. She started her academic career in 1967 as an Assistant Professor of Pathology at the medical school of the University of Chicago and subsequently Northwestern University. She was promoted to Associate Professor of Pathology in 1977 and in 1989 became Professor at Brown University, and retired there in 1990. Before H. Mei Liu was about to retire, she planned to begin a second career in Taiwan, so she visited the Institute of Biomedical Sciences, Academia Sinica and the Veterans General Hospital in Taipei from 1988 to 1990. After her retirement, she was appointed Professor and Chairperson of the Department of Pathology at National Cheng-Kung University in Tainan, 1990–1995. Then she helped the Hunan Medical University to build up its medical school from 1995 to 1997. She finally moved back to the United

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States in 2002. From 1988 to 1990, H. Mei Liu and I actually lived in the same dormitory buildings of the Veterans General Hospital in Taipei, but my parents and I had neither met her nor got the chance to know her then.

H. Mei Liu (1929– ) and Sheng-Tung Liu H. Mei Liu’s career in Taiwan from 1990 to 1995 is the key reason why a personal connection was able to be built between her and myself. It is what allowed me to get to know more about her personal memories. I received an e-mail in English from H. Mei Liu on 13 October 2014 that gave me some important background to her own experiences of recalling, recounting and transmitting the social memories of the descendants of the Chinese staff of the CMCS: I am writing to you because my father had worked at the Chinese Maritime Customs Service from 1924–1950. I was born in China in 1929, our family had lived a privileged life until Japanese invasion followed by the Civil War. At the age of 20, I left my family in the mainland and went to Taiwan on the eve of Communist takeover in 1949. On Taiwan, I finished medical school at the Taiwan University and came to the US where I had a successful medical career. Since I was separated from my family for nearly 30 years, I knew little about my father and his work. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, I returned to work in Taiwan and China and to find my roots. In 2004, I published my memoir entitled Grandfather’s Microscope [外公的显微镜] in which I only briefly mentioned my father’s work at the Customs Service. In recent years, more information is available, and the Bristol University’s website has provided invaluable information. I was delighted to find the names of my father and my uncle (Liu Sheng Tung and Liu Chuan Sheng 刘盛栋, 刘传森 from Hunan) on the list of employees. Now I am inspired to rewrite my memoir.

When I received this e-mail, I looked into Sheng-Tung Liu’s files and then replied to H. Mei Liu that her father was a Custom College student, in the thirteenth batch, from 1920 to 1924 (The Special Collection, Directorate General of Customs 1993: 4).9 He was transferred to the Weihaiwei station in 1936 (Liu 2012: 66) and he was Chief Clerk B so he was not lucky enough to be appointed Assistant after his one-year probation (The Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs 1940: 47; see figure 6.2). His career in the Kishimoto Inspectorate after the outbreak of the Pacific War appeared to be more successful. Sheng-Tung Liu was the third highest-ranking staff member, and thus only second to Japanese T.E. Takaka and Tao-Yi Wu (The Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs 1942: 47; see figure 6.3 and 6.4). This was because all of the high-ranking British and American employees had been dismissed, so Sheng-Tung Liu was automatically promoted.

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Figure 6.2. Page 26 of the 1940 Service List for Chinese Staff of the CMCS. © CMCS Archives, published with permission

My investigation of her father’s career immediately proceeded much further when I realized that there were some hidden connections between us, as a result of which H. Mei Liu revealed more of her personal memories to me. I told her that my mother also graduated from the Medical School of National Taiwan University. Both she and my mother are female mainlanders so they confronted quite similar hostilities from male Taiwanese. Once she learnt this information, we started to discuss her years in Taiwan in the late 1980s, including through an email she sent me on 16 December 2014: When I first returned to Taiwan in late 1970s, I worked at the Institute of Biomedical Sciences at Academia Sinica because I knew the founders well. At the time the Director was Cai Zuoyong [蔡作雍]. Cai was my classmate back in the National

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Defence Medical Center [国防医学院]. He was a very good student and we got along well. We used to play Mozart together in the round-domed classroom constructed out of a US military camp. He played violin and I played piano, badly. He was an outstanding physiologist and later became the Director of the National Defence Medical Center. After an early retirement he founded the Institute of Biomedical Sciences with the help of Yu Nan-geng [余南庚] and Chien Hsu [钱煦]. Yu was my first friend in the US when I arrived in Rochester NY. He was just a young assistant professor at the University of Rochester. Later he became a famous cardiologist, president of the American Heart Association and personal physician to President Chiang Kaishek. Chien Hsu was my classmate in Taiwan U medical school, and has been good friend since then. He was a top student in our class, a famous physiologist and Academician of Academia Sinica. He still works at the University of California, San Diego and at Academia Sinica. His late father was President of Taiwan University. Prof Cai was Director for only a few years before he was ousted by his young colleagues, because they did not like his military style of ruling. Chien Shu was acting Director for a short time before he recruited Wu Chengwen [吴成文] from the US. I left shortly afterwards.

Figure 6.3. Pages 206–207 of the 1940 Service List for Chinese Staff of the CMCS. © CMCS Archives, published with permission

Because of this email, Liu and I started to realize how many shared friends we have, as Tsai (Cai) had taught my parents and my parents also worked under Chien and Yu. After more discussions, I realized that she lived next to me while serving at the Taipei General Veteran Hospital for three years. Both of my parents served at the same hospital for over three decades. Because of this relationship, we started to exchange our articles and books. The exchange of our works led to another surprising story.

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Figure 6.4. Page 47 of the 1942 Service List for Chinese Staff of the CMCS. © CMCS Archives, published with permission

I sent her the nearly finished draft of my (2018) The Chinese Journal of L.K. Little, 1943–1954, as her father worked under Little from 1946 to 1949. After she read the chapter entitled ‘L.K. Little and the Chinese Staff after 1949’, she immediately telephoned me to say: ‘I remember the family who fled to Qingdao with us after I read his name in your article’. The person she recalled is Tao-Yi Wu. I then told her about Tao-Yi Wu’s career, but found that I had already completed Tao-Yi Wu’s investigation before she had even recalled his name. This surprising story led to another line of my research project and the uncovering of the collective memories of the Chinese descendants of the Chinese staff at the CMCS, to which I now turn here.

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Ta-Cheng Wu (1939– ) and Tao-Yi Wu Tao-Yi Wu was a Customs College student, in the ninth batch, from 1917 to 1920 and he was more successful than Sheng-Tung Liu and Hsu-Chang Shih because he was appointed Assistant after his one-year probation. As the 2nd Assistant A in the Inspectorate General in Shanghai in 1940 (Service List 1940: 13; see figure 6.5 and 6.6), Tao-Yi Wu also held a much more prestigious position than Sheng-Tung Liu held at the Weihaiwei station or than Hsu-chang Shih held at the Chefoo Custom House. In 1949, Tao-Yi Wu was a Deputy Commissioner, but fled to Canton with his family and IG Lester Little (1892–1981; fifth IG 1943–1950) when the Communists took Shanghai in April 1949. Later in 1949, they went to Taiwan with Little and served under the Taiwanese Inspectorate General of Customs (Chang 2018). His son, Ta-cheng Wu, graduated from National Taiwan University and received his doctorate in English literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, after which he returned to his alma mater to serve as a faculty member. It turned out that the Wu family and my family have a shared history as my parents have known Tao-Yi Wu’s son, Ta-cheng Wu, and his wife for more than four decades.10 The Wus hid their CMCS background for some time because in the early 1980s the White terror in Taiwan was still a serious issue. However, I also knew Tao-Yi Wu’s grandson, Chia-heng Wu, although we did not realize at the time that our parents knew each other. I got to know Chia-Heng Wu back in 2011 during my postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute of Modern History at Academia Sinica. The occasion on which we met was also related to the CMCS.11 Before all of this, and during my doctoral studies, I was editing the memoirs of Te-wei Chou, who was the last Director-General (DG) of the Kuan-wu Shu (Directorate General of Customs) before 1949 in the Chinese mainland and first DG after 1949 in Taiwan. While editing Te-wei Chou’s memoirs, I discovered that he had been a friend of my grandfather’s as they both went to the UK in the 1930s for graduate education at UCL and LSE, respectively. His son, Yu Chou, was also a classmate of my father at Tunghai University in Taichung in the 1960s.12 Due to these family connections and my studies on the CMCS, Yu Chou entrusted me with his father’s handwritten memoir. The trust was necessary because Te-wei Chou had once worked for Wang Jingwei as well, which meant that his son, Yu Chou, had always been worried that the publication of this memoir would lead to misunderstandings about his father’s historical image. I explained that I understood the difficulties the staff had confronted, as I had already investigated the history of Maze and his staff from 1937 to

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Figure 6.5. Page 13 of the 1940 Service List for Chinese Staff of the CMCS. © CMCS Archives, published with permission

1941. Yu Chou therefore handed me the manuscript of his father’s memoir, which I finished editing in 2008 before returning to the UK. It was Tao-Yi Wu’s grandson, Chia-Heng Wu, who in his capacity as an editor published Te-wei Chou’s (2011) memoir, entitled Winds and Rain under My Pen: My Life and the Stories of the Nationalist Party (落筆驚風雨: 我的一生和國民黨的點滴). I therefore met with Chia-Heng Wu and my own father at the book launch, where I learned that my parents had known the Wus for over three decades.13 In 2011, I had only known that Lester Little brought Tao-Yi Wu and his family to Taiwan on 27 April 1949 (Chang 2018, vol. II: 178–79). At that point, I neither realized that Tao-Yi Wu had brought Ta-cheng Wu out of Weihaiwei nor knew that I would meet H. Mei Liu, who fled with them in 1946.

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Figure 6.6. Page 199 of the 1940 Service List for Chinese Staff of the CMCS. © CMCS Archives, published with permission

So when I received a telephone call from H. Mei Liu in December 2014, in which she told me that she had fled with the Wus in 1946, I immediately arranged an interview with Ta-Cheng Wu. During a dinner with the Wus, the Chous and my parents held in February 2015, Ta-Cheng Wu talked about his childhood in Taiwan and his English education. He was taught English by his father when he was a child and admitted that ‘my father only cared about my grade in English’. To underscore this point, Ta-Cheng Wu added that ‘If I got low grade in math, he would not be upset; but if I got a low grade in English he would be very upset and guide me through the exam sheet’. Continuing on this train of thought, Ta-Cheng Wu confirmed that: ‘In my generation, everyone thought smart students should study science and engineering but only my father insisted on English. He always told me

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scientists and engineers only know a set of skills but if you know English you know a wider world. The world is so wide that it will take your whole life to study’. Expanding on his educational upbringing, Ta-cheng Wu reflected that ‘it is quite interesting that my father never asked me to join the CMCS. One day my father’s boss, Mr. Tu Fang [later the IG of the Taiwanese Customs Service], was amazed by my English fluency and he asked my father if I would become my father’s successor. My father just smiled and waved his hand [meaning no]’. Summing up this connection to his father’s profession, Ta-cheng Wu concluded ‘I guess my father would be happier if he had seen that I have become a professor of English literature’. Because of the English fluency in the Wu family, the grandson of the family, Chia-Heng Wu, became an editor for Taiwan’s largest publisher. During the period before 1987 when Taiwan was under martial law, Tao-Yi Wu was worried that his records of serving the collaborationist government and the 8th Route Army before 1946 would attract political suspicion from the Nationalist government in Taiwan. His son, Ta-cheng Wu, was just eight years old when the family left Weihaiwei for Qingdao, so he does not know explicitly why his father had worked for the Wang Jingwei regime and the CCP. As Tao-Yi Wu did not tell his son the full picture of his career, this history was not transmitted to him directly. Ta-cheng Wu therefore set out to reconstruct this history for me based on his own understanding and memories of it. However, it took the help of others in the Wu family to bring our conversation to its fullest fruition during our dinner together in February 2015. Although Taiwan’s political tensions had changed significantly from what they were during Tao-Yi Wu’s career, Ta-cheng Wu still felt that his father’s record of working for either the CCP or the collaborationist government was not a glorious thing. He thus chose to bury his personal memory of his father’s career, which had grown dimmer as he had grown older. Yet Tacheng Wu and my other dinner companions also knew that I was the editor of Te-wei Chou’s memoir and that Chou also had served Wang Jingwei. The other Wus at the table thus sought to share his personal memories with me, by reopening the conversation with a question. They asked me why Tao-Yi Wu did not evacuate to Chongqing in 1937 or 1938 and what it was really like to work under the Collaborationist IG, Kishimoto Hirokichi. After I had told Ta-cheng Wu how Kishimoto worked with the Chinese staff to protect the integrity of the CMCS, how the Chinese staff in occupied China had helped the postwar rehabilitation, and how the Nationalist government pardoned all but two of the Chinese staff members after the war, I felt that he was much relieved. It seems that I had helped him to clear up his father’s name.

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Xizhi Shi (1936– ) and Hsu-Chang Shih The interview with the Wus led to yet another dinner in Shanghai, which, however, was initiated by H. Mei Liu, who in May 2015 had visited Shanghai as she had finally found another childhood companion there, Xizhi Shi,14 through her sister, Hsiang-lan Liu (劉湘蘭), in China. While Liu and Shi had known each other in Weihaiwei, since the Lius had left for Qingdao in 1946, they had not had the chance to meet again. Liu was excited to have found her childhood companion from Taipei and to learn more about her own father’s history. Because Shi and I are both affiliated with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, I was invited to the reunion dinner at the Bund, a waterfront area in the former Shanghai International Settlement, which Liu had arranged with him. Before the dinner, I had investigated the files of Xizhi Shi’s father, Hsuchang Shih (史敘章), who was born in Ying-kow, Liaoning Province, and joined the CMCS in 1929 as Fourth Clerk C at the Harbin Custom House (see figures 6.7 and 6.8). He was not a graduate of the Customs College but received a BA from the Education Department at the University of Shanghai, which was the successor of the Shanghai Baptist College and predecessor of the Shanghai University for Science and Technology. Hsuchang Shih then joined the CMCS and spent most of his time in the Custom Houses in Manchuria, where he became fluent in both English and Russian (see figure 6.9). Over dinner, I found that there are many more details about the Shihs than the Wus in H. Mei Liu’s autobiography. During their service at the Weihaiwei station, the Shihs ‘lived near the school’ attended by H. Mei Liu and had ‘six children’ (Liu 2012: 77), of whom Xizhi Shi was the fourth. During the difficult days of the Japanese and the 8th Route Army, the Shihs often invited the Lius ‘to a feast of dumplings stuffed with minced pork’ and H. Mei Liu still remembers ‘how delicious those treats were and how they sustained our health and lifted our spirits’ (Liu 2012: 77). Since Hsu-chang Shih was originally from Liaoning, I discussed some famous Chinese staff members from that province, while Xizhi Shi added that he personally knew two other staff members who hailed from Liaoning: Commissioner Wen-ju Wang and Deputy IG Kwei-tang Ting. The more successful of these two had been Ting, the leader of the Liaoning faction (Chang 2018, vol. II: vii–xxiii). During the dinner, I narrated the personal histories of Deputy IG Kwei-tang Ting and Commissioner Wen-ju Wang. Building upon these stories, Shi immediately shared his memories of his childhood in Weihaiwei as he and Wen-ju Wang’s two sons, David Wang and Ruiqing Wang, had also been childhood companions in Chefoo. I noticed that my research about the Liaoning faction had enabled Xizhi Shi to reveal

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his personal memories and show that he had confronted a much more dangerous political atmosphere than had the Wus, at least with regards to his own father’s career under the collaborationist government, which had been a historical mystery haunting him. My method of swapping stories in research also helped to relax Shi, who at first felt very uncomfortable and even offended when I asked him about his father’s service at the Weihaiwei station from 1937 to 1945. His reaction was easy to understand because decades earlier, during the Cultural Revolution, this aspect of his family history would have been used to destroy them. But after listening to the kinds of stories I shared with the Wus and the kinds of explanations I gave them about my research, he relaxed. A collective, or social, memory of the CMCS that I had not anticipated then revealed itself over dinner, namely that Shi’s wife, Hongmian Wang (王紅棉), was also a child of a CMCS staff member and that the CMCS children in China have formed a very close community that has endured all the political turmoil and domestic unrest from the inauguration of the PRC to the end of the Cultural Revolution. However, this social memory only exists among the children of the CMCS staff in China. My research on the Liaoning faction and our affiliation to SJTU became key to my study of the social memory of the children of the Chinese staff of the CMCS in China. Although this community is a closed and suspicious circle, I was able to arrange a series of interviews with Xizhi Shi and Hongmian Wang about it in June and July 2015. Initially Shi was rather hesitant, probably because of the trauma caused by the Cultural Revolution, but his

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Figure 6.7. Page 205 of the 1940 Service List for Chinese Staff of the CMCS. © CMCS Archives, published with permission

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Figure 6.8. Page 36 of the 1940 Service List for Chinese Staff of the CMCS. © CMCS Archives, published with permission

determination to learn that his father had not been a collaborator with imperialism won out in the end. My interviews revealed the network of the descendants of CMCS employees after 1949. Hongmian Wang’s father was Cheng-hua Wang, a native of Fukien, who joined the CMCS in July 1930 as Fourth Class Tidewaiter (see figure 6.10). He had evacuated to the Kowloon Custom House after the Japanese military took over the Canton Custom House in 1938, which is why Hongmian Wang was born in Hong Kong. Unlike the fathers of H. Mei Liu, Ta-cheng Wang and Xizhi Shi, who all worked under the collaborationist Customs, Cheng-Hua Wang had worked under the Chongqing Inspectorate led by C.H.B. Joly and Lester Little until 1950.

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Figure 6.9. Page 48 of the 1931 Service List for Chinese Staff of the CMCS. © CMCS Archives, published with permission

As I learned during my interviews with CMCS members and later corroborated with their Service Lists, Xizhi Shi and Hongmian Wang only met each other when their fathers were both transferred to the Amoy Custom House (see figure 6.11). Coincidentally, Sheng-Tung Liu also transferred to the Amoy Custom House in 1949 (see figure 6.12), so H. Mei Liu’s sister, Hsiang-lan Liu, met Xizhi Shi again in Xiamen. Shi and Wang’s marriage was arranged by Sheng Wang (汪深, a native of Hebei and outdoor Tidewaiter), who also worked under the collaborationist Customs during the Second World War with Liu, Wu and Shi at the Chefoo Custom House (see figure 6.13). Sheng Wang’s son, moreover, married Shi’s sister and his daughter married the son of another CMCS staff member, Shao-shun Huang (黃紹勳). At

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Figure 6.10. Page 134 of the 1931 Service List for Chinese Staff of the CMCS. © CMCS Archives, published with permission

Figure 6.11. Page 61 of the 1944 Provisional Service List for Chinese Staff of the CMCS. © CMCS Archives, published with permission

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Figure 6.12. Page 13 of the 1948 Provisional Service List for Chinese Staff of the CMCS. © CMCS Archives, published with permission

Figure 6.13. Page 43 of the 1942 Service List for Chinese Staff of the CMCS. © CMCS Archives, published with permission

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Figure 6.14. Page 51 of the 1942 Service List for Chinese Staff of the CMCS. © CMCS Archives, published with permission

the Amoy Custom House, Shi met his lifelong friend Zeng Wang (王增), who now is the Director of Neurology at Ruijin Hospital, the successor of the French Hôpital Sainte Marie and affiliated with the Medical School of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Zeng Wang’s father was Shih-Fah Wang (王實發), who was stationed at the Tsingtao (Qingdao) Custom House before 1945, which means that he also worked for the Collaborationist government (see figure 6.14 and 6.15). Most of the CMCS Chinese staff suffered grievously during Communist China’s class struggles after 1949. It was already considered evil enough to work for the Nationalists (KMT) in the eyes of the CCP, let alone to work for the British imperialists and the collaborationists as did the CMCS staff. Thus, from 1949 to 1957, any CMCS staff who had not worked for the Nationalists could avoid the turmoil of the Counterrevolutionary Campaign. However, from 1957 to 1966, most of the high-ranking staff members of

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Figure 6.15. Page 48 of the 1940 Service List for Chinese Staff of the CMCS. © CMCS Archives, published with permission

the CMCS could not avoid the Anti-Rightist Campaign; and from 1967 to 1976, none of them could avoid the Cultural Revolution. Although Xizhi Shi did not give many details during the interviews about what he and his father had suffered, one story he told me revealed that he had for some time tried to avoid a particularly painful memory. He and his brother, Xiren Shi (史習仁), read through all of their father’s English textbooks from the University of Shanghai, as well as his English novels. Yet during the Cultural Revolution these books were very dangerous possessions and his family therefore dug a hole to bury all of their so-called ‘Western imperialistic toxic elements’, not daring to dig them up again until after the Cultural Revolution. Despite having hidden these books out of sight for all that time, Hsu-Chang Shih still taught his sons English from what

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he had recalled of the textbooks, although they all only dared to do this in the late evenings because they were afraid someone would discover they were learning the language of the ‘American imperialists’. There was even a time when Hsu-Chang Shih’s neighbours discovered that he was teaching a foreign language and he told them that it was Russian, the mother tongue of the Soviet Union. This was the Shihs’ secret way of hanging on to their English-language skills during some of the most fanatical, xenophobic periods of the Maoist era. No doubt due to the influence of his father, Xizhi Shi had acquired a more international and liberal political outlook. His role models were the US presidents Washington and Lincoln, but he did not dare to tell his classmates as such political beliefs would prove to be extremely dangerous during the Maoist era. While he was an undergraduate student at Nanjing University in 1956, for example, right before the Anti-Rightist Campaign, Xizhi Shi stated in public that ‘compared to being a communist, it was more difficult to be a decent person in China’, by which he meant that normally only the best persons would be selected to become communists, which made it more difficult that not to become a communist in China. Yet during the Cultural Revolution, telling lies to the party was also enough to become a communist. Prioritizing being a decent person over all else, Xizhi Shi was not willing to tell lies. As I learned, Xizhi Shi’s statement in 1956 at Nanjing University was the last time that he spoke frankly in public before the end of the Cultural Revolution – and he still refused to tell me what had happened after he had made this public statement.

Conclusion This chapter started with the histories of three Chinese employees of the CMCS, before broadening its scope to cover three children and three lives in Taiwan, America and China, and their shared memory of the CMCS and of their fathers. The stories of H. Mei Liu, Ta-Cheng Wu and Xizhi Shi revealed the personal memories of these three individuals. Obviously, their criteria for selecting which of their memories to reveal were quite different. Liu values the happiness of her memory with her father, Wu buries the missing pieces of his memory with his father, and Shi hides the politics of his memory with his father. Given that Liu, Wu and Shi live in different political surroundings, it turned out that the only way to bridge their personal memories was through research. While I worked with Liu to uncover more memories about her father, I answered Ta-cheng Wu’s questions about his father’s career from 1937 to 1946 and explained to Shi what sort of dilemmas kept his father from leaving Weihaiwei.

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Before I brought them together, the three children’s personal memories ran along three different but parallel lines. H. Mei Liu’s memories reached back to family glories; she is interested in her family history and has even conducted her own research on it in ways that resonate with her professional training at medical school. She was free to do this as she lived in the US, and not Taiwan or China, where the politics of peoples’ pasts is far more sensitive. In contrast, Wu’s memories appear to have been shaped around his own political aloofness, as he had become bored with Taiwanese political conflicts and chose to distance himself from them. Yet Shi’s memory is perhaps the most complicated and contradictory of them all, as he was deeply influenced by CCP propaganda about the CMCS and his father’s service. He never believed that his father or his father’s colleagues were evil, but after so many decades of political propaganda, he could hardly not have absorbed some of it. Through my study of memory-making with Liu, Wu and Shi, I observed their social, or collective, memory of the shared history between them gradually taking–shape. I observed them building upon my research and their social memory, from which they started to identify their own unique cultural memory and identity that includes access to cultural memories from outside of China, which they learned through English-language textbooks, novels and research. Although the high salaries and British-influenced lifestyle offered by CMCS jobs had already given many CMCS families a sense of their particular identity within Chinese society, I learned that the positive childhood memories of many CMCS descendants had furthered this idea of their uniqueness. H. Mei Liu, Xizhi Shi and his lifelong friend Zeng Wang, for example, have each emphasized the high-quality lifestyles they enjoyed before 1949 and the changes to their lives that followed this pivotal year. Their fathers’ careers in the CMCS certainly provided them with a good living standard and afforded them access to people, products and ideas from the Western world. Thus, any new field of knowledge could be easily learnt from their fathers’ international colleagues, such as H. Mei Liu’s English tutor. As I have shown, each of the three children’s fathers (Sheng-tung Liu, Hsu-chang Shih and Tao-Yi Wu) shared similar educational backgrounds that they were able to draw upon to educate their children. Moreover, the language foundations they had developed in their youth enabled Xizhi Shi in particular to refresh and strengthen his English immediately after the Cultural Revolution; even now he still keeps his old textbooks and novels as mementos of this. Xizhi Shi remembers fondly that his father taught him to read the English version of A Tale of Two Cities, after which he made up his mind to write a book in English, which he eventually did: Blind Signal Processing: Theory and Practice. This choice to build upon one’s childhood

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love of books and reading when establishing a career in adulthood is echoed in Zeng Wang’s own biography too, as her favourite books during her childhood were also her father’s textbooks, such as Guidelines for the Tariff Tax and The Principals of Chemistry, which fostered her interest in biochemistry and inspired her to become a medical doctor. Thus, to Xizhi Shi, Xiren Shi and Zeng Wang, these English novels and textbooks during the Cultural Revolution were as rare as H. Mei Liu’s microscope in the 1930s. Each of these novels, textbooks and microscopes carried within their purview what Katherine Swancutt, in the introduction to this volume, calls the ‘conceptual, material and sensorial qualities’ of memories – in this case the memories of acquiring an education and lifestyle that not only echoed those required of CMCS staff, but gave the children of the CMCS access to cultural memories sourced from outside of China and reshaped uniquely within it. Taken together, the personal memories of the children of the Chinese staff of the CMCS have formed the basis of their own social, or collective, memory. Theirs is a highly reflexive social memory that points towards the culture of professionalism and political liberalism that they inherited from the CMCS, and the emphasis it placed upon having access to Western educations and the English language. These children have thus generally been inspired by their shared background to choose occupations that require advanced professional expertise, are well-paid, and by and large enable them to remain aloof from politics if they so choose. Just as their shared backgrounds and educations have shaped their social memory of being the aspirational children of the Chinese CMCS staff, so many of them have followed the ethos of professionalism that modern historians consider to be a signature feature of the CMCS’ cultural memory and identity. Let us recall that the Chinese children of the CMCS staff have tended to become university professors, medical doctors, engineers or members of other educated professions. As noted, their shared cultural horizon has also encouraged them to marry partners from within the CMCS community. Xizhi Shi thus observes: It is difficult for outsiders to understand our [CMCS staff children’s] value system because our fathers had a very different style of living. The CMCS staff did not have to fawn on anyone, even politicians, because their foreign supervisors only cared about their competence and integrity. Their salaries were much higher than ordinary civil servants so they were not forced to borrow money from relatives.

While this statement clearly reveals the social memory and cultural identity of the CMCS staff’s children in China, Shi did not realize that these memories exist in the minds of the descendants of the Chinese staff of the CMCS living in the US and Taiwan. Ta-cheng Wu also shared this social memory and cultural identity, even though he fled to Taiwan in 1949 with

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his father. Wu thus observed that ‘my father [Tao-Yi Wu] always taught me that as long as your professionalism is good enough, everyone has to pay you a certain degree of respect. For instance, he had worked under the British, American, Japanese, Communists and Nationalists but they always valued his contributions’. Now, if Tao-Yi Wu had chosen to stay on the Chinese mainland in 1949, he might not have felt the same way, but his statement was generally true before 1949 as the CMCS had a culture of integrity, political aloofness, professionalism and cosmopolitanism, while paying its staff high salaries to encourage good employees to stay in the service. Over time, this CMCS social memory, ethos and cultural identity gradually entered the minds of modern Chinese historians, but did so in a way that vividly took on the myth-historical proportions of the cultural memory and identity that they themselves have attributed to the CMCS – a cultural memory that even the CMCS staff’s children were not initially aware of. Yet the children of the Chinese staff of the CMCS, who initially had not known that modern Chinese historians took this view, nonetheless came to find decades later that something analogous to it had been influencing their own values and lifestyles. They reflected on how their own occupations resonated with the cultural memory and identity of the CMCS, and on their choice to remain less interested in careers in commerce or politics. Some of them noticed that their career tracks continued to reflect the CMCS values, even when their personal memories had been heavily influenced by Chinese politics. This is not to say that the CMCS cultural memory was as positive as it has been remembered. In fact, discrimination and inequality against the Chinese staff also existed in this British dominated institution. However, the children were not always aware of these negative aspects because the CCP stigmatized the CMCS and its staff to an extreme degree. This led H. Mei Liu, Ta-Cheng Wu and Xizhi Shi in particular to distance themselves – and often their most salient forms of memory-making – from all political propaganda, even in cases where the propaganda rang true. Of course, what matters most is how these children personally experienced their childhoods and remember their fathers’ careers. Ultimately, they have found that the social memory they built during their childhoods in China have enabled them to become professional and capable people, and this is also the cultural memory found in the minds of modern Chinese historians. Chihyun Chang is Professor of International Trade History in the Department of History, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He received his doctorate in historical studies from the University of Bristol and is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at University of Bristol and Project Professor at University of Tokyo. He is the author of Government, Imperialism and Nationalism

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in China: The Maritime Customs Service and its Chinese Staff (Routledge, 2013) and The Chinese Journals of L.K. Little, 1943–1954: An Eyewitness Account of War and Revolution, 3 volumes (Routledge, 2017).

Notes 1. For the collaboration and competition between these historians, see Chang (2020). 2. For the Chinese staff members’ privately published memoirs and autobiographies, see Huang Qingxun (2003), Lam Lok Ming (1982), Lu Haiming (1993), Wang Wen-ju (1969), Ye Yuanzhang (1987), Zhan Dehe (2000), Wang Shude (1990), and Ruan Shourong (1986). 3. The romanization of the Chinese names in this chapter presents a problem. Some are transliterated according to the Wade-Giles system widely used in the twentieth century, such as Sheng-Tung Liu, Hsu-Chang Shih and Ta-Cheng Wu; some according to the Hanyu Pinyin system now used in China, such as Xizhi Shi and Hongmian Wang; and some of the names are spelled as the individuals preferred, such as H. Mei Liu and Tao-Yi Wu. This is quite confusing because Hsu-Chang Shih was Xizhi Shi’s father but their family names are spelt differently. However, for the Chinese names in Taiwan this issue does not exist because Taiwan continues to use the Wade-Giles system. Moreover, the romanization of geographical names is another issue because the CMCS had its own style, which is totally different from the Wade-Giles system or Hanyu Pinyin, seen in names such as Tsingtao (Qingdao), Amoy and Xiamen, etc. In this chapter, the author has used the spellings that appear in contemporary sources, particularly CMCS Service Lists, rather than anachronistically rendering them in Hanyu Pinyin. 4. The CMCS’ Revenue Department consisted of Indoor and Outdoor staff. The Indoor staff had Assistants who were in charge of administrative responsibilities and Clerks who were in charge of documentary works. The Outdoor staff was in charge of import and export appraisal and examination. 5. The 50 per cent Sterling Allotment meant that half of the income of foreign staff members would be paid in GBP in order to avoid the fluctuation of currency exchange rate. IG Maze Circular No. 3873, 14 March 1929 (Wright 1935–1938, vol. IV: 176). 6. He was released in 1943 and travelled to Africa. Then he returned to Chongqing, claimed his pension and retired as IG in 1943. After Maze was dismissed in December 1941, all the Custom Houses in Occupied China were immediately taken over by the Collaborationist IG Kishimoto Hirokichi, so the Chongqing government appointed C.H.B. Joly as Officiating IG over the Custom Houses in Free China. See Bickers (2008). 7. When H. Mei Liu wrote her (2012) memoir, she thought they had travelled with ‘Mr Hu’, but when she read the introduction to my book (Chang 2018, vol. III: vii–xxiv), she recalled that the colleague was Tao-Yi Wu. 8. The Liu’s return to luxury here resonates with the resumption of the comfortable lifestyles discussed by Anna Reading (this volume), who reflects on how many Shanghai-based Jewish refugee families reclaimed their affluence after their brief internment in China during the Second World War. 9. Wang Wen-ju, who published Forty Years of A Desultory Career in the Customs, was also in the thirteenth batch. 10. My parents knew Mrs Wu before they knew Mr Wu as she was an outstanding biologist at Taipei Medical University where they were college students in the 1960s.

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11. A colleague, Jennifer Ning Chang, whose PhD supervisor was Hans van de Ven at Cambridge, a prominent historian of the history of the CMCS, told me that a friend of hers, Chia-heng Wu, was the grandson of a CMCS Commissioner and was a senior editor at the Yuan-Liou Publishing Company (遠流出版社) in Taiwan. This publisher, coincidentally, was owned by one of my grandfather’s students (Rung-wen Wang 王 榮文) at National Cheng-Chi University. 12. Te-wei Chou’s daughter, Chih Chou, and my aunt both worked at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. 13. My godfather, Professor Yen Chu, and Ta-cheng Wu both taught at the Department of English Literature at National Taiwan University. My parents had first met my godparents at the Wu’s residence in the early 1980s and they became friends for life. 14. Xizhi Shi was born in Tianjin, December 1936; he is the author of Blind Signal Processing: Theory and Practice and a Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the same school from which he obtained his doctoral degree.

References Assmann, Jan. 2008. ‘Communicative and Cultural Memory’, in Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (eds), Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 109–18. Bickers, Robert. 2006. ‘Purloined Letters: History and the Chinese Maritime Customs Service’, Modern Asian Studies 40(3): 691–723. ______. 2008. ‘The Chinese Maritime Customs at War, 1941–45’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 36(2): 295–311. Bruner, Katherine F., John K. Fairbank and Richard J. Smith (eds). 1986. Entering China’s Service: Robert Hart’s Journals, 1854–1863. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cannon, Isidore. 2009. Public Success, Private Sorrow: The Life and Times of Charles Henry Brewitt-Taylor (1857–1938), China Customs Commissioner and Pioneer Translator. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Chang, Chihyun. 2013. Government, Imperialism and Nationalism: The Maritime Customs Service and its Chinese Staff. London: Routledge. ______. 2018. The Chinese Journals of L.K. Little, 1943–1954: An Eyewitness Account of War and Revolution, 3 volumes. London: Routledge. ______. 2020. ‘Sir Robert Hart and the Writing of Modern Chinese History’, International Journal of Asian Studies 17: 109–26. Chou Te-wei (周德偉).2011. Winds and Rain under My Pen: My Life and the Stories of the Nationalist Party (Luobi Jing Fengyu: Wode Yisheng he Guomindang de Diandi 落筆驚風雨：　我的一生和國民黨的點滴). Taibei: Yuanliu Chuban Shiye Gufen Youxiang Gongsi.

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Fairbank, John K. 1953. Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of the Treaty Ports, 1842–1854. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fairbank, John K. and Katherine F. Bruner (eds). 1975. The I.G. in Peking: Letters of Robert Hart Chinese Maritime Customs, 1868–1907, 2 volumes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fairbank, John K., Martha Henderson Coolidge and Richard J. Smith (eds). 1995. H.B. Morse: Customs Commissioner and Historian of China. Lexington, KY: Kentucky University Press. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1980. The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter, Jr. and Vida Yadzi Ditter. New York: Harper & Row. ______. 1992. On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Huang Qingxun (黃清潯). 2003. The Years in the Maritime Customs Service: My Lifelong Career (Haiguan Suiye: Wode Zhongshen Zhiye 海 關歲月: 我的終身職業). Taipei: Self-published. Lam Lok Ming (林樂明). 1982. Memoirs of 35 Years of Service in the Chinese Maritime Customs. Hong Kong: Longman. Liu, H. Mei. 2012. Grandfather’s Microscope. Thorofare, NJ: Edwards Brothers Malloy. Lu Haiming (盧海鳴). 1993. The Molting Period of the Customs: My Fortytwo Years Career (Haiguan Tuibian Niandai: Renzhi Haiguan Sishi’er zai Jingli 海關蛻變年代: 任職海關四十二載經歷). Taipei: Self-published. Morse, Hosea Ballou. 1910 and 1918. The International Relations of the Chinese Empire, 3 volumes. London: Longmans, Green, and Company. Ruan Shourong (阮壽榮). 1986. The Ashes of Brocade (Jin Hui Ji 錦灰集). Taipei: Self-published. Shi Xizhi (史習智). 2011. Blind Signal Processing: Theory and Practice. Berlin: Springer. Smith, Richard J., John K. Fairbank and Katherine F. Bruner (eds). 1991. Robert Hart and China’s Early Modernization: His Journals, 1863–1866. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Takeshi, Hamashita. 1989. Tyuugoku Keizaishi Kenkyuu – Shinmatsu Kaikan Zaisei to Kaikou Shijoken (Studies of Contemporary Chinese Economic History: Finance of Late Qing Customs Service and Ports’ Markets). Tokyo: Institute of Advanced Studies on Asia. ______. 2016. Trade and Finance in Late Imperial China: Maritime Customs and Open Port Market Zones. Singapore: NUS Press. The Special Collection, Directorate General of Customs (Guanshui Zongju Te Cangshi 關稅總局特藏室). 1993. The Address List for Alumni of the Customs College (Shuiwu Zhuanmen Xuexiao Xiaoyou Tongxun Lu 稅務專門學校校友通訊錄).

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The Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs (Shanghai Zong Shuiwu Si Gongshu Tongji Chu上海總稅務司公署統計 處). 1931. Service List Fifty Ninth Issue, 1931 (1931 Nian Haiguan Zhiyuan Lu Di Wushijiu Qi / 1931年海關職員錄第五十九期). Shanghai: The Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs. The Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs (Shanghai Zong Shuiwu Si Gongshu Tongji Chu上海總稅務司公署統計 處). 1940. Service List Sixty Sixth Issue, 1940 (1940 Nian Haiguan Zhiyuan Lu Di Liushiliu Qi / 1940年海關職員錄第六十六期). Shanghai: The Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs. The Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs (Shanghai Zong Shuiwu Si Gongshu Tongji Chu上海總稅務司公署統計 處). 1942. Service List Sixty Eighth Issue, 1942 (1942 Nian Haiguan Zhiyuan Lu Di Liushiba Qi / 1942年海關職員錄第六十八期). Shanghai: The Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs. The Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs (Shanghai Zong Shuiwu Si Gongshu Tongji Chu上海總稅務司公署統計 處). 1944. Provisional Service List Seventy, 1944 (1944 Nian Haiguan Zhiyuan Lu Di Qishi Qi / 1944年海關職員錄第七十期). Chungking: The Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs. The Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs (Shanghai Zong Shuiwu Si Gongshu Tongji Chu上海總稅務司公署統計 處). 1948. Provisional Service List Seventy Four, 1948 (1948 Nian Haiguan Zhiyuan Lu Di Qishisi Qi / 1948年海關職員錄第七十四期). Shanghai: The Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs. van de Ven, Hans. 2006. ‘Robert Hart and Gustav Detring during the Boxer Rebellion’, Modern Asian Studies 40(3): 631–62. ______. 2014. Breaking with the Past: The Maritime Customs Service and the Global Origins of Modernity in China. New York: Columbia University Press. Wang Shude (王樹德). 1990. The Miscellanea for the Forty-one Year Service in the Customs (Fuwu Haiguan Sishiyi Nian Suoji 服務海關四十一年瑣 記). Taipei: Self-published. Wang Wen-ju (王文舉). 1969. Forty Years of A Desultory Career in the Customs (Lanyue Haiguan Sishi Nian濫籥海關四十年). Taipei: Self-published. Wright, Stanley. 1927. The Collection and Disposal of the Maritime and Native Customs Revenue since the Revolution of 1911: With an Account of the Loan Services Administered by the Inspector General of Customs (2nd edition). Shanghai: Statistical Department of Inspectorate General of Customs.

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______. 1935. China’s Customs Revenue since the Revolution of 1911. Revised and enlarged with the assistance of John H. Cubbon. Shanghai: Statistical Department of Inspectorate General of Customs. ______ (ed.). 1935–1938. Documents Illustrative of the Origin, Development, and Activities of the Chinese Customs Service, 6 volumes. Shanghai: The Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs. ______. 1938. China’s Struggle for Tariff Autonomy, 1843–1938. Shanghai: Kelly & Walsh, Ltd. ______. 1950. Hart and the Chinese Customs. Belfast: WM. Mullan & Son Ltd. Ye Yuanzhang (葉元章). 1987. Recollections of a Chinese Customs Veteran, 2 volumes. Taipei: Self-published. Zhan Dehe (詹德和). 2000. A Tour of the Customs in Style (Haiguan Xiaosa Zou Yihui海關瀟灑走一回). Taipei: Self-published.

7 Jailhouse Blues, Storytelling and Becoming the Stuff of Legends in Southwest China



Katherine Swancutt (苏梦林) and Jiarimuji (嘉日姆几)

Huddled together in a crowded room lit by embers, soot and smoke curling from the hearth pit in the floor, we watched the jailhouse story unfold again. Our storyteller, who is nicknamed ‘Water Buffalo’ (yyx nyi 襱褵) in the Nuosu language, was seated on the floor against the honorary back wall of the room that holds the warmth of the fire best. We had gathered sometime earlier for an evening feast in the courtyard that housed this cramped kitchenette in which Water Buffalo, with his feet tucked up close to his body, shared his comic tale about the micropolitics of a Nuosu dispute. With the door kept ajar to make up for the lack of a chimney, we had a partial view of our host’s courtyard where guests milled about and some women busily prepared food. A small stream of visitors dipped in and out of the room to enjoy a few snatches of the tale, bringing us salted pieces of freshly roasted pig’s liver. Their comings-and-goings helped to circulate the heady air as we awaited the meal to come. Holding our eyes half-open to avoid the motes of ash floating in and out of focus over the fire, we watched Water Buffalo hold court with us. He laughed and gesticulated at high points of the story, scaling his choreography to a miniature form that fit the space available. Despite these packed quarters, he managed to re-enact both his own role in the story and the roles of others with ludic gestures that some of his lineage mates delighted in mimicking. It became clear that Water Buffalo had set out

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to present himself as a heroically comic and highly memorable figure in a recent feud between his own lineage, the Jjiessyt, and their frequent marriage partners and enemies, the Axku. To this end, Water Buffalo appealed to his audience to envision the dispute as part of their unified public, collective or ‘social memory’ in the sense given to the term by Jan Assman (2008: 109; see also Feuchtwang 2011: 13; MacDougall 1994: 268; and the introduction to this volume). Going a step further, he staged his story as a feud of myth-historical proportions that already had become a legendary feature of Nuosu ‘cultural memory’ (sensu Assman 2008: 109 and 2006: 8–9; see also 25–30). Through this dual appeal to social and cultural memory, Water Buffalo sought to be remembered not only as the chief protagonist of his story, but as a living legend. The Nuosu are a Tibeto-Burman ethnic group who share the Yi ethnonym with numerous other groups residing across China’s southwest. Located in the Liangshan (Cool Mountain) highlands of Sichuan and Yunnan provinces, Nuosu storytellers commonly seek recognition for the memorable tales that they spread far and wide. While rural Nuosu, such as Water Buffalo and his fellow villagers, are predominantly subsistence pastoralists and agriculturalists, their stories frequently include relatives or friends in urban areas who take up a wide variety of professions and equip their city homes with the traditional hearth pit next to which storytelling sessions unfold. As Water Buffalo’s story shows, everyday life among Nuosu of all residences and occupations is shaped by the lineage and clan into which they are born. Typically caught within the binds of cross-generational feuds, Nuosu often battle with the lineages from which they source their marriage partners. Their feuds are both mitigated and complicated by the fact that Nuosu women, who join their husband’s lineage upon marriage, nonetheless maintain strong ties to their natal lineages through their siblings (especially their sisters) and their children (Liu 2011: 153–56). Several years earlier, Water Buffalo found himself at the heart of the dispute that he had recounted to us, which has since become the subject of numerous storytelling sessions across the Liangshan highlands. A gentle man in his sixties, Water Buffalo gained his nickname in youth on account of his height, build, features and stubborn bravery. While his story of the dispute echoed the Nuosu expectation that men should courageously defend their lineages, it also revealed that, due to his advanced age, Water Buffalo had no choice but to pursue somewhat comical strategies of keeping his rivals at bay. The story also showed Water Buffalo’s resilience in weathering a jail sentence, which is considered to be the most shameful thing to endure among Nuosu. Through his entertaining delivery of the story, Water Buffalo rocked the room with laughter, amusing those who were new to it and those who savoured hearing it again.

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We suggest in this chapter that storytellers, such as Water Buffalo, shape social and cultural memory by re-enacting tales in memorable ways that their audiences later reproduce when retelling the same stories. According to Michael Taussig, when storytellers and their audiences ‘mimic’ specific scenes in bodily, sensuous and material form, they come to mutually reexperience them through the process he calls ‘mimesis’ (1993: 40–41 and 1994: 206; see also the introduction to this volume). Taking Taussig’s (1993 and 1994) approach to mimesis a step further, we propose that storytellers and their audiences mimic the material, sensuous and even conceptual features of storylines in order to make both social memory and the myth-histories of cultural memory into the stuff of legends. To this end, we introduce a new way of envisioning storytelling that goes beyond the narrative-based approaches found in fields as diverse as anthropology (Narayan 1989, AbuLughod 1993, and Hurston 1991/1935), folklore (Tedlock 1999) and literary studies (Izzo 2015).

From Narratives to Storytelling Matters The focus upon ‘narrative structure’ has been a longstanding theme across the arts, humanities and social sciences, which, in our own discipline of anthropology, reaches back to the post-structuralist and deconstructivist moment of the late 1960s and early 1970s (cf. Maggio 2014: 98–100). Clifford Geertz (1973) famously spearheaded the anthropological emphasis on narrative while advancing his general approach to ethnographic writing and analysis under the heading of ‘thick description’ – a term that he borrowed from the philosopher, Gilbert Ryle (1968a and 1968b). Now narrative is no longer at the analytical forefront of anthropology and other cognate disciplines, yet the theme of storytelling often still stubbornly gravitates around it. It is therefore not uncommon to find newer studies rehearsing familiar tropes about a story’s ‘contextual immediacy’, or in cases of joking and comedy, ‘the “you had to be there” syndrome’ (Carty and Musharbash 2008). However, more nuanced approaches to storytelling have appeared recently under the label of ‘new ethnographies’ that are built upon selfreflexive accounts, the sharing of emotions, and a renewed attention to the political projects of storytellers (Herrmann and DiFate 2014: 4). One notable contribution here is Justin Izzo’s study of the Malian literary writercum-anthropologist, Amadou Hampâté Bâ, who uses narrative structure to re-envision ‘autobiography as a cross-disciplinary palimpsest’ that builds creative bridges between ‘literary virtuosity and ethnographic exposition’ (2015: 1). In Izzo’s discussion of the cross-disciplinary palimpsest, which he describes as ‘an operation of rewriting and writing-over, involving the conversion of autobiography into transcultural dialogue and the reversal of the

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directionality of ethnographic knowledge production’, he draws attention – albeit implicitly – to the memorable, mimicable and transmittable qualities of storytelling narratives (2015: 2; see also 5). Izzo thus suggests that the cross-disciplinary palimpsest is a key feature of the ‘global knowledge’ that certain storytellers may produce about their own societies (2015: 15). In our study of Water Buffalo’s story, we draw from a similar kind of palimpsest, which, however, is composed of memorable features of Nuosu storytelling and anthropological thought. Since our chapter builds predominantly upon Jiarimuji’s own retelling of Water Buffalo’s story (more on this below), we have necessarily engaged in some rewriting and writing-over of his tale in order to transmit it to an inter-disciplinary readership situated beyond the Liangshan highlands. Moreover, as Jiarimuji is both an anthropologist and a legendary Nuosu storyteller in his own right, our palimpsest has also mobilized a ‘reflexive feedback loop’ between these two crafts, which are distinct modalities of knowledge production and memory-making in their own right (Swancutt and Mazard 2016: 3–5). Through our recounting of Water Buffalo’s tale below, we thus reveal the important role that Jiarimuji has in this story, which (among other things) has imparted him with legendary qualities among Nuosu, and the Jjiessyt lineage especially. Much like Benoît Vermander and Chris Berry have observed in their chapters in this volume, a quality of mise en abyme (or ‘story within a story’) has shaped the content of our chapter. This is due to Jiarimuji’s status as a living legend who transmits not just his own tales, but the legend of Water Buffalo, both within Liangshan and through the present chapter, in which we recall, write, rewrite and transmit Water Buffalo’s tale as a palimpsest of Nuosu social and cultural memories. Let us then be clear about our position here at the start, as we do not mean to downplay the importance of narratives altogether and we do present the detailed narrative of Water Buffalo’s story in this chapter. However, we want to suggest that narratives and storytelling are built upon more than meaning and semiotics alone. Much as Vermander (this volume) suggests of the artists who, as storytellers, fill their ‘memory palaces’ with their own experiences, memories and the meanings they have assigned to their previous compositions – each of which provide them with inspiration when producing new works – we propose that Nuosu storytellers draw upon their own storehouses of experience, memories, meanings, narratives, gestures, miming, joking and expressions of pathos in order to create lively interactions with their audiences. Gesture and miming are often particularly important for encouraging Nuosu audiences to re-enact the highly memorable and mimicable qualities of a tale. Through our analysis of Water Buffalo’s story, then, we show that when storytellers and their audiences take such sensitive

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matters as lineage disputes into their own hands, they use mime and gesture to present them as, quite literally, the stuff of legends. Our proposition is in some senses both new and familiar, as we build our analysis upon previous studies of how narratives filled with myth-historical meanings and material resonances have been propagated across centuries and even between societies (cf. Halbwachs 1980 and 1992; Nora 1996, 1997, 1998; Matten 2014: 9). As Michael W. Scott has shown in his comparative study of Melanesian ‘cargoistic discourses’ and the medieval European song cycles, narratives unfold as ‘matters’ in multiple senses of the term (2012: 120–22). The concept of matter is apt here as it evokes on the one hand an event, subject, situation, occurrence, question, problem, curiosity, storyline, narrative or discourse, while it calls to mind on the other hand the material, sensorial and conceptual qualities of matter as stuff or ‘things’ (cf. Henare, Holbraad and Wastell 2007). Beyond this, the polysemic qualities of the term ‘matter’ go beyond the familiar Cartesian divide between mind and spirit (conceived in substanceless form) and matter and the body (material forms with substance). We thus approach a storytelling matter as an assemblage of actions, bodies, senses, material stuff, concepts, personal memories, social memories and the epic themes of cultural memories. Viewing Nuosu stories as matters in their own right enables us to show how they may gain legendary status and become perpetuated through time. If, as Scott suggests, a matter can become a ‘storehouse of worthy themes for new songs, plays, and romances’ (2012: 120), then it can be recounted in ways that shape social and cultural memory. Storytellers such as Water Buffalo connect their personal experiences to their myth-histories of feuding, which include what Scott calls ‘pleasurably exciting incidents and adventures that may contain fabulous elements but also make claims to historical veracity’ (2012: 141, n5). Seen in this light, Nuosu storytelling matters are meant to appeal to a unified social or public memory that, over time, may be incorporated into their myth-histories. Legendary stories such as Water Buffalo’s tale mimic history in a roundabout, yet highly memorable and mimicable way. It is of course also possible that a story will appeal to audiences on account of its memorably imaginative, culturally specific, and sometimes deliberately inaccessible elements (cf. Carty and Musharbash 2008: 215). Thus, as we show through our study of Water Buffalo’s legend, storytellers and audiences re-enliven their tales with imaginative forms of mimicry through which persons stake their claims to be remembered in a particular way. Nuosu, then, often set out to ensure that their stories will be received by younger generations as important matters, which, when lineage rivalries flare up, encourage them to take to the battlefield.

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Becoming a Local Legend There is a sense in which our chapter mirrors Water Buffalo’s own venture, as it is also a product of storytelling. We met in 2007 when Swancutt first conducted fieldwork among Nuosu in the Ninglang Yi Autonomous County of Yunnan Province, China. On her return fieldwork trip to the area in 2011, she invited Jiarimuji to England as a visiting scholar. By 2012, Jiarimuji had arrived in the United Kingdom, where he shared Water Buffalo’s story with her while positioning it within his own narrative of a dispute that arose in May 2010 between two Nuosu lineages. Like a set of Russian dolls, Jiarimuji stacked Water Buffalo’s story inside of his own tale of this dispute, which he compared to yet other well-known tales from across the Liangshan highlands (cf. Swancutt and Jiarimuji 2018). In this chapter, we present the extended storyline of this dispute, as recounted by Jiarimuji to Swancutt, in order to throw the fullest possible light onto its myth-historical qualities. Three years after we first discussed Water Buffalo’s story together, we watched him retell it again in summer 2015, during the feast described at the start of this chapter. By then, Water Buffalo’s comic tale had already become a celebrated classic across much of the Liangshan highlands. His vivid evocation of the battles between his lineage and its rivals made his story into an immediate crowd pleaser, while underscoring its contribution to Nuosu social and cultural memories of feuding. Key to understanding how this worked are the ways in which Water Buffalo evoked the material, sensorial and conceptual hooks to his storyline. One example of this, which we discuss in detail below, is Water Buffalo’s caricature of his elderly Jjiessyt lineage mate who had been thrown aside by an opponent like an old jacket. This highly memorable feature of Water Buffalo’s story arose when his lineage mate was charged by an elderly opponent from the Axku lineage and, to his surprise, was caught and swung easily over the shoulder of his attacker who then tossed him to the ground, as though he had casually peeled off and discarded an item of clothing. Each time Water Buffalo re-enacts the jacket-tossing scene, he mimics it in a way that transforms it into a storytelling matter. He uses the jibe ‘like throwing off an old jacket’ (lie guot ggu lyt guo shax su sup 蚦蛏蜕蚽蛑袕蠉蠊) to invite listeners of his tale to imagine themselves in the thick of the story’s battle, where they would have needed to fend off attacks with their wits, bodies and possibly the tactic of discarding an opponent as one would shed clothes. At the same time, Water Buffalo presents himself as a clever fighter who had no choice but to witness this unforgettably comic event from a place of hiding. Against the grain of the Nuosu ideal that it is brave young warriors who fight battles, Water Buffalo creatively mimics this scene and his own comedic helplessness in watching it unfold as a key part of his story. Many of

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his lineage mates enjoy imitating this scene when retelling his tale, including Jiarimuji who stood up to mime the jacket-tossing scene with relish when he first shared the story with Swancutt. Water Buffalo’s lineage mates also enjoy imagining themselves replicating scenes such as the jacket-tossing one, albeit to their advantage, in some future skirmish with their rivals. What Water Buffalo’s re-enactments allow Nuosu to do, then, is to position this specific scene within their personal memories and cross-generational myth-histories of lineage feuding. Through lively scenes such as this, Nuosu storytellers evoke memories of deeds that warrant revenge because they are a source of shame and bodily harm that indicate defeat. Being overthrown by one’s opponent is an experience that, among Nuosu, emotively undermines the warrior’s sense of propriety on a sensorial, material and conceptual level. When listening to Water Buffalo’s tale, his audiences therefore laugh at the comic way in which one of their own men was overpowered by an opponent, while bearing in mind that shamefully memorable events such as these often eventually lead to matters of the most serious proportions. Nuosu may recount memorable stories like these in order to summon a revenge battle or support for a blood compensation dispute, which entire lineages consider to be matters of certain life or death. By encouraging their audiences to imitate memorable scenes, storytellers embolden the next generation to perpetuate feuds, produce newfound stories of bravery, ensure they get the last laugh, and, where possible, become local legends within Nuosu social memory and myth-history. Let us now see how all of this works by taking a closer look at Jiarimuji’s retelling of Water Buffalo’s story and of the larger dispute in which it featured.

A Dispute Is Born Jiarimuji started narrating the story to Swancutt by positioning it within the social and cultural memory of the Jjiessyt and Axku lineages. He recalled that a different feud had concluded perhaps ten days before the dispute that gave rise to Water Buffalo’s jacket-tossing scene. Each of the key persons in the new dispute were descended from three brothers who were born of one man five generations ago, making them relatives. As Jiarimuji observed, the Jjiessyt and Axku lineages have routinely intermarried for five to six generations and are famous for bravery in battle, particularly against each other. This new dispute was sourced to a recent marriage between a young Jjiessyt man and an Axku woman. The couple had been married for four years but had lived apart for at least two of them while the husband undertook compulsory military work. After his military service, the husband joined his wife in the city of Kunming, the provincial capital of Yunnan province, so that they could live and work together. No children had yet been born to

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the couple, who were in their early thirties and visited medical doctors frequently to determine the reasons for this. But the doctors could not pinpoint what, if any, problems there might have been. It was assumed by the wife’s family that because her husband’s two elder brothers did not have children for many years, the problem was traceable to his family. There were many times when the couple considered divorcing so that they could find suitable partners, have children and continue their lineages. Heavy pressure to divorce also came from the wife and her father, who was a famous mediator of lineage disputes. However, the husband reasoned that they should be patient as they were still young, loved each other and the doctors had not found the exact reasons for their problems. Crucially, the husband added that he did not want to take the proportionately larger shame that Nuosu society places on men for not producing children. Sterility in men is conveyed through a slang in Nuosu that plays on the word (bup 蔘), which denotes a barren ewe in particular or sterility in the more general sense of the term. Nuosu consider that body fat accumulates on a barren ewe much as it does on a castrated male sheep. The slang for a sterile man, then, literally means ‘a man who is barren’ (batbup 蔇蔘). Jiarimuji explained that any man addressed by this epithet loses all face in Nuosu society and is discriminated against on every occasion in a way that is more severe than the already severe ostracism faced by a bastard child. Worse yet, the sterile man has no choice but to endure the insult of this epithet. Knowing this, the husband in this story told his wife that he would rather be sterile in actual fact than to undergo a divorce, which would bring on the public humiliation whereby other Nuosu would automatically assume that his marriage had failed because he was sterile. Eventually, his wife agreed to remain with him. However, one evening his wife disappeared without anyone knowing where she had gone. There had been no recent quarrels between the couple, yet she remained missing for three days. Afraid that she had been killed, her husband reported her as missing to the police, asking them to see if they could gauge her location via her family’s mobile telephone. He then discovered that his wife had telephoned her father and brother many times before she had left their home. Moreover, his wife’s family knew where she was. It dawned on him and his lineage mates that his wife could have been persuaded by her family to hide from him for a couple of years. By then, it was assumed, her estranged husband would likely seek a divorce. They factored into their reasoning the Nuosu traditional legal requirement that the person who initiates a conflict, such as a divorce, must pay the compensation money for it. Divorce payments are typically far higher in Nuosu society than are weddings, as they involve returning any bride-wealth payments made by the lineage of the husband to the lineage of the wife, as well as the

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interest incurred upon them. Thus, the Jjiessyt lineage concluded that the wife’s father had devised a strategy to encourage his son-in-law to divorce his daughter and forfeit the bride-wealth that he had paid. More than ten days had passed before the husband received a telephone call from his wife, who finally told him that she wanted a divorce and added that he need not go looking for her. Soon after, all of their shared money disappeared from their credit card account, which she had presumably taken. A month later, the wife’s father appeared at the home of the husband’s father. These two men are cross-cousins and became the focal point of a Jjiessyt-Axku dispute from this moment onwards. The Axku father pleaded with the Jjiessyt lineage to help locate his missing daughter, saying that she had not returned to her natal home. He explained that her grandfather and all the Axku lineage members were concerned and wanted the Jjiessyt lineage, into which she had married, to take up the responsibility of finding her. This was a reasonable request in Nuosu terms, so the Jjiessyt father agreed to it. But he added that the Axku father shared the responsibility of finding his daughter. In reply, the Axku father admitted that his missing daughter often telephoned her family, but that no one could locate her. Inwardly, the Jjiessyt father surmised that the Axku father had intentionally driven her away from the marriage, but he chose not to voice his suspicions. Instead, he agreed to do a joint search for the missing daughter in hopes of finding her within a couple of months and clarifying the situation. Beneath the surface of these calm discussions, though, secret hatreds started to grow. Pushing the matter a step further, the Axku father recited the Nuosu saying ‘In life you belong to our people, in death you belong with our ghosts’ (Jjo nge nit vo co, sy nyit cy nge nit 褎蝕虦藙螨, 蠏褳螵蝕虦), which refers to the care entitled to any daughter who is taken into another lineage at marriage. His point was to underscore the responsibility of his in-laws, and affinal kin more generally, to keep watch over their daughters. These were serious words to deliver in the context of an impending divorce, as they are a reminder that even a divorced Nuosu wife is always ritually incorporated into her husband’s lineage at his funeral and post-mortuary rites. What the Axku father wanted to stress here was that the responsibility for his daughter would rest with the Jjiessyt lineage forevermore, under any circumstances, including after her death. He thus chose memorable words to signal that his daughter’s absence should be logged as an important matter in Nuosu social memory, if not also the myth-histories of cultural memory.

The Courtyard Battle between Lineages After another month had passed, the Axku father visited the Jjiessyt father again. He asked after his daughter, declaring that he had not seen her foot-

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prints and feared she was dead. Levelling an open challenge, he said that if the Jjiessyt lineage did not find her by the time of the annual Torch Festival celebrations two months later, then he would charge them with murder in the manner of a traditional mediation dispute, demanding that the Jjiessyt father pay blood compensation for her death. The Axku father thus raised the stakes considerably. Compensation for a death is far higher among Nuosu than a divorce payment. But the Jjiessyt father calmly replied that he had no right to sue him for killing his daughter, as they knew very well that she lived comfortably in her father’s home. Rhetorically, he added that the Axku father perhaps even knew where she was right then and there, and so should do his best to find her. Otherwise, he concluded, the Jjiessyt lineage would need to sue the Axku lineage for her murder, as she was now a Jjiessyt wife. Although the two men comported themselves peaceably and politely, their words had become deadly serious. Ten days after the Torch Festival, the Jjiessyt lineage held a large celebration for the eldest brother of the spurned husband. This brother had passed the entrance examination for Minzu University of China, which was an enormous event for his family and lineage. All of the family’s relatives visited the Jjiessyt father’s home, where a large pig was slaughtered for a feast to congratulate his son on the exam result. But on the following day, this happy occasion shifted to a matter of concern. Jiarimuji received a telephone call from the son who had passed his exam, who was seeking advice because the Axku lineage sought to hold a mediation for the dispute with them. Moments before, the Axku father had telephoned to announce that he had assembled more than twenty persons who were on their way to the Jjiessyt father’s home, would arrive soon, and wanted to mediate the dispute upon arrival. It was a peaceful looking day with bright sunshine, which made Jiarimuji feel that nothing dramatic was likely to happen. He therefore replied that the Jjiessyt lineage should take it easy, as no one had the courage to kill another person in their society, what with everyone being afraid of each another and no powerful person in sight. At the time of this telephone call, there had been just six men in the Jjiessyt home, including the Jjiessyt father, his three sons, their uncle Water Buffalo, and Water Buffalo’s nephew, who were accompanied by the women of the home. In total, the Axku father had gathered twenty-six men from across three counties. On route to the Jjiessyt home, he stopped off at a township office where he informed the local officials that he was on his way to mediate a dispute with the Jjiessyt lineage and wanted to officially inform them of this. The Axku father did this in order to show that he had legal backing for his plans. When the officials replied that he could mediate the dispute but asked him to do so peaceably, the Axku father agreed.

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Upon their arrival at the Jjiessyt village, the Axku group started the mediations off in an informal way. They sent two mediators to the home of the Jjiessyt father to explain that the Axku lineage wanted an exact answer for its daughter’s disappearance. This was a euphemistic demand for blood compensation money for their missing daughter. Unfazed, the Jjiessyt lineage members replied that this would be no problem, provided that the Axku lineage bring 1,000 yuan, which the Jjiessyt lineage would match with another 1,000 yuan, so that they could make a bet. They added the rejoinder that ‘If someday we find your daughter and know that it is our fault that she went missing, then we will give the money to you. But if it turns out instead that we find your daughter and know that it was your fault, then you will give the money to us. Beyond that, we cannot control you. So you do what you like’. With this sarcastic message, they sent the mediators back to the group of Axku men. Having heard this, the Axku father told his mediators to send back this refusal: ‘We have no reason to make a bet with you and give over 1,000 yuan. Since my daughter disappeared in your house and no one else is involved in this case, then you must find her by the upcoming Torch Festival, or I will charge you for her death. I have arrived here to initiate the proceedings for this matter and if you do not give an exact and clear answer to me immediately, then we will move to your house instantly to seize and occupy it’. Once the mediators conveyed these words to the Jjiessyt side, Water Buffalo retorted ‘Okay, no problem. You will come because we are marriage partner lineages. Your mother and grandmother are also my aunt and grand aunt. You are our marriage partners and we are also your marriage partners. Our house is your house. It is not a problem if you want to come. But we need to prepare an empty room for you’. Water Buffalo’s implication was that the Axku and Jjiessyt lineages were on good terms and no one was an enemy. But everyone knew that the conflict was rising. The choice to offer an empty room was significant, as it implied that the Axku men would be given a place to stay, but one that would be empty of the Jjiessyt lineage’s nice possessions that could otherwise be destroyed. Further to this was the implication that in an empty home, the Axku could make a fire on their own but could not eat or do anything without the Jjiessyt lineage’s permission, as they would have no access to food or other amenities without them. Having sent off the mediators, the six Jjiessyt men locked the doors and left the house where they had gathered. But moments later, the Axku men arrived and met the six Jjiessyt men at the wooden gates to their home. As the Axku men entered the gates, the Jjiessyt women tried to hold them back, whereupon the Axku men kicked at

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them, knowing that this would likely bring retribution as Nuosu consider it unacceptably shameful for a man to beat or kick a woman. Seeing this, the Jjiessyt men attacked the Axku men. Finding themselves face-to-face at the gates, the Jjiessyt and Axku fathers said nothing but simply leapt on each other and began wrestling, despite their advanced age. The Axku father was upwards of sixty years old at the time but still muscular, whereas the Jjiessyt father was thin, frail, and upwards of seventy years old. Water Buffalo witnessed the moment where the Axku father appeared to have taken off his jacket and roughly thrown it away, only to realize that what he had actually seen was the Axku father tossing the lightweight Jjiessyt father over his own shoulder and discarding him on the ground. Obviously, the battle was unequal between them, so the three sons of the Axku and Jjiessyt fathers paired up to wrestle too. As no one knew what would happen in advance, the sons had brought weapons in the form of stones, knives and the wooden clubs that Nuosu use for threshing buckwheat. During the wrestling, some of the Jjiessyt men battled their opponents with some large heavy stones that had been left next to their gate. Quick on the uptake, the Axku men gathered the large stones too and incorporated them into the fight. Rural Nuosu learn as young boys how to throw stones at rapid speed by practising on sheep, honing their skills until they can hurl them in a way that mimics machine-gun fire. A battle of only three-to-five minutes took place before the fighting had finished. Within that brief burst of aggression, four Axku men were seriously hurt by the stones and one Axku man had stabbed people when swinging a knife. At that point, the Jjiessyt men ran off quickly, as they knew the terrain well and could camouflage themselves in the high maize fields that had grown tall in the lead-up to the August Torch Festival. No one could find them dispersed among the rows of maize. By this time, it was around three or four o’clock in the afternoon and the road was covered with blood from the wounded. The Axku father had a wound on his head and left arm from the stones, while his eldest son had broken his left forearm, another of his sons was wounded in the shin, and his nephew had four wounds on his head from the stones as well as a knife wound. This Axku nephew actually lived in the Jjiessyt village, which angered the Jjiessyt side who felt that he should not have joined in to harm his neighbours. All of the assembled Jjiessyt women watched as the wounded men were assisted by their remaining twenty or so Axku lineage mates, who helped them to walk the 500–600 metres to the roadside where they could flag down a private minibus for transport to a local hospital. While the Axku men assisted their wounded to the road, many Jjiessyt neighbours came out of their homes to witness this. Laughing, the neighbours taunted the defeated Axku men for their bloodied look, calling out ‘See, you should not come here to fight!’. Jiarimuji mimicked these women’s taunts when re-

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counting the story to Swancutt, as well as the loud warlike-whooping calls that they made to draw public attention to the Axku defeat. As Jiarimuji explained, the Jjiessyt were elated by this success and allowed social memories to come flooding back to them of the twenty years that had passed in which the Axku lineage won each battle against them. But on this occasion, the Axku were beaten very seriously by the Jjiessyt side, which added to the jubilance of the Jjiessyt women’s loud mockery. As soon as a minibus arrived, all the Axku wounded who could fit into it were sent to the hospital, while the remaining Axku lineage mates retired 1–2 kilometres from the Jjiessyt father’s home. Since it was anticipated that the hospital bills would become the centre of the next stage of blood compensation mediations, the Axku and Jjiessyt sides prepared accordingly. Some Jjiessyt men chose to have their wounds checked by a medical doctor, but following Nuosu protocol for this, they went to a different hospital. This way, there would be no reason to worry that the true value of their medical bills would be overheard by the rival lineage, as bills are routinely inflated during lineage mediations. Even the Jjiessyt women who were kicked went to the hospital in case they might have had internal wounds, accompanied by the Jjiessyt father who was thrown over his opponent’s shoulder like an old jacket. The extra hospital trips gave the signal that the Jjiessyt had wounded on their side too and would need compensation from the Axku.

Psychological Warfare It was around this time that Jiarimuji received a telephone call from Water Buffalo, who exclaimed ‘We are fighting!’. Completely taken aback, Jiarimuji had thought that the two lineages were only discussing monetary compensation at this stage. But he learned that the Axku lineage mates who did not travel to hospital had returned to seize and occupy the Jjiessyt household courtyard in order not to have lost too much face through their defeat. By then, it had started to rain and the six Jjiessyt men in the household made numerous telephone calls, as their numbers were far fewer than even the remaining Axku men. In total, the Jjiessyt men summoned around 100 additional lineage mates from their nearby administrative village centre as well as from a nearby township. Gathering these men together was easy, and not only due to the support that Nuosu lineage mates routinely give to each other. As Jiarimuji pointed out, the Jjiessyt lineage had recently won a different dispute with the local police, who had allowed unlicensed drivers to operate in their area. Having fought with the local authorities and held negotiations with them until they secured financial compensation, the Jjiessyt lineage felt united by fresh memories of that success, which had showcased the strength of their fighting skills and reputation. This feeling of

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solidarity had been further reinforced by the feasting celebrations held for the Jjiessyt son who had just passed his prestigious exam. Midnight had nearly arrived when the 100 summoned lineage mates reached the Jjiessyt village. The Axku men who had occupied the Jjiessyt home had wanted to make a fire outdoors in the courtyard, but they could not manage this as it was raining, so they broke into the empty Jjiessyt home, made a fire, and had food brought to them by relatives living in the county town centre of Ninglang. By then, the local government had learned about the fighting and sent in the leaders of the communist party from the administrative village, as well as representatives from the security commission, police station, inspectors’ bureau and judicial court, who used a broad roll of tape to erect a boundary zone around the house that the Axku lineage had occupied. Having completed this, the officials declared that no Jjiessyt could enter this bounded-off area, while the Axku who were inside of it were not allowed to leave. All of the neighbouring Jjiessyt households then kept watch and listened out carefully in case the Axku men tried to leave the area. At exactly midnight, the Jjiessyt lineage mates gathered together and decided that if the Axku did not retreat from their territory, they would attack them immediately, as the Jjiessyt would not permit other lineages to occupy their homes for more than twelve hours. They had in fact invented this new ‘lineage rule’ on the spot and presented it to the persons acting as their mediators, who were no longer the two Axku men, but the local officials who had come to the area to placate and resolve the dispute. Then the Jjiessyt men prepared strips of red cloth to wear around their heads so that they could recognize each other in battle against the Axku men. Still in view of the officials, they prepared clubs, knives and axes while loudly singing war songs to further encourage the Axku men, who could not help but overhear them, to leave. However, the government officials decided that as it was still raining, it would not be good form to force the Axku men to walk back in the rain. A compromise was reached whereby the government agreed to tell the Axku men to leave by midday the following day. To celebrate this mini victory, the Jjiessyt slaughtered a number of pigs and held a raucous all-night feasting party that advertised their 100-strong numbers, ribald strength and ongoing battlefield preparations – all of which served as a form of what Jiarimuji dubs ‘psychological warfare’ against the Axku men who had occupied their home. Evidently, the pressure that the Jjiessyt lineage put upon them worked, as the Axku men were persuaded by the government officials to leave around ten o’clock the following morning. As they left, the Axku men made the government officials promise to prevent the Jjiessyt lineage from attacking them while they were on the road. Although they appeared to show a fearful retreat, the Axku request for protection was understood by the Jjiessyt to be an opportunistic, ironic and foreboding

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taunt. Through their mock fear, the Axku signalled they had already chosen to increase their blood compensation demands in future, which would also cover their serious battle wounds. For six months, the dispute was left aside while both sides strategized about how to raise their compensation demands. The police investigated the Axku and Jjiessyt involvement in the dispute, asking who got injured and why. During their investigations, the Axku lineage told the police that Water Buffalo was responsible for all of their injuries and for hurting them with stones. They wanted to have him arrested as an important Jjiessyt lineage leader. Word got out too that, when in hospital, the Axku father had shared a room with a young Jjiessyt man who was not involved in the fighting. Reclining on their hospital beds that were positioned side-by-side, the Axku father looked over and recited the Nuosu saying ‘A tiger’s tail was leapt over by a dog (Lat mop pup shu ke qie 蚨薩蔶袥蛵裫)’. This saying evokes the Nuosu notion that warriors are tiger-like and the Axku father used it to describe himself as an important battlefield figure to the young Jjiessyt man, whom he likened to an insignificant dog. Another memorable layer of meaning was conveyed through this saying, which alludes to the fact that Nuosu always consider it to be a pity or a fluke accident when the common dog leaps over the magnificent, powerful and rare tiger. While no one expects the mighty tiger to be defeated, this occasionally happens when it is wounded. Expanding on this theme, the Axku father theatrically inquired aloud of all the people around him: ‘Do you know who wounded me? There is no one in this county who has the ability to wound me. But the people who wounded me are here in my mother’s lineage’. Here, the Axku father’s point was that he was not ashamed to have been wounded by his cross-cousins or uncles who are members of his family and bloodline. Nuosu only find it shameful to be beaten by the kin of others and are proud to marry persons from big and powerful lineages. The Axku father thus called attention to the fame of both his own lineage and the Jjiessyt, which in the past have joked together, shared happy moments and enjoyed the status of being associated with one another. His comments harked back to a further layer of social memory concerning the on-and-off lineage alliances and rivalries between the Jjiessyt and Axku – which, across Ninglang, is often summed up in a joke coined at an earlier time by the Axku father that people enjoy repeating: ‘I long to spar with a person of the Jjiessyt lineage’ (Jjie ssyt cuop luo zo xix mgu  複蠩螥蚮螆襇蜫). This memorable turn of phrase is frequently recounted, complete with an imitation of the jokingly epic manner in which the Axku father first declared it, during moments of storytelling. It suggests not only that the Axku and the Jjiessyt lineages are the strongest in their area but that mediations are the final frontiers of their prestige-building battles, which only the strongest, most accomplished, most ambitious and cleverest may enter.

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Having declared in hospital that he felt no shame at being beaten by his own kin, the Axku father presented himself as a moral person who refuses to voice ill words about the lineage that gave birth to and raised his mother and wife. By following the Nuosu men’s custom of pursuing physical battles without voicing disparaging thoughts about their enemies in the midst of a dispute, he strove to be remembered in a favourable light. Both his joke about sparring with the Jjiessyt and his recitation of the saying about the tiger and dog became memorable features in the story of this dispute, which Jiarimuji grandly mimicked in his retelling of it. Yet as Jiarimuji pointed out, the climax of Water Buffalo’s story was yet to come.

A Legendary Arrest Not long after the Axku lineage had complained about Water Buffalo to the police, he joined a large retinue of male relatives to escort a Jjiessyt woman to her marriage in the county town centre of Ninglang. An Axku man spotted Water Buffalo in town and promptly telephoned the police, complaining that he had committed ‘the crime of seriously wounding’ (Ch. zhong shang 重伤) his relative and therefore should be arrested, even if the wounded did not press charges. The police appeared at the end of the wedding to quietly summon Water Buffalo, who was arrested outside of the celebrations on the basis of the hospital reports that confirmed the seriousness of the Axku lineage’s wounds, and promptly taken to the station for questioning. Disputing Water Buffalo’s involvement, the Jjiessyt lineage mates told the police that he was an old man and had run away from the fighting to protect himself. They complained that one side’s statement only cannot be taken as police proof and that Water Buffalo had acted in reasonable selfdefence, whereas the Axku lineage had occupied a private house of theirs. Going a step further, they asked why the police did not also arrest someone from the Axku side. More than 100 Jjiessyt lineage mates then gathered to descend upon the Ninglang county town police station to demand Water Buffalo’s release, using a recent tactic that they had introduced only seven months earlier when demanding restitution for their relatives killed in the aforementioned truck accident (cf. Swancutt 2016: 111–13). The assembled Jjiessyt collectively proclaimed Water Buffalo’s innocence in the battle and demanded that the police find witnesses from among their lineage too. However, the police replied that the Axku lineage already had proved Water Buffalo to be a criminal with the hospital reports, adding that the Jjiessyt side would have to take their complaints to court if they felt that the Axku lineage’s behaviour was criminal. In response, the Jjiessyt lineage took a few days to produce a written affidavit from witnesses to the fighting, who added their thumbprints as signatures to formally state that Water Buffalo

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ran away from the fight rather than partaking in it. To strengthen the document, some Jjiessyt lineage mates apprehended the two Axku mediators who had handled their dispute by surprise in their own homes, where they were forced to add their thumbprints to the document, along with a confession that they had failed to keep the rival lineages apart at the critical moment when the Axku side had reached the Jjiessyt gate, as they were supposed to have done. These two mediators were bundled off in a car with the Jjiessyt men to the police station in order that they could support the affidavit in person when it was formally submitted. In addition to this, Water Buffalo’s brother told one of the brothers of the man whose wife had gone missing – which was the cause of the whole dispute in the first place – that ‘Your family has the responsibility to get my brother, Water Buffalo, out of jail. My own group’s effort to get him out of jail has thus far not been enough. So you should collect some money to bribe the police so that they will release Water Buffalo’. Agreeing to do this, the Jjiessyt brother told him that the police could name their price, since being in jail is the most shameful thing to a Nuosu person. He collected around 40,000 yuan to be sent through a person skilled in this kind of negotiation. Still, none of these efforts ensured Water Buffalo’s release. To progress their cause, the Jjiessyt lineage arranged to bring Water Buffalo’s mother, who was upwards of ninety-five years old, to the police station in the Ninglang county town and plead for her son’s release. The Vice-Chair, who was a member of the Han ethnic majority rather than Nuosu, was the only person available when they arrived. Water Buffalo’s mother was unable to speak Chinese and the Vice-Chair was unable to speak Nuosu. But as he had grown up in a Nuosu area, he was familiar with their lineage disputes and the historic practice among Nuosu women of showing their protest in battle with a dramatic intervention, such as taking a lethal dose of poison carried on their own persons. For a couple of hours, the Vice-Chair was followed around his office by Water Buffalo’s mother, without being able to communicate with her. Knowing that he would be blamed if any harm happened to befall to her, the Vice-Chair telephoned a prominent Nuosu mediator and begged him to have Water Buffalo’s mother taken away, while giving the assurance that Water Buffalo would be released soon. It was agreed that Water Buffalo’s mother would be taken home. In a follow-up telephone call, the Vice-Chair suggested that the Jjiessyt and Axku lineages secure a resolution to their dispute, as it is known throughout the Liangshan highlands that lineages do not recant on their resolutions, even if new disputes arise later. With a stable resolution, the Vice-Chair added, it would be possible to release Water Buffalo from jail. This was a watershed moment in the dispute. It became apparent that the Axku father had pushed for Water Buffalo’s arrest as a way of accelerating

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the mediations and collecting his blood compensation payments. To bring the matter to a close, then, the Jjiessyt lineage selected three representatives to mediate for them. When they arrived at the home of the Axku father, he told them: ‘It’s a pity that Water Buffalo was arrested. Of course, I did not want him in jail as we are cross-cousins. But he wounded my people so seriously. That’s why the police arrested him. I really did not want to sue him in court either. But the police station chose to arrest him under public prosecution for the crime of seriously wounding someone, and that certainly was none of my business. Yet as we’re relatives and share the same blood, I’m also very sad for Water Buffalo, feeling for him as we sit together right here in my own house. I know that if we have a good resolution, then I can help you to get Water Buffalo out of jail. But in order for me to do this, you need to pay me 60,000 yuan’. Feeling assured that the Jjiessyt lineage had no other option than to pay him, the Axku father appeared to the mediators as though he were a tiger with its mouth open wide, awaiting the moment for its stomach to be filled. However, the Jjiessyt representatives retorted: ‘Your attitude doesn’t show that you’re leaning towards the resolution of our dispute. We have not yet heard of a person who has been able to keep a dispute going in perpetuity. Now you have four sons, just like our Jjiessyt father. Each of you is the same kind of person. We think that both of our families have the same abilities and are entirely equal. Neither side is stronger than the other. Today we have come to your home on behalf of both sides of the dispute. If you want to keep your dispute, that’s fine. You just keep it’. The Jjiessyt representatives then returned to share this information with their lineage mates. At this point, Jiarimuji intervened by telephoning an official in the inspector’s bureau, who agreed to meet with the Jjiessyt side, help release Water Buffalo from jail, and resolve the case. Although amenable to helping, it turned out one week later that he could do nothing other than let the case proceed to court. Yet Jiarimuji also learned that beneath this official, one of Water Buffalo’s own nephews was working on the case. So the Jjiessyt lineage mates met with this man, who told them to advise Water Buffalo that he should under no circumstance commit himself to any guilty accusations, but should continue to insist on his innocence. By complicating the case in this way, it would be difficult to charge him. With no choice left other than to help resolve the case on a legal basis, Jiarimuji bought some law books and found that the Axku invasion, seizure and occupation of the Jjiessyt home could lead to their public prosecution. The Axku appeared to have violated the Chinese criminal act of seeking ‘to pick quarrels and provoke a dispute’ (xunxin zisi 寻衅滋事) in a typically public space, which was formerly known by the more arcane Chinese legal term of ‘the crime of hooliganism’ (liumangzui 流氓罪). So Jiarimuji wrote

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a lengthy letter that detailed the reasons why the Axku had committed this crime and sent it to a number of important authorities. His letter garnered the support of the official in the inspector’s bureau, who put pressure on the Axku to resolve the dispute or have their lineage mates arrested. Then Jiarimuji and a good friend of his from the Axku lineage agreed to meet with the key persons in the dispute to resolve it. Both lineages quarrelled over compensation for hospital bills, the bride-wealth and wedding costs for the divorcing couple, and other borrowed money. To stop the quarrelling, Jiarimuji told both sides that he would withdraw from the mediation if they did not forgo their monetary claims and end the dispute with the agreement that Water Buffalo should be released from jail. His friend and co-mediator from the Axku lineage agreed that he also would withdraw if this resolution was not met. But the two lineages still quarrelled and threatened each other. Soon, though, the Axku lineage put forth a new demand that doubled as a concession. They declared that as Water Buffalo was still in jail and they were afraid he would take his revenge upon his release (although he had placed no threats from jail), something would need to be done to assure their safety. The official from the inspector’s bureau therefore approached Water Buffalo in jail and advised him that once freed, he must not attack the Axku lineage or the dispute would not be resolved. Water Buffalo agreed, saying ‘Sure. Of course, it’s not been any shame for me to have been put in jail on behalf of my lineage. If both sides can have a fair resolution, then that’s good for everyone’. This statement resonated with the heroic advice that Water Buffalo had given his lineage mates earlier from his jail cell, where he proclaimed: ‘Let me stay in jail. If you get the chance, then kill the eldest son of the Axku father. Or if not, then sit down together and have a good resolution. They will maybe release me from jail after three years. It’s not a problem’. Through these pronouncements, Water Buffalo enhanced his reputation within his generational cohort as a fearless person who no one wants to meet in battle. He was already known as a person who starts off fighting when faced with something wrong and only negotiates after the battle has ended. Yet with his readiness to serve an extended jail sentence, Water Buffalo added to his legendary status by displaying not just bravery, but hospitality and generosity, as a person open to weathering jailhouse blues and accepting even the worst shame of imprisonment on behalf of his lineage. To conclude the dispute, the official from the inspector’s bureau wrote an official government paper that gathered thumbprint signatures from the Jjiessyt and Axku lineages, which were eager for the government to bring about this resolution. This pleased the Axku side, which had prevented the Jjiessyt lineage from reclaiming their bride-wealth for the divorce. But the

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Jjiessyt side was pleased to have first physically beaten the Axku lineage and then nobly chosen to abandon the bride-wealth as just a small price for having secured Water Buffalo’s release from jail. The resolution levelled out the prestige between them. When Water Buffalo was released from jail, the Jjiessyt lineage presented him with a ritually apologetic ‘prize/price’ (ssot 蠞), which took the form of a new set of clothes and a sheep slaughtered for him. Through this memorable prestation, the Jjiessyt lineage conveyed their deepest appreciation to Water Buffalo for suffering on their behalf and for his excellent work done. Water Buffalo now routinely recounts this final part of his story with a memorable pathos that Jiarimuji and other Nuosu enjoy imitating in their own retellings of his tale, thus underscoring the legendary status that Jjiessyt warriors may achieve through extraordinary deeds that merit ritual prizes and entering the annals of myth-history.

Concluding Reflections on Nuosu Storytelling and Myth-History Recounting stories in ways that turn them, and the storyteller, into the stuff of legends is no easy feat to accomplish. We have suggested that this is particularly the case among Nuosu, who set the bar high for legendary storytelling by connecting it to their myth-histories of lineage and clan achievements. Unlike everyday stories, legendary tales stand out for their memorable qualities, which Nuosu audiences aspire to mimic sensu Taussig (1993: 40–41) through their own heroic actions. As we have shown in this chapter, Water Buffalo’s role as the protagonist of his legendary tale is both highly memorable and mimicable, but this is also true of other characters in the story, such as Jiarimuji, who helped to orchestrate its resolution. Legendary storytellers like Water Buffalo or Jiarimuji thus recount their experiences far and wide in order to underscore their status as living legends among other Nuosu, who in turn imitate them in their daily lives and when transmitting their tales. Nuosu storytellers set out to enliven their tales by re-enacting them in highly memorable ways. They do this not only with comic gestures that mimic, for example, throwing aside an opponent like an old jacket, but by giving voice to the memorable sayings that feature in their stories. We have shown in this chapter that each Nuosu saying is meant to evoke multiple layers of meaning on a material, sensorial and conceptual level. The saying that ‘A tiger’s tale was leapt over by a dog’ conjures up thoughts, feelings and even the bodily-qua-material sense of shame through its reference to battles lost only on account of an insignificant wound. Similarly, the Nuosu saying that ‘In life you belong to our people, in death you belong with our ghosts’ evokes the responsibility of ensuring that wives are cared for well in

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life and revered in death by their affinal relatives, who are expected to fulfil this duty in ways that pay proper attention to the conceptual, sensorial and material features of showing and giving care. When storytellers recount memorable sayings and re-enact memorable gestures from their tales, they present them as important layers within their social memory and the myth-histories of cultural memory. Storytellers such as Water Buffalo and Jiarimuji transmit these memorable details in ways that make their stories into tangible works of enduring, and often comedic, art. Through their memorable retellings, they invite Nuosu audiences to envision a tale by replaying it in the mind’s eye and body, in ways that position the listener like a protagonist within it. By inviting audiences to mimic them, they work to ensure that the most memorable layers of their stories (if not an entire tale) become part of their social memory and, where possible, their myth-history. We have shown this above through the Nuosu saying that ‘I long to spar with a person of the Jjiessyt lineage’, which evokes thoughts about the rigours, glories and myth-histories of battling staunch opponents as well the feeling, on a sensorial and material level, of being in the thick of a fight. Having added memorable sayings such as these to their storehouses of memory, Nuosu equip themselves not only to recount them later for entertainment but to summon them from memory at important moments in their lives, such as when preparing for a battle. It is in this way that highly memorable features of stories come to be re-enacted within the feuds that connect generations through myth-historical time. Our recounting of Water Buffalo’s story shows that it is filled with memorable and mimicable details. His narrative reveals that rival lineages sarcastically refuse blood compensation payments by offering to hold bets about their true intentions. They celebrate their impending warpath with telephone calls to alert their rivals and local officials that they are coming. In some cases, they even retaliate by assembling in mass numbers when their enemies are constrained, intimidating them by loudly preparing their weapons, holding impressive feasts and co-opting official representatives of the Chinese state to act as their mediators according to the terms of Nuosu traditional law. When rivals are defeated, women jubilantly taunt them and revel in their lineage’s status. To signal their impending revenge, a defeated lineage may feign fear on its retreat, making veiled demands for increased compensation in future. It may also set out to have a rival imprisoned as a shameful and disheartening punishment. Bribes and legal rationales are furthermore presented through the official channels, as responses to a dispute that unfolds with material and meaningful consequences. Even blood compensation payments and the prize-cum-price of a ritual apology are used to restore status in memorable ways.

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Beyond what a narrative conveys, though, is the way in which it comes to be transmitted as the stuff of legends. Thus, when Water Buffalo shares his tale, he oscillates between the self-effacing portrait he gave to the local authorities who intervened in the skirmish and the more brave-faced, even if comically aged, warrior image that he presents to his Jjiessyt lineage mates – typically in a moment of soliloquy – where the storyline reveals his intentions of strengthening the reputation of his lineage. Water Buffalo, then, presents himself as a legendary figure who unwittingly spearheaded a battle in a Jjiessyt courtyard after being faced with a display of aggression from a rival lineage. He reminds listeners of how the Jjiessyt women were elated by his victory in battle, which offered vindication for the social memory of past defeats. Introducing his own quasi-cinematic imagery of key moments in the story, Water Buffalo signals to his audiences that the reputation of a lineage and even living legends like himself can be overturned in an instant – in ways that resonate with being unexpectedly thrown aside as though one were an old jacket. By assembling his storytelling matter from sayings filled with resonant meanings, actions involving material items like old jackets, and sensory experiences from the thick of a fight, Water Buffalo invites his audiences to imagine what it feels like to become a legend. These colourful details in Water Buffalo’s story do more than evoke laughter and a variety of emotions. They invite audiences to somatize the battlefield and jailhouse, to mimic heroic actions and to propagate memories of them by giving material form and substance to their storytelling art. Seen in this light, Nuosu storytelling is transmitted theatrically as a form of mythopoesis that imparts certain persons with legendary status. Above all, storytellers like Water Buffalo set out to recount stories that are memorable, meaningful, mimicable and important matters that propagate the stuff of legends. Katherine Swancutt (苏梦林) is Reader in Social Anthropology and Director of the Religious and Ethnic Diversity in China and Asia Research Unit at King’s College London. She is Project Lead of the ERC synergy grant ‘Cosmological Visionaries’ (Grant No. 856543) and has conducted research across Inner Asia on shamanic and animistic religion for more than two decades. Her latest research is on dreams and climate change. Key publications include: Animism Beyond the Soul: Ontology, Reflexivity, and the Making of Anthropological Knowledge (Social Analysis 2016, volume 60, issue 1, also published in 2018 by Berghahn) and Fortune and the Cursed: The Sliding Scale of Time in Mongolian Divination (Berghahn, 2012). Jiarimuji (嘉日姆几), known in Chinese as Yang Honglin, is Professor of Anthropology in the School of Philosophy, Political Science and Law at

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Yunnan Normal University. His research interests span political and legal anthropology, with a particular focus upon the contemporary history of minority groups in southwest China. He is the author of 尊严,利益? 云南小凉 山彝汉纠纷决定方式的人类学研究 (Zunyan, Liyi? Yunnan Xiao Liangshan Yi Han Jiufen Jueding Fangshi de Renleixue Yanjiu [Dignity or Benefits? The Anthropological Study of Dispute Resolution between the Nuosu and Han in Xiao Liangshan, Yunnan]), published with Yunnan University Press in 2014, and has published numerous articles on Nuosu social history and lineage society. He received his MA from Southwest Minzu University in 2001, his PhD in Anthropology from Minzu University of China in 2008, and completed his postdoctoral research in ethnology at Yunnan University in 2011. In 2012, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford.

References Abu-Lughod, Lila. 1993. Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Assmann, Jan. 2006. Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies, trans. Rodney Livingstone. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ______. 2008. ‘Communicative and Cultural Memory’, in Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (eds), Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 109–18. Carty, John and Yvonne Musharbash. 2008. ‘You’ve Got to be Joking: Asserting the Analytical Value of Humour and Laughter in Contemporary Anthropology’, Anthropological Forum 18(3): 209–17. Feuchtwang, Stephan. 2011. After the Event: The Transmission of Grievous Loss in Germany, China and Taiwan. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays by Clifford Geertz. New York: Basic Books. Halbwachs, Maurice. 1980. The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter, Jr. and Vida Yadzi Ditter. New York: Harper & Row. ______. 1992. On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Henare, Amiria, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell (eds). 2007. ‘Introduction: Thinking through Things’, in Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 1–31. Herrmann, Andrew F. and Kristen DiFate. 2014. ‘The New Ethnography: Goodall, Trujillo, and the Necessity of Storytelling’, Storytelling, Self, Society: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Storytelling Studies 10(1): 3–10.

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Hurston, Zora Neale. 1991/1935. Mules and Men. New York: Harper Perennial. Izzo, Justin. 2015. ‘The Anthropology of Transcultural Storytelling: Oui mon Commandant! and Amadou Hampâté Bâ’s Ethnographic Didactism’, Research in African Literatures 46(1): 1–18. Liu Shao-hua. 2011. ‘As Mothers and Wives: Women in Patrilineal Nuosu Society’, in Shanshan Du and Ya-chen Chen (eds), Women and Gender in Contemporary Chinese Societies: Beyond Han Patriarchy. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, pp. 149–69. MacDougall, David. 1994. ‘Films of Memory’, in Lucien Taylor (ed.), Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990–1994. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 260–70. Maggio, Rodolfo. 2014. ‘The Anthropology of Storytelling and the Storytelling of Anthropology’, Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology 5(2): 89–106. Matten, Marc Andre (ed.). 2014. Places of Memory in Modern China: History, Politics, and Identity. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Narayan, Kirin. 1989. Storytellers, Saints, and Scoundrels: Folk Narrative in Hindu Religious Teaching. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Nora, Pierre (ed.). 1996. Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past (Volume 1: Conflicts and Divisions), trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press. ______ (ed.). 1997. Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past (Volume 2: Traditions), trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press. ______ (ed.). 1998. Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past (Volume 3: Symbols), trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press. Ryle, Gilbert. 1968a. ‘Thinking and Reflecting’, in Godfrey Norman Agmondisham Vesey (ed.), The Human Agent (Royal Institute of Philosophy, Lectures, Volume One, 1966–1967). London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 210–26. ______. 1968b. ‘What Is “Le Penseur” Doing?’, in The Thinking of Thoughts. University [of Saskatchewan] Lectures 18. Also published in 2009. ‘What Is “Le Penseur” Doing?’ in Collected Essays: 1929–1968 (volume 2). London and New York: Routledge, pp. 494–510. Scott, Michael W. 2012. ‘The Matter of Makira: Colonialism, Competition, and the Production of Gendered Peoples in Contemporary Solomon Islands and Medieval Britain’, History and Anthropology 23(1): 115–48. Swancutt, Katherine. 2016. ‘The Anti-Favour: Ideasthesia, Aesthetics and Obligation in Southwest China’, in David Henig and Nicolette Makovicky

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(eds), Economies of Favour after Socialism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 96–116. Swancutt, Katherine (苏梦林) and Jiarimuji (嘉日姆几). 2018. ‘The Return to Slavery? Nostalgia and a New Generation of Escape in Southwest China’, in James Laidlaw, Barbara Bodenhorn and Martin Holbraad (eds), Recovering the Human Subject: Freedom, Creativity and Decision. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 131–47. Swancutt, Katherine and Mireille Mazard (eds). 2016. ‘Introduction – Anthropological Knowledge-Making, the Reflexive Feedback Loop, and Conceptualizations of the Soul’, in ‘Animism Beyond the Soul: Ontology, Reflexivity, and the Making of Anthropological Knowledge’, special issue of Social Analysis 60(1): 1–17. Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. New York and London: Routledge. ______. 1994. ‘Physiognomic Aspects of Visual Worlds’, in Lucien Taylor (ed.), Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990–1994. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 205–13. Tedlock, Dennis. 1999. Finding the Center: The Art of the Zuni Storyteller. Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press.



Conclusion Layers, Traces, Fields and Storehouses of Memory

Katherine Swancutt

Storytelling and memory-making perhaps uniquely have in common the penchant for inviting persons to go beyond ‘what is real’ and imaginatively empathize with a world ‘as-if real’. In this concluding chapter, I show that persons uncover multiple mise en abyme, or ‘stories within stories’, whenever they identify with a given story, work of labour or work of art. Memory-making underpins the process of imaginative identification among storytellers and their audiences, viewers or readers, each of whom endeavour to retrace the personal experiences (sometimes mixed with fantasies) that gave rise to a particular story in the first place. Like peeling back layers of the proverbial onion, storytellers and their audiences bring what is (apparently) real into conversation with the as-if real world of a specific story. In so doing, they set out to access the repositories of memories from which a given story came and to illuminate the multiple mise en abyme from which it was crafted. Throughout this book, the contributors have shown that there are endless ways in which persons backtrack to specific repositories of memory, to stories within stories, and to the connections between what is real and a world as-if real. Retracing memories in and of China, the contributors have revealed the contours of particular stories, works of labour and works of art in tandem with personal memories, the social memories of groups or communities, and the cultural memories that underpin their myth-histories and cultural identities. They have discussed how memories come in layers, leave behind traces, form into fields, and are contained within storehouses or even

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‘memory palaces’ – not unlike the one Jonathan Spence describes in his study of Matteo Ricci – which storytellers routinely draw upon when recounting their experiences. It should, then, come as no surprise that the contributors have proposed that conflicting memories, plural historiographies and rich artistic memory fields all arise from the intricate work of memory-making. Each of the contributors suggests that storytellers tend to identify experiences that are worth remembering and pair them with earlier memory traces rooted in personal memory or a shared social history, before layering this admixture of experience, memory and history onto their own works. Recursivity underpins this creative storytelling process, which is designed to showcase the resonances between various lived experiences, histories and memories. Thus, any audience that sets out to retrace a story to its origins within personal experience may gradually uncover the multiple memories and mise en abyme that underpin it. This process of identifying multiple memories and stories within stories is important because it exposes the imaginative empathy that storytellers and their audiences have for a particular tale. One way to empathize with and, indeed, to position oneself within a story, much like a protagonist, is to envision the many routes along which the tale unfolds and how these routes evoke ‘individual’ (or personal), ‘social’ and ‘cultural memories’ in Jan Assman’s (2008: 109) sense of these terms. Retracing a tale throws multidimensional light onto it, revealing what Franck Billé (2020) has called the ‘voluminous’ qualities of the ‘territorial imagination’, which he has explored with respect to questions of materiality and sovereignty. Billé’s (2020) study dovetails, to some degree, with one particular aim of the present volume, namely showcasing the imaginative-cum-material terrain that any given work may occupy in the mind’s eye – particularly when it comes to the politics of claiming the imaginative territory of a given story, work of labour or work of art as one’s (or another’s) own. Just as Billé has suggested that persons imagine the volumetric terrains of seafloors and the contested border zones above them (2020: 10–11), or, alternatively, the voluminous spaces (such as walls erected) between various ecological habitats that alter the movements of persons, animals, germs and other beings (2020: 16), so the contributors to this volume have shown that storytellers and their audiences imaginatively envision and even empathize with the multi-dimensional qualities of a particular tale. There is a politics not only to how storytellers craft their works, which are always multi-layered and filled with mise en abyme, but to how audiences receive a tale as part of the voluminous lineage of stories that underpins it. Given this, the question arises: how are stories, works of labour or works of art imaginatively retraced to their voluminous points of origin?

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I suggest in this conclusion that imaginatively identifying with the as-if real does not mean doing away altogether with what is real. It involves instead moments of juxtaposing the real to the as-if real in ways that throw light on the imaginative terrain of a particular story. Persons imaginatively empathize with the as-if real in order to uncover its role, importance and what Igor Kopytoff (1986) and Arjun Appadurai (1986) might call its ‘social life’ within a specific sociocultural milieu (see the introduction to this volume). Imaginative empathy furthermore arises where storytellers and their audiences bring into focus the many material, sensorial and conceptual qualities of a tale in order to show its conflicted, contested and yet historically specific elements. In so doing, storytellers and their audiences position a given work as one specific story within others.

Layers and Traces Juxtaposing what is real to the as-if real is first and foremost a layering process. It encourages persons to retrace the many layers in a story, work of labour or work of art to the numerous sources on which it is based. Once uncovered, the layers of a composition exhibit the tensions, conflicted memories and contested histories that underpin it. Benoît Vermander offers a clear example in this volume of the process of uncovering the multiple layers of a Chinese painting with reference to the Chinese term and character, ji 迹, which means ‘trace’ and pervades the painter’s craft of layering memories, stories and meanings, while evoking the Daoist dialectic between what is real and the world as-if real. Vermander observes that in Chinese painting and the ‘long history in Daoist thought and meditation … traces or layers exist as individual “signs” of an underlying reality, and they also take on added power as other traces appear along the way, other layers on the surface, combining into a richer symphony of meanings’. However, this ‘symphony’ is not always harmonious in a painting. According to Vermander, certain layers in an artwork may ‘suggest a tension between conflicting memories’ and may even evoke ‘undecided’ narratives that call into question what is real or as-if real about such a broadly contested philosophical, cultural and historiographic theme as, for example, what constitutes ‘Chinese culture and its destiny’. Vermander further attributes the tensions in any Chinese composition to the process whereby ‘the artist surrenders to the forces that continuously beget and regenerate the world’. He suggests that each artist in a ‘spiritual lineage’ of Chinese painters ‘leaves behind … “traces” similar to the ones that the wind leaves on the sand … which testify to the eternity and universality of what has moved his hand and his heart – as the same force moves other

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particles of the universe, each according to its nature’. Layers and traces of artistic imagination, inspiration and empathy with what is real become interleaved with the ‘eternal’ and as-if real world of Daoism. Thus, Vermander proposes that artistry emerges from the layers and traces of ‘any painting going beyond the mere expression of “what is real”; and daring to enter into a world “as if real”’, from which it illuminates ‘traces of historicity, connecting the painter to his background, travels or spiritual lineage … and traces of the Elemental’ forces of the universe. Seen in this light, Chinese works of art are crafted both from traces of history (i.e. what is real) and imaginaries of the Elemental (i.e. the reality behind this world that may appear to be as-if real but is in point of fact the ‘ultimate truth’). In an artwork that is ideally executed, Vermander adds that ‘the artistic process transforms and sublimates’, or engulfs, the many layers of memory and experience that informed it, merging them into the essence of a singular vision. As Vermander notes, Chinese paintings that sublimate human history and the Elemental of Daoism thus lead viewers to perceive how ‘The historical disappears into the Elemental, the Elemental into the historical’. Now I want to take Vermander’s observations further by suggesting that perhaps even more is at stake than sublimating history and the Elemental – or the real and the as-if real. Any given story, work of labour or work of art may invite the viewer to retrace the multiple layers of history, memory, artistry and mise en abyme, or stories within stories, that compose it. Retracing these myriad layers requires the viewer to hold the real and the as-if real in an ongoing tension that sometimes challenges the artist’s intention of, say, causing the historical to disappear into the Elemental and vice-versa. By entertaining this tension between the real and as-if real, the viewer may go against the grain of the artist’s efforts to sublimate, engulf or, in Alfred Gell’s terms, ‘abduct’ the viewer’s perception of the artwork so that only the essence of a singular artistic vision remains (1998: 23–27). I want to suggest here that audiences need not inevitably succumb to these sublimating effects. When audiences set out to envision the tensions between the various layers in a composition, they may render each layer visible by juxtaposing them, as happens in a ‘figure-ground reversal’ (Wagner 1987). Armed with this pluralistic vision, an audience may alternately shift its focus between a given composition and the storehouses, fields or palaces of memory, artistry, biography and history from which it emerged. Here, the onus is on the audience to hold the composition and its myriad sources together in productive tension, rather than collapsing them into a singular vision. Thus, it is not only audiences but also storytellers who may seek to maintain this productive tension within a composition, rather than leaving it to culminate in sublimation.

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Fields and Storehouses Tensions between the real and as-if real are a key feature of Wei Luan’s discussion in this volume of Mo Yan’s Nobel Prize winning novel, Big Breasts & Wide Hips. As Luan shows, Mo Yan sets out in this work to recount the memories, imaginative fantasies and personal experiences of himself, his mother and other key persons in his life, each of which he considers to be emblematic of watershed events in modern Chinese history. Luan proposes that Mo Yan uses the technique of ‘Chinese body-expression’ to bring the memory and history of starvation during the Great Leap Forward into productive tension with his own fantastical and often hyperbolic imagery of how hunger was experienced in bodily terms. In particular, his novel pivots around the tensions between social memories of major historical upheavals and personal memories that exemplify the tragedies they unleashed, such as having to bear witness to the strange behaviours and physiological consequences of famine. An especially evocative example of Mo Yan’s body-expression is his description of members of the Flood Dragon River Farm rightist unit, who secretly gorged on the vegetables they scavenged while working the fields. According to Luan, Mo Yan’s highly memorable, strange and fantastical depiction of the rightists as quasi-human ruminants who regurgitated the foods that they had foraged to stave off hunger is designed to encourage readers to re-envision experiences of starvation through his own ‘artistic memory field’. Readers are invited to retrace their understanding of starvation to Mo Yan’s artistic memories of it, which encompass not only the personal experiences of himself, his mother, family and the other Chinese persons on whom he modelled his characters, but certain recurrent themes in Chinese history, philosophy and religion. As Luan shows, Mo Yan produces numerous ‘shock scenes’, like the one with the ruminants, to encourage readers to apply the tensions he creates between the real and as-if real to both their own personal experiences and those of his characters. While Mo Yan ultimately wants his readers to sublimate their personal memories of landmark events in modern Chinese history with those of his characters, he does not intend for this to be an easy process. Instead, as Luan suggests, Mo Yan wants readers to retrace the tensions between the real and as-if real in his work, thereby evoking the difficult experiences that anyone who is perceived as strange and Other tends to have within China. This theme of living through, and even surviving, the condition of being strange is central to Mo Yan’s artistic memory field. Retracing the many layers in a story, then, may reveal tensions between the real elements of the storyteller’s biography and the as-if real memory layers sourced to specific storehouses of memory. Chihyun Chang’s study

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in this volume on descendants of the Chinese staff of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS) and the modern Chinese historians who research them exemplifies how multiple and competing tensions may become sublimated into a shared vision. Rather uniquely, Chang proposes that the memories of multiple persons – some of them scholars, others the subjects of scholarly inquiry – have been assembled in recent years to produce a shared memory bank about the CMCS, which enables them to pursue joint storytelling, memory-making and historical study. As Chang suggests, this newly shared vision of the CMCS perpetuates its ‘culture of integrity, political aloofness, professionalism and cosmopolitanism’ even as it begs the question of how it came into being in the first place. Many descendants of the CMCS staff nowadays live far apart from each other in mainland China, Taiwan and the USA. Yet they have proactively published their memoirs, retraced their shared experiences and memories, held reunions with each other, and pooled knowledge within what Chang calls their own ‘closed and suspicious circle’. The CMCS descendants seek to build up and propagate memories of their distinctive values, biographies, British-influenced education, high social status and living standards. Thus, within their own circle, they swap stories about their parents’ experiences of navigating the competing allegiances they held when working (often simultaneously) within China for British superintendents, the Nationalist government from 1937 to 1949, the Collaborationist government of Wang Jingwei from 1941 to 1945, and the Communist government from 1945 to 1949. It is not a coincidence that modern historians’ understanding of the social and cultural memory of the CMCS has aligned with the memories of the descendants of the CMCS staff. According to Chang, through several generations of research, modern historians have emphasized the shared histories, values, elite education and high social standing of the CMCS. Their works have come to the attention of the children of the CMCS staff, who in turn have sought to incorporate modern historical findings into the memories shared within their own circle. Chang thus gained entrance to the circle of CMCS descendants when one of them, H. Mei Liu, reached out to him to request information on his own historical work. After entering the circle, he learned that he had previously unknown personal connections to several CMCS descendants, which gave him further privileged access to their storehouse of memories. Chang’s exchanges with three children in the CMCS circle reveal the delicate balance struck between the real and as-if real elements of their shared memories. As he suggests, certain stories and memories of the three children had been shaped by Chinese propaganda in ways that were accepting of it, or, alternatively, went against the grain of it ‘even in cases where the propaganda rang true’. In dialogue with these three children, Chang thus

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sought to parse the real elements of their biographies from their propaganda-inflected memories. Notably, he chose to retrace each of these memories and juxtapose them as a way of getting closer to the real. Building upon his own memories as a historian and an honorary member of the CMCS circle, Chang worked closely with the three children to uncover what they ultimately agreed to be a more definitive social and cultural memory of the CMCS. The joint efforts of Chang and the CMCS circle to retrace this definitive memory to the multiple and varied storehouses that contained it required bringing the biographical details of the CMCS descendants and their as-if real memories, shaped by propaganda, into productive tension. Revealingly, Chang proposes that none of these memories were pure fantasy as they exhibited imaginative ways of identifying with the competing allegiances, political turmoil and propaganda that the CMCS staff actually faced. Both Chang and the CMCS circle worked to sublimate the tensions between the real and as-if real elements of their memory. They did this in order to produce a new joint vision of the CMCS that is now shared by its descendants and modern historians alike. Productive tensions between real biographical details and as-if real memories can, then, become transformative. Katherine Swancutt and Jiarimuji show in this volume that the Nuosu of southwest China delight in stories that exhibit the tensions between the real and as-if real, which make certain storytellers and their tales into the stuff of legends. They show how a legendary storyteller invites audiences to connect his own personal experience of a battle between rival lineages to wider social and cultural memories of intergenerational feuding. Woven into this tale are the storyteller’s highly memorable and mimicable gestures, which recreate a comic battlefield scene. His story shows that conflicts, threats and mediations are all important features of Nuosu feuding and have very real consequences. Yet many of the demands made to settle a feud are also based upon the injuries, insults and other damages that rival lineages exaggerate in order to inflate their compensation claims. Every story of a Nuosu dispute thus unfolds through a voluminous and imaginative terrain of real and as-if real threats, actions and mediations, which are remembered differently by rival lineages. Swancutt and Jiarimuji suggest that when listening to stories about disputes, Nuosu seek to reveal the tensions between, on the one hand, their lengthy myth-histories of feuding, and, on the other hand, the real and as-if real details of a given quarrel. But they only incorporate storytellers and their stories into their own lineage’s storehouse of memory after they have become recognized as popular legends that can spur persons into battle. Adding storytellers and their tales into the myth-history of a specific lineage imparts them with exemplary qualities that render them both real and as-if

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real at once. Entering Nuosu myth-history is thus an act of sublimation that makes both storytellers and their stories integral elements within a particular lineage’s cultural identity. Notably, though, as rival lineages have different myth-histories and cultural identities, the wider social memory and historiography of the Nuosu – which contains the experiences, memories and legends of multiple lineages – resists being sublimated into a single unified vision. Nuosu historiography is, then, ultimately a plural and contested terrain, filled with lineage conflicts that legendary storytellers and their stories help to propagate.

Incommensurable Elements Up to this point, I have suggested that the tensions between what is real and the as-if real may be sublimated to varying degrees and under certain conditions. It is nonetheless difficult to sublimate these tensions because stories, works of labour and works of art often give rise to incommensurable elements that are sourced to numerous storehouses of memory and a plural historiography. I now want to approach this theme from a different direction, through a discussion of how incommensurable elements shape stories, works of labour or works of art that have been designed, at least to some extent, as memory projects. Chris Berry suggests in this volume that the filmmaker, Jia Zhangke, introduces incommensurable elements in his film 24 City, in order to show that uniquely personal memories underpin ‘a new, more democratic and plural form of historiography that resists closure and unification’. Berry aligns the incommensurable with the ‘singularity of individual memories’, which, he suggests, encourages viewers to look beyond ‘the modern idea of historiography as a unified discourse written in a single voice’. According to Berry, Jia Zhangke encourages viewers to trace the incommensurable not only to the juxtaposition between the real memories of the persons he filmed in documentary style and the as-if real actors who performed scripted memories. Beyond this, Berry proposes that Jia Zhangke uses the incommensurable to invite viewers to envision how the ‘individualism’ now pervasive throughout China undercuts ‘nostalgia for the era of the planned economy’ and the Third Front policy. Viewers of 24 City are therefore tasked with reflecting upon the making of their own memories, and positioning them in China’s modern history, in ways that throw doubt on the existence of any unified social memory. They are further encouraged to trace their personal experiences to their own repositories of memory, which are filled with conflicted and incommensurable elements. Jia Zhangke thus sets out to elicit responses from viewers of 24 City that challenge any nostalgia for the Third Front policy and for China’s planned economy more generally. He points

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to a thoroughly plural historiography that calls into question any form of memory-making which pivots around a unified experience and single perspective. If the nostalgia for a shared social and cultural memory is critiqued in 24 City, this is because it is often considered to be an important feature of Chinese history and memory-making. I want to linger over the reductive qualities of nostalgia here, as they frequently are brought into productive tension with related phenomena, such as escapism, within China. It is worth briefly revisiting Vermander’s discussion of Chinese painting in this volume, which throws additional light on how nostalgia, escapism and the incommensurable all feature within the production of artworks. In the passage below, Vermander sets forth a key contrast between, on the one hand, nostalgia for a specific place and time, and, on the other hand, the imaginary essence of a floating spacetime that is revealed through moments of escapism. ‘Escapism’ has to do with a flight from reality that proceeds by referring to an imaginary past or place – such is the ‘essence’ of Chinese culture – without a specific anchorage. Nostalgia refers to a given place and time, idealized for sure, but still tangible. This has consequences for the way in which one relates to material memories: nostalgia privileges objects from the past, and nurtures a collector’s mentality. Escapism comes with a production of artworks, often of a repetitive facture, that exemplifies an ‘essence’, an imaginary, floating spacetime, unceasingly celebrated. (Vermander, this volume)

Here, Vermander suggests that nostalgic memorabilia appeal to collectors who seek to relive the unified experience of a single perspective on history. By contrast, escapism appeals to artists who seek to compose works that, taken together, exemplify neither a single moment in historical time nor a unified perspective on history, but a vague cultural essence composed of multiple incommensurable elements that enfolds the real and as-if real within it. The collector’s nostalgia for ‘red tourism’ in East Germany and China features at the start of Yejun Zou’s chapter for this volume, but it is soon contrasted with the tensions, incommensurable elements and even the escapist qualities of socialism in Christa Wolf’s The Divided Heaven and Ding Ling’s The Sun Shines Over the Sanggan River. Zou suggests that these two novelists offer their readers pluralistic visions of socialism, which – not unlike the artistry of Chinese painters discussed by Vermander in this volume – recursively point to the multiple tensions within any given experience, memory and history. As Zou observes, socialist realism is a genre known for having promoted (and often even required) revisionist rewritings of literary works as a way of ensuring that they would reflect the shifting landscapes of socialist memories, values and projects through time. Typically, revisionism

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was undertaken to excise the incommensurable elements found within novels and across the literary approaches of socialist countries. Yet the literary works of Christa Wolf and Ding Ling that Zou discusses reveal not only the local particularities of socialism (including its revisionist tendencies) but the ways in which contested memories of it have shaped people’s lives, sometimes in escapist ways. Zou shows that Wolf takes readers through four different historical periods with flashback scenes featuring the dysfunctional family lives of her protagonists, Manfred Herrfurth and Rita Seidel, who are lovers that ultimately separate. Whereas Manfred abandons the socialist project of the German Democratic Republic by leaving for West Germany and the individualism it ostensibly promises, Rita hopes that life in the socialist collective will one day bring her the peace and happiness of a cosy family life. Both Manfred and Rita evidence what could be called different modes of escapism, which dovetail with Zou’s suggestion that Wolf uses this narrative to present readers with some of the short-lived optimism that she had entertained herself towards the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. According to Zou, Wolf crafts Rita’s hopes for the future in a way that shows socialism is not a ready-made panacea, but something worth striving for in order to lead social change in an ideally progressive direction. Similarly, Ding Ling sets out to offer a portrait of how socialism and its ideals can be achieved. Her novel reveals the complexities of the land reforms in rural China, which typically involved communal struggles against a landlord who relied upon ties of kinship to exploit his or her fellow villagers, but who was not openly malicious to them. Ding Ling’s character, Qian Wengui, is a landlord of this type who is beaten and derided in the struggle sessions against him. Zou observes, though, that Ding Ling was critiqued by Chinese Communist Party officials for having created a landlord who was not malicious enough to provoke the extreme struggle sessions that would show her readership what overturning their class consciousness ‘ought to be’ like. Nonetheless, Ding Ling defended her choice to illustrate what, based on her own experiences, had been the common experience of rural peasant life during the land reforms. As Zou proposes, Ding Ling set out to reveal what socialist reality ‘actually is’, namely a revolution filled with ongoing yet often subtle tensions, ambivalences and contradictions. What is real for Ding Ling, then, is always already composed of incommensurable elements that reflect the revolutionary vision of striving for what ‘ought to be’. At stake in this debate about the literary presentation of socialist realism is how to define the essence of socialism, its real and as-if real qualities, its escapist tendencies, and the incommensurable elements within it. Difficulties in coming to terms with the incommensurable elements of personal experience and memory-making is also a guiding theme in Anna

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Reading’s contribution to this volume. Drawing upon Liliane Willens’ memoir, Stateless in Shanghai, Reading discusses how members of the Jewish diaspora process the ‘absences of cultural identity’ caused by their family’s stateless condition. Reading proposes that, for Willens, the relationship between food and memory-making is key to managing her statelessness – and that this is not only because stories about food illuminate ‘the tensions between local, ethnic and national memory cultures as well as diasporic and mixed or hybrid memories’. According to Reading, Willens set out to ‘metabolize’ her statelessness by reminiscing about the production, consumption and avoidance of certain foods during her childhood and youth. In particular, Willens savours memories of eating what her parents, exercising their colonialist sensibilities, had declared to be the forbidden and contaminated street foods of Shanghai. This incommensurability between the contamination that Willens’ parents attributed to Chinese foods and Willens’ own choice to secretly flout their taboo by consuming them becomes central to how she processes her own memories and experiences of statelessness. As I have discussed in the introduction to this volume, Reading shows how this works through an evocative discussion of the ‘synaesthesia and gustatory nostalgia’ that Willens experiences when recalling the foods that her nanny, or ‘old Amah’, shared with her. There is, though, another layer of explanation that perhaps can be added to her analysis. Reading recounts how Willens is transported by gustatory nostalgia to a childhood memory when biting into one of her old breakfast favourites on her return visit to Shanghai as an adult. The aroma of the oily twisted fried bread that she savours, called youtiao, calls to mind the voice of her old Amah. Yet just after indulging her cherished memory, Willens evidences some of the colonialist sensibilities learned from her parents. She contrasts the contaminated foods and setting of the old Shanghai of her childhood with the prosperity and cleanliness that she observes in the delicacies and newer Shanghai of her visit. Willens’ vignette unfolds as a moment filled with incommensurable elements, including her treasured memories of forbidden Chinese foods, her still-colonialist sense of hygiene learned in childhood and youth, and her newfound vision of China that encompasses moments from its modern past and recent changes alike. Observe here how Reading’s conceptualization of gustatory nostalgia is something of a cross between what Vermander calls ‘nostalgia’, which evokes a tangible even if idealized place and time (such as the Shanghai of Willens’ childhood and youth), and ‘escapism’, which captures the essence of a celebrated but floating spacetime (such as the notion of a timeless Shanghai where street side foods continue to be sold, even if their preparation has changed). This admixture – which I would call ‘nostalgia-cum-escapism’ –

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appears during Willens’ return visit to Shanghai, where she relishes Chinese foods that evoke both her treasured childhood memories and the imagined essence of Shanghai’s street cuisine enduring through time. Reading’s observation that stories of food open up social spaces in which persons indulge in gustatory nostalgia (and perhaps escapism too) thus offers additional food for thought on how memory-making, nostalgia, escapism and the incommensurable might collectively shape stories in and of China.

Conclusion Having sketched out how the real and as-if real feature in the present volume, I now want to conclude by indicating some new and important directions for the study of stories, works of labour and works of art. Throughout this volume, the contributors have shown that storytellers encourage their audiences to imaginatively empathize with, and often mimic, the experiences that they recount in the form of highly memorable stories. However, storytellers – who in this volume include artists, filmmakers, novelists and persons that produce works of labour such as memoirs – also routinely invite audiences to go beyond their own personal memories, the social memories of their group or collective, and even the cultural memories shaped by myth-histories. Storytellers set out to suggest that memories can be juxtaposed with what lies outside of memory per se, such as imaginative and even fantastical encounters with the strange and Other. They invite audiences to retell their own tales in the future, knowing that their stories will likely be subjected to some amount of ‘rewriting’ or ‘writing-over’. Yet storytellers do this in hopes that audiences will identify with their tales, increase their reputation and status, and possibly secure a place for them in the annals of myth-history. But in order for any given story, work of labour or work of art to be memorialized in this way, an audience must set out to recursively trace it back to its many layers, traces, fields and storehouses of memory. This process of retracing requires imaginative empathy from audiences, who seek to uncover the many mise en abyme, or stories within a story, that underpin a given tale. Sifting through the multiple layers of a story brings its real and as-if real elements into productive tensions that sometimes are sublimated, or engulfed, into a single unified vision. More often, though, these tensions expose the incommensurate elements in a story, which invite audiences to imaginatively rethink, rewrite and potentially reposition the tale within personal, social and cultural memory at large. Storytellers and their audiences who re-envision the tensions between the real and as-if real may point to new ways of managing them – such as through the nostalgia-cum-escapism that, as I suggested above, underpins Reading’s study of a Jewish woman

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from Shanghai who reminisces about food in order to come to terms with what had formerly been her stateless condition. Taking the study of stories, works of labour or works of art further, then, requires going beyond the ubiquitous focus on narrative, which the contributors to this volume have taken as just one of many starting points to their own analyses, rather than as their endpoint. Each contributor to this volume has shown that the only way to understand how memories in and of China (or, indeed, memories from anywhere) are crafted through storytelling, materiality and art is to recursively uncover the voluminous and imaginative territories that underpin them. This means setting out to bring what is real into productive analytical tension with the world as-if real. By doing this, one reveals not only the highly memorable, imaginative and incommensurable elements within stories, works of labour or works of art, but new conceptual avenues for understanding them. Katherine Swancutt is Reader in Social Anthropology and Director of the Religious and Ethnic Diversity in China and Asia Research Unit at King’s College London. She is Project Lead of the ERC synergy grant ‘Cosmological Visionaries’ (Grant No. 856543) and has conducted research across Inner Asia on shamanic and animistic religion for more than two decades. Her latest research is on dreams and climate change. Key publications include: Animism Beyond the Soul: Ontology, Reflexivity, and the Making of Anthropological Knowledge (Social Analysis 2016, volume 60, issue 1, also published in 2018 by Berghahn) and Fortune and the Cursed: The Sliding Scale of Time in Mongolian Divination (Berghahn, 2012).

References Appadurai, Arjun (ed.). 1986. ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 3–63. Assmann, Jan. 2008. ‘Communicative and Cultural Memory’, in Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (eds), Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, pp. 109–18. Billé, Franck (ed.). 2020. ‘Voluminous: An Introduction’, in Voluminous States: Sovereignty, Materiality, and the Territorial Imagination. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, pp. 1–35. Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kopytoff, Igor. 1986. ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process’, in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Com-

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modities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 64–91. Wagner, Roy. 1987. ‘Figure-ground Reversal among the Barok’, in L. Lincoln (ed.), Assemblage of Spirits: Idea and Image in New Ireland. Minneapolis: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, pp. 56–62.

 Index

adventure, 50n21, 124, 129, 185 aesthetic, 11, 14–15, 35–39, 45, 49, 65–66, 82–83, 122 Amah (nanny), 15, 128–33, 216 Amoy Custom House, 167–70, 176 Anti-Japanese War of Resistance, 31, 91, 151–52, 154 Anti-Rightist Campaign, 171–72 anthropology, 183–84 apology, 201 Appadurai, Arjun, 2, 134, 208 apprentice, 59–60 architecture, 3–4, 34–35, 60 public buildings, 4, 45–47, 50n21, 60, 64, 68–69, 125, 154–56 synagogues, 125 ars memorativa. See memory art, x, 1–4, 6, 8–15, 18, 25–33, 35–48, 49nn3–4, 49nn6–7, 49n11, 50n17, 50nn20–21, 50n25, 51n28, 51nn30– 31, 51nn36–37, 58, 60, 63, 81–85, 88–90, 96, 107–10, 112–14, 117, 123, 126–27, 133, 158, 184, 201–2, 206–10, 213–14, 217–18 l’art pour l’art, 84 artistic memory field. See Mo Yan artistry, 12, 209, 214 as-if real. See real aspirations, 16, 84, 174, 200 Assmann, Jan, 3–4, 81, 95, 146 atmosphere, ix, 28, 33, 37–39, 82, 87, 90, 93–94, 165 audience, 2, 4–8, 10, 13, 16–18, 33, 35, 44, 57–59, 62–65, 70, 72, 93–94, 153, 182–85, 187, 200–2, 206–9, 212, 217 authenticity, 63–64, 70, 81

Axku (a Nuosu lineage) 182, 186–87, 189–99 battle, 17, 115, 182, 185–87, 189, 192– 97, 199–202, 212 psychological warfare, 193–94 Beijing, 26–27, 29–30, 33–35, 50n25, 51n31, 58, 64, 148 betting, 191, 201 Bergson, Henri, 62 Berlin Wall, 86 Berry, Chris, 4, 8–13, 27, 184, 213–14 Billé, Franck, 207 biography, 2, 11, 16–17, 67, 174, 209–12 autobiography, 5, 81, 106, 128, 146, 164, 176n2, 183 self-narrative, 42 body, 4–5, 7, 13–17, 29, 37, 44, 49n13, 92, 105–16, 131, 182–83, 185–88, 200–1, 210 embodiment, 1, 7, 43, 46, 60, 127, 129, 186–87, 200 Chinese body-expression, 11, 14– 15, 104–6, 108–9, 111, 113–14, 117, 118–19n2, 210 female body, 104, 111, 113–15, 130 and the nation, 115–16, 136 Britain, 125, 136 British education, 148–49, 162–64, 171–74, 186 British influenced, 16, 59, 125, 128, 145, 149, 152, 156, 170, 173, 175, 211 blood, 91–92, 103, 110, 115, 124, 127– 28, 130, 136, 192, 195, 198

222

blood compensation, 187, 190–91, 193, 195, 198, 201 jus sanguinis (Law of Blood) 124, 130 blurred distinction, 13, 25, 33, 62, 66, 70 Boxer Rebellion, 103 calligraphy, 12, 25, 30–32, 40, 50n15, 58n28, 58n31 Cartesian divide, 185 Chang, Chihyun, 5, 11, 16–17, 210–12 Chefoo Custom House, 147, 151–52, 160, 164, 167 Chengdu, 25, 27, 29, 37–39, 49n7, 50n27, 56, 59–60, 68 children, 15–17, 59, 87, 102–4, 109, 113, 116, 118n2, 128–31, 133, 135, 145–49, 154, 162, 164–65, 172–75, 182, 187–88, 211–12 childhood, 15–16, 89, 103, 106, 113, 122, 127, 162, 164, 173– 75, 216–17 childlike, 35 Chinese classics, 37, 51n39 Chinese Communist Party, 10, 11, 49n8, 56, 71–72, 81, 89–93, 97n2, 98n11, 152, 163, 170, 173, 175, 194, 215 Chinese Communist Revolution, 79, 80, 85, 89, 92, 94–96, 98n11, 122 Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS) 5, 16–17, 145–49, 151, 156, 157–75, 176nn3–4, 177n11, 211–12 circle of CMCS children and their descendants, 17, 165, 211–12 Chongqing, 49n7, 152, 163, 166, 176n6 citizen/citizenry. See nation Civil War, 103, 156 cleanliness, 15–16, 131–33, 216 cognition, x, 5 Collaborationist government, 146–47, 151–52, 163, 165–67, 170, 176n6, 211 Wang Jingwei, 151–52, 160, 163, 211 Cold War Policy. See Third Front Policy collective memory. See memory colonialism, 15, 121–23, 126, 128–31, 133, 135–36, 155, 216 colour, 12, 26–27, 36–39, 45, 51n28, 131, 135, 202 comic, 17, 182–83, 186–87, 200–2, 212 comic books, 15, 126 commemoration, 96, 125

Index

Communism, 153 anti-Communism, 155 composition, 12, 26, 29, 32, 35, 46, 50n20, 51n44, 52n46, 57, 70–71, 115, 184, 208–9 Confucianism, 35, 116 Mencius, 31, 116 contamination, 15, 127, 130–32, 216 cosmopolitan, 121, 126, 136, 146, 175, 211 counternarrative. See narrative Counterrevolutionary Campaign, 170 crafting, x, 1–3, 11–13, 16, 30–31, 36, 39, 45, 122, 127, 133, 184, 206–9, 215, 218 creation diary. See Li Jinyuan cultural essence. See essence cultural identity, 3, 5, 16, 121–22, 128, 146–47, 174–75, 213, 216 Cultural Revolution, 26–27, 31–32, 98nn10–11, 103, 106, 111, 165, 171–74 cultural memory. See memory Daoism, 6, 11, 14, 30, 44–45, 47–48, 48n2, 49n5, 49n11, 51n40, 51nn42– 43, 107, 111–12, 208–9 Elemental, 40, 42, 48, 209 free and easy wandering, 27, 48 qi, 40, 47, 51n32, 111, 115 signs of an underlying reality, 44, 208 the internal and external, 26, 111–12 Zhuangzi, 27, 30, 45, 49n11 death, 10, 27, 38, 69, 71, 103, 108, 112–13, 115, 117, 135, 153, 187, 189–91, 200 democratic, 8, 13, 56, 72, 126, 213 Deppman, Hsiu-Chuang, 63, 66 Der geteilte Himmel. See Wolf, Christa Ding Ling, 14, 60, 80–81, 85, 90–96, 214–15 The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River, 80, 90, 214 disciples, 31, 116 discourse, x, 13, 48n2, 51nn44–45, 56–57, 61, 63, 185, 213 disputes, 181–82, 185–90, 193–99, 201, 212 divorce, 188–90, 199–200 documentary, 13, 58, 60, 63–64, 66, 68, 70, 176n4, 211 docudrama, 63 donor. See gift

Index

drama, 4, 11, 16, 27, 57–58, 63–65, 190, 197 Du Fu, 26, 37–39, 43, 50n27, 51n28 dysfunctional, 88–89, 215 earth, 37, 40, 42, 44, 107, 115 East Germany. See German Democratic Republic education, 16, 27, 39, 49n6, 51n35, 97nn1–2, 118n2, 148–50, 153, 160, 162–64, 171–74, 186, 211 Elemental. See Daoism emotion, 31, 116 affect, 32, 56, 60, 65, 69–70, 108, 128 empathy, 4, 7–8, 14, 18, 37, 90, 105–8, 207–9, 217 pathos, 184, 200 sympathy, 92, 153 environment, 3, 42, 51n35, 60, 86, 133 ephemeral, 45, 56, 61–62, 69 epic, 17, 42, 115, 185, 195 Erll, Astrid, 94–95 escapism, 39–40, 214–17 essence, 92, 97n5, 115, 209, 214–17 cultural essence, 39–40, 42 ethnic, 2, 4, 6–7, 10–11, 14, 41–42, 51n5, 64, 92, 113–15, 118, 124, 127, 129, 182, 197 exemplar, 2, 10–11, 16, 84, 212 expressive, 29, 43, 51n28 factory, 8, 26–28, 34–35, 56–60, 63, 65–66, 72, 83, 86 fairy, 6, 107, 111–12 fake, 57, 64, 68 familiar, 2, 34, 118n2, 134, 183, 185, 197 family, 14–15, 27, 57, 59, 65, 67, 71, 85–89, 95, 98n11, 102–4, 107–8, 110–11, 116–17, 122, 125–27, 130, 134–35, 148, 151, 153–56, 159–61, 163, 165, 171, 173, 176n3, 176n8, 188–90, 195, 197–98, 210, 215–16 fantasy, 1, 3, 6, 8, 11, 17, 64, 108–9, 112, 114, 117–18, 206, 210, 212 fantastical, 2, 6, 64, 70, 107, 110, 210, 217 feedback loop, 6, 184 Feuchtwang, Stephan, 5–6 feud, 11, 17, 182, 185–87, 201, 212 fiction, 1, 13, 64, 70, 86, 94, 103–4 fictive, 47 film, 1–2, 6, 8–11, 13, 15, 18, 27–28, 51n34, 55–72, 126, 213, 217 quasi-cinematic, 202

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Fleming, David L., 46 food, 15, 106–8, 110–11, 121–23, 127, 136, 154, 181, 191, 194, 210, 216–18 foreign, 103, 110, 135, 153, 172, 174, 176n5 forgetting, 4, 10–11, 14, 45–46, 85, 106 fragrance, 15, 122 France, 3, 26, 33, 44, 48n1, 84, 126, 130, 133–34, 136, 148, 170 Freud, Sigmund, 62 future, 14, 16–17, 35–36, 44, 47, 58– 59, 85, 88, 90–91, 96, 126, 135, 187, 195, 201, 215, 217 Geertz, Clifford, 183 Gell, Alfred, 209 generations, 1, 14, 16–17, 32, 36, 59–61, 72, 80, 87–89, 104, 106, 116, 118n2, 146–47, 162, 182, 185, 187, 199, 201 German Democratic Republic (East Germany), 28, 39, 60, 79–80, 82–87, 89, 95–96, 214–15 Germany, 5, 33, 79–81, 83–84, 86–89, 95–97, 115, 125, 134, 215 gesturing, 17, 181, 184–85, 200–1, 212 gift, 31, 107–8, 115, 123, 128–29, 201 Great Leap Forward, 103, 106–7, 210 Greece, 51n44, 67, 123, 149 habit, 5–6, 132 Halbwachs, Maurice, 3–4, 61–62, 95, 103, 117 Hardy, Grant, 67 harmony, 35–37, 84, 208 heart, 32, 34–35, 37, 40, 42, 45, 47, 87, 90, 105, 107, 109, 115–16, 201, 208–9 heaven, 10, 34, 38, 40–43, 47, 68, 97n4, 115, 214 Heidegger, Martin, 12 Helbig, Holger, 80, 82, 86, 89, 94, 96 hero, 11, 30, 34, 65, 104, 115, 182, 199–200, 202 Herodotus, 67 heterogeneity, 56–57, 63, 65–71 Himalayas, 41–43 history, x, 1, 3–5, 7–8, 10–14, 16–18, 26, 34–35, 42–46, 48, 48n2, 55–64, 66–72, 79–82, 87, 89–90, 94–96, 97n2, 102–9, 114–18, 118n2, 121– 23, 125–26, 132, 135–36, 146–49, 160, 163–65, 172–75, 177n11, 185, 197, 207–15

224

historical veracity, 70, 185 metahistory, 57 myth-history, 1, 3–5, 8, 11, 16–18, 57, 79, 95, 103, 105, 109–12, 117–18, 121, 146, 175, 182–83, 185–87, 189, 200–1, 206, 212– 13, 217 official history, 56, 61, 63, 66, 68, 103 oral history, 56, 59, 63–64 Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji), 8, 57, 63, 67–71 revisionist history, 214–15 traces of historicity, 47, 209 unofficial history, 11, 62 historiography, 8, 10–11, 13, 17–18, 56–57, 63, 66–72, 207–8, 213–14 plural historiography, 8, 10–11, 13, 17–18, 56, 72, 207, 213–14 Hong Kong, 65, 166 hope, 6, 18, 34–35, 59, 61, 85, 88, 91, 104, 106, 189, 215, 217 human rights, 124 hunger, 6, 15, 102, 106–8, 129–30, 132, 134–35, 210 hybrid, 64, 127, 136, 216 icon, 42, 51n36, 79 iconic, 17, 32, 65, 104, 117 identity, ix, 3, 5–8, 13–14, 16–18, 33, 80, 82, 87, 89–91, 94–96, 105, 107–8, 110, 113–14, 117–18, 118n2, 121–24, 126–29, 132–36, 146–47, 173–75, 206–8, 212–13, 216–17 imagery, 17, 37, 103, 107, 202, 210 imagination, 1–11, 14, 17–18, 25, 33, 40, 46, 81, 85, 90, 92, 96, 103, 105–9, 113, 117–18, 118n2, 130, 136, 185–87, 202, 206–10, 212, 214, 217–18 incommensurability, 13, 56–57, 63, 67, 213–18 individual, x, 3, 5, 40, 44, 48, 56, 58, 61–62, 69–72, 80–81, 86, 88, 105, 132, 134, 172, 176n3, 207–8, 213, 215 intellectual, ix, 45, 82–83, 90, 98n9, 153 interviews, 9, 27, 56–66, 70–71, 147, 162–71 Italy, 8, 12, 26, 33–34, 123, 133 jail, 152, 181, 197–200, 202 Japan, 26, 31, 33, 65, 91–92, 103, 107, 121–22, 134–35, 151–52, 155–56, 164, 166, 175

Index

Jesuits, 8, 33, 46, 48, 48n2 Jewish food/culture, 15, 121–23, 125– 29, 133–34, 136, 176n8, 216–17 Jia Zhangke, 8, 11, 13, 27–28, 55, 57–72, 213–14 24 City, 8, 13, 27, 55–59, 62–72, 213–14 Jiarimuji, 5, 16–17, 42, 57, 184, 186–88, 190, 192–94, 196, 198–201, 212–13 Jjiessyt (a Nuosu lineage), 182, 184, 186–87, 189–202 joking, 2, 17, 62, 183–84, 195–96 Keane, Webb, 1–2, 4 kinship, 14, 16, 89, 215 Kopytoff, Igor, 2, 208 Korean War, 56, 103 Kunming, 187 landlords, 14, 89–94, 98n11, 111, 153, 215 land reforms, 14, 83, 90–96, 215 landscapes, 26, 29, 32, 39–40, 50nn20– 21, 51n28, 58, 80, 82, 214 law, 124–25, 127, 130, 151, 163, 198, 201 layering, 7, 12–13, 18, 26–27, 37, 39– 40, 43–45, 47–48, 49n12, 58, 85–86, 97n3, 115, 127, 136, 195, 200–1, 206–10, 216–17 legend, 1–2, 8, 11, 16–17, 67, 182, 184–87, 199–200, 202, 212, 213 stuff of legends, 17, 42, 50n15, 183, 185, 200, 202, 212 Lei Feng, 11 Liangshan (Cool Mountains), 29, 40, 42, 51n33, 51n35, 182, 184, 186, 197 Li Jinyuan, 8, 10–12, 25–48, 48n2, 49nn3–4, 49n7, 50n20, 50nn22–24, 51n32, 51n36, 51n39, 58, 65, 105 creation diary, 12, 28 Li Rihua, 35–36 Liaoning, 164–65 lieux de memoire (sites of memory). See memory lineage, 4, 12, 17, 30–31, 45–48, 181– 82, 184–203, 207, 209, 212–13 literature, 1, 7, 9, 13–14, 18, 28, 68, 80–84, 89–90, 94–95, 97n5, 98n9, 102–3, 117, 149, 160, 163, 177n13 logic, 1, 56–57, 69–70 Lu Xun, 32, 39, 50n18, 84 Luan, Wei, 4, 6–7, 11, 13–15, 127, 135, 210

Index

MacDougall, David, 6, 9 Macerata, 12, 26, 34, 50n24 mainland China, 155–57, 159–60, 175 Mao Zedong/Maoism, 11, 28, 32, 63, 73, 89–90, 92, 153, 172 master/mastery/masterpiece, 12, 27, 29–32, 51n28, 59–60, 65, 69, 87, 102, 114 material/materiality, x, 1–5, 7, 12, 14– 18, 25, 29–31, 36, 39–40, 46, 49n12, 57, 60, 62, 68–69, 71, 91, 104–5, 118, 122–23, 126–27, 132, 174, 183, 185–87, 200–2, 207–8, 214 Matten, Marc Andre, 4 matter (content of a story/composition), 2, 16–17, 39, 42, 52n47, 90–91, 125, 175, 185–87, 189–91, 198, 202 May Fourth Movement, 43 Maze, Frederick (Inspector-General), 151–52, 160–61, 176nn5–6 mediation, 1, 15, 17, 81, 126, 188, 190– 91, 193–94, 197–99, 201, 208, 212 memorable, 1–2, 4–9, 12, 17–18, 104– 5, 107–8, 112–14, 117, 182–87, 189, 195–96, 200–2, 210, 212, 217–18 memorialize, 27, 30, 40, 50n24, 217 memory ars memorativa, 45 circulating memory, 62 clearest memory, 104, 107 collective/social/public memory, x, 3–8, 9, 12–14, 16–18, 26–27, 36, 50n21, 61–62, 71, 90, 94–95, 103–5, 109–10, 112–14, 117, 136, 146–48, 156, 159, 165, 173–75, 182–87, 189, 193, 195, 201–2, 206–7, 210–14, 217 conflicted/contested/fragmented memory, 5–6, 8–11, 15, 18, 35– 37, 56, 85–87, 136, 147, 173, 207–8, 213, 215 cross-cultural/cosmopolitan/ globalized/transcultural memory, x, 4, 10, 136 cross-generational memory, 1, 16–17, 36, 60, 72, 89, 104–5, 118n2, 146–47, 162–63, 185, 187, 201 cultural memory, ix–x, 3–4, 7, 10, 12–13, 16–17, 26, 44, 61–62, 81–82, 94–97, 103, 105, 109–10, 112, 114, 117, 121–23, 126–27, 136, 146–48, 173–75, 182–87, 189, 201, 206–7, 211– 14, 217

225

disseminating memory, 12, 56, 61, 95 earliest memory, 104, 106, 123 going beyond memory, 1, 3, 6, 10–11, 17–18, 45, 47–48, 56, 62, 118, 136, 213, 217–18 individual/personal/private memory, 3, 5–6, 8, 12–15, 18, 26–27, 33, 56, 62, 69, 71, 95, 105–8, 110, 117–18, 118n2, 122–23, 136, 147–48, 156–57, 163, 165, 172–75, 185, 187, 206–7, 210, 213, 215, 217 institutional memory, 16, 95–96 lieux de memoire (sites of memory), 3, 61, 80 memory field, 11, 14–15, 106, 108, 110, 114, 117, 118n2, 206–7, 209–10, 217 memory-making, 3–5, 10, 12, 14, 18, 95, 147, 173, 175, 184, 206–7, 211, 214–17 metabolizing memory, 16, 122–23, 127–28, 130, 132, 136 Memory Palace, 10, 12, 27–28, 33, 36–37, 45–48, 105, 184, 207 memory project, 27, 55, 71, 213 painful memory, 104, 106, 171 quest for memory, 48, 58 remorseful memory, 96, 104 shared memory, 5, 16–17, 28, 39, 110, 136, 146–47, 164–65, 172–74, 186–87, 207, 211–12, 214 storehouse of memory, 12–14, 16, 18, 46, 58, 184–85, 201, 206, 209–13, 217 storybook memory, 11 traumatic memory, 109–10 Mencius. See Confucianism metamorphosis/transformation, 4, 6, 16, 26, 42, 49n3, 58, 64–65, 89–91, 94, 96, 107, 110–12, 122–23, 186, 209, 212 migration/migratory, 15, 123–25, 136 military occupation, 87, 121–22, 125– 26, 136, 151–52, 154–55, 163, 166, 176n6, 191, 193–94, 196, 198 mime/mimic/mimicry/mimesis, 7–9, 14, 17–18, 181, 183–87, 192, 196, 200–2, 212, 217 mise en abyme, 28, 30, 63, 184, 206–7, 209, 217 montage, 13, 57, 87 monument, 4, 62, 64

226

mnemonic, 27, 105, 123, 126–27, 130, 132 Mo Yan, 6–7, 14–15, 102–18, 118– 19n2, 135, 210 Big Breasts & Wide Hips, 6, 102–4, 106–10, 113, 115–18, 135, 210 museums, 44, 58, 62, 68–69, 72, 79, 125, 137 museum exhibition, 9, 15, 126 music, 11, 13–14, 57, 65, 93, 98n11, 149, 151, 158 myths, 3–5, 57, 79, 95, 115, 121 myth-history (see history) mythopoetic, 6, 57, 202 names/naming, 30, 32, 34–36, 39, 41, 60, 63, 65, 69, 102, 106, 113–15, 117, 155–56, 159, 163, 176n3, 181–82 Nanjing, 35, 152, 172 narrative, x, 2, 5, 10–11, 14–15, 18, 30–31, 35–38, 42, 57, 63, 66–68, 72, 80–81, 84, 86–87, 89–90, 94–96, 103, 121, 129–30, 133–34, 136, 148, 183–86, 201–2, 208, 215, 218 nation, 3, 10, 28, 35, 42, 81–88, 95–96, 97n1, 103, 113–18, 121–27, 130, 133–34, 136, 157–58, 216 citizen /citizenry, 16, 55, 60–61, 80, 85, 95–97, 122–25, 127–28, 130, 132–33, 135–36 naturalization, 124, 127–28, 132–33, 136 Nationalist (Guomindang) Party/ government, 92, 98n11, 145, 150–52, 154, 161, 163, 170, 175, 211 nature, 29, 33–34, 39, 45, 51n39, 89, 209 Nora, Pierre, 3–4, 61–62 nostalgia, 8, 13, 28, 36, 39–40, 59, 61, 79, 127, 131–32, 213–14, 216–17 Nuosu (Liangshan Yi, an ethnic group of China), 5, 17, 40, 42, 181–82, 184–90, 192–93, 195–97, 200–2, 212–13 Opium Wars, 122, 125 optimism, 59, 82, 85, 87–89, 97n5, 215 oral history. See history Other/strange/alien, 2, 6–10, 14–15, 17–18, 34–35, 42, 66, 83, 92, 103, 107, 110–15, 117, 125, 128, 130, 133, 135, 210, 217 Pacific War, 149, 152, 156

Index

painting, 1–2, 8–12, 25–33, 35–47, 49nn3–4, 50n17, 50nn20–21, 50n23, 51n28, 51nn30–31, 51n36, 65–66, 105, 208–9, 214 palimpsest, 10, 14, 183–84 People’s Republic of China, 2, 68, 96, 97n1, 116, 118n2, 124, 150, 211 performance, 14, 57, 59–60, 62–64, 70, 93, 98n11, 149, 213 photography, 9, 65–66, 128, 151 philosophy, 11, 35, 37, 51n39, 67, 103, 105, 108–9, 113, 118, 149, 183, 208, 210 Pilgrims’ Progress series, 35–36, 40 plot, 8, 14, 90, 93, 103–4, 106–7, 118, 118n2 poetry, 12–13, 26, 37–39, 43, 51n28, 57. See also mythopoetic portrait, 61, 66, 69–70, 113, 202, 215 power, 7, 31, 38, 44–45, 61, 90, 92, 94, 125, 127, 146, 187, 190, 195, 208 privilege, 40, 47, 122, 126, 136, 148– 49, 156, 211, 214 golden rice bowl, 151, 154 propaganda, 11, 31, 50n22, 90, 173, 175, 211–12 Qingdao, 151, 154–55, 159, 163–64, 176n3 Reading, Anna, 4, 11, 13, 15–16, 106, 176n8, 216–18 real, 11, 37, 39, 41, 47, 57, 63, 70, 106, 206, 208–15, 217–18 as-if real, 47, 206, 208–15, 217–18 realistic, 33, 81, 93 realism, 39, 64, 80, 84, 103 reality, 32, 37, 39–40, 44, 46, 49n12, 64–65, 81–83, 85, 88, 93–94, 96, 97n5, 103, 208–9, 214–15 socialist realism, 14, 80–86, 88–89, 92–96, 97n5, 214–15 surrealism, 64 vs. fake, 57, 63, 70 recollection, 15, 25–26, 28, 30–31, 33, 47, 60, 121–22, 128, 130–32, 134–35 Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji). See history recursivity, 5, 207, 214, 217–18 re-education, 39 re-enactment, 17, 57, 181, 183–84, 186–87, 200–1

Index227

Reform and Opening-up, 103, 106, 116 renaissance, 45, 151 representation, 9, 32–33, 37, 46–47, 82, 90, 92–93, 104, 194 reputation, 17, 29, 64, 67, 81, 114, 126, 193, 199, 202, 217 research, 16–17, 49n5, 57, 59, 62, 67, 71, 146–47, 150, 159, 164–65, 172–73, 211 reunion, 2, 16, 60, 147, 164, 211 revolutionary, 27, 29, 32, 79–80, 82– 83, 85, 88, 90–92, 94, 96, 97nn1–2, 98n11, 170, 215 rhetoric, 45, 51n44, 67, 71, 94, 104–5, 107–9, 113, 117, 190 Ricci, Matteo, 8, 12, 26–27, 33–36, 46–48, 50nn22–26, 52n46, 207 Ryle, Gilbert, 183 romanticism, 32, 65, 69 Saint Ignatius, 46 sayings/parables, 17, 189, 195–96, 200–2 Schultz, Corey, 56, 66, 70 Scott, Michael W., 185 seasons, 27, 35–37, 39, 86, 107, 129, 134, 154, 186 Second World War, 87, 89, 122, 124– 26, 147, 152, 167, 176n8 self (vs Other) 3, 7–8, 81, 113–14, 123 self-confusion, 113–14 self-criticism, 153 self-cultivation, 112 self-defence, 196 self-development, 126 self-effacing, 202 self-identity, 80, 113–14 self-image, 14, 105 self-knowledge, 46 selflessness, 11 self-perception, 91 self-referentiality, 63 self-reflexive, 14, 183 self-reliance, 59 self-sacrifice, 8, 59–60 self-transformation, 91 semiotics, 1, 184 senses, 2, 5, 9, 28, 33, 60–61, 105, 185, 187, 200 Shanghai, ix, 5, 15–16, 51n37, 106, 121– 23, 125–29, 131–36, 147, 154, 160, 164, 170–71, 176n8, 177n14, 216–18 Shitao (Chinese painter), 32, 35 Sichuan, 25, 27–29, 34, 49n5, 49n9, 50n22, 51n33, 68, 182

Sima Qian (Chinese historian), 8, 10, 57, 63, 67–72 singularity (uniqueness), 46, 56–57, 69–72, 209, 213 Sino-Other borderlands, 10 Sino-Japanese War, 103, 107, 151 social life (of things), 2, 9, 18, 208 socialism, 11, 14, 79–83, 85–89, 95–96, 148, 214–15 socialist realism, 14, 80–86, 88–89, 92–96, 97n5, 214–15 Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands), 81, 88, 215 soil, 83, 124, 127–28, 130–31, 136, 153 Soviet Union/Soviet, 82–85, 87, 93, 127, 172 Spence, Jonathan, 12, 27, 45–47, 52n46, 207 The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, 12, 46–48, 207 spiritual lineage, 12, 30–31, 45–48, 208–9 starvation, 107–8, 129–30, 134–35, 210 statelessness, 11, 15–16, 106, 121–36, 216, 218 status, 15–17, 124, 126, 148, 184–85, 195, 199–202, 211, 217 sterility, 102, 188 still life, 58, 64–66 storytelling, x, 1–2, 6, 8, 11, 13, 14, 16–18, 31, 57, 60, 80–81, 83, 85–86, 88–89, 94–96, 182–86, 195, 200, 202, 206–7, 211, 218 scripted story, 13, 57, 59, 63, 70–1, 213 story within a story (see mise en abyme) swapping stories, 165, 211 struggle, 14–15, 37, 40, 42–43, 46–47, 83–85, 87, 90–92, 117, 145, 154, 170 struggle sessions, 91–92, 153, 170, 215 sublimation, 26, 209–13, 217 engulfment, 26, 209, 217 suffering, 31–32, 37, 43, 59, 90–91, 93, 107–10, 112–13, 134, 170–71, 200 surrender, 45, 135, 208 Swancutt, Katherine, x, 5, 11, 16–17, 42, 57, 105, 109, 122, 174, 186–87, 193, 212 symbol, 34, 40, 44, 79, 89, 92, 109 symphony (of meanings), 35, 44, 208 synaesthesia, 15–16, 33, 37–38, 122, 127–29, 131, 216–17

228

tableau, 13, 57, 65–66, 70 Taiwan, 5, 42, 50n22, 145–48, 150, 154–58, 160–63, 172–74, 176n3, 177n11, 177n13, 211 Taussig, Michael, 7–8, 183, 200 tension, 8, 11, 14, 18, 35, 39, 80–81, 83, 88–89, 94, 96, 121, 127, 136, 146, 163, 208–18 testimony, 26, 31, 45, 126 texts, 4, 10, 16, 30, 50n23, 56–57, 63– 68, 71–72, 81–83, 86, 95–96, 117, 118n2, 149, 171–74 intertextual, 58, 83, 93 Thailand, 33 Third Front Policy, 56, 61–62, 70, 213 Three Years of Natural Disasters, 103, 106, 110 Tibet, 40–41, 51n33 yaks, 41–42 Tibeto-Burman, 17, 182 tigers, 115, 195–96, 198, 200 time, x, 2–4, 10–11, 13, 15–17, 26–28, 30–31, 33, 35–38, 40, 42, 44–46, 49n3, 49n13, 50n24, 51n36, 51n44, 52n8, 57–58, 60–62, 65–66, 68, 72, 86–88, 90–91, 93–94, 103, 105, 107–10, 112–13, 118, 121, 124, 127, 129, 131–32, 134–35, 146, 151–52, 154, 158, 160, 164, 171–72, 175, 185–86, 188, 190, 192–93, 195, 201, 214, 216–17 tourism, 64, 79, 97nn1–2, 214 red tourism, 79, 97nn1–2, 214 trace, 2–3, 10, 12, 16–18, 31, 44–48, 49n12, 51n39, 56, 71, 85–86, 90, 97n3, 109, 115, 188, 206–13, 217 tradition/traditional, 3, 11, 17, 30–32, 37, 39, 43–44, 48n2, 49n3, 50n21, 59, 63, 67–68, 83, 89, 95, 115, 132– 33, 148, 182, 188, 190, 201 training, 25, 28, 32, 68, 82, 86, 149–50, 173 trains, 12, 26, 29, 34, 129 transformation. See metamorphosis translation, 27, 30, 32, 44, 47, 49n11, 50n23, 50n27, 51n32, 55, 57, 63, 65, 67, 84, 97n4, 97nn6–7, 114, 117, 118nn1–2 transmission, 1, 3, 5–6, 8–9, 17, 30–31, 81, 95, 156, 163, 184, 200–2 travel, 7, 12, 26, 31, 33–35, 38, 46–47, 50n22, 58, 67, 121, 123, 129, 136, 176nn6–7, 193, 209 unforgettable, 15, 186

Index

ugliness, 29, 98n11, 109, 111 unification, 7–9, 13, 18, 26, 56–57, 63, 66–67, 70–71, 80, 95–96, 182, 185, 213–14, 217 United States of America/American, 16, 41, 112, 122, 132–33, 135, 146–48, 152, 156, 158, 172, 175 universe, 29, 33–35, 40, 44–45, 47–48, 115, 209 Vermander, Benoît, 4, 6, 8, 10, 11–12, 58, 65, 85, 97n3, 105, 131, 184, 208–9, 214, 216 vision, 6, 8, 10, 14, 32–33, 42, 44, 63, 83, 88, 90, 94, 105–6, 108–9, 114, 117, 146–47, 182–83, 201, 207, 209–17 visual, 6, 38, 104, 106 visual idea, 32 Water Buffalo (Nuosu storyteller), 181–87, 190–93, 195–202 Weihaiwei station, 145–48, 151–52, 154, 156, 160–61, 163–65, 172 Willens, Liliane, 15–16, 106, 121–23, 126–36, 216–17 Stateless in Shanghai, 106, 122, 126, 216 Willerslev, Rane, 12, 32 Wolf, Christa, 14, 46, 60, 80–81, 85– 89, 94–96, 214–15 The Divided Heaven (Der geteilte Himmel), 80, 85–89, 95, 97n4, 214 world, 11–12, 18, 26, 33, 35–36, 39– 41, 45, 47, 64–65, 67, 69, 85, 88, 92, 104, 111–12, 114–15, 126, 136, 146, 153, 163, 173, 208–9 world as-if real, 206, 208–9, 218 writing, x, 1–2, 8–10, 13, 15, 28, 30–31, 35, 39, 45, 47, 49n13, 50n15, 52n28, 56–58, 62, 65–68, 70–71, 80– 90, 92–96, 102–9, 114–17, 126, 153, 156, 160, 173, 183–84, 196, 213 revisionism, 214–15 rewriting, 14, 80–82, 86, 89–90, 94, 96, 156, 183–84, 214, 217 yaks. See Tibet Zhuangzi. See Daoism Zou, Yejun, 4, 11, 13–14, 46, 60, 106, 127, 131, 214–15