Engendering Victimhood: Women in Literature of Atrocity
Sylvia Li-chun Lin
positions: east asia cultures critique, Volume 17, Number 2, Fall 2009, pp.
411-434 (Article)
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Engendering Victimhood: Women in Literature of Atrocity
Sylvia Li-chun Lin
What is remembered of the Holocaust depends on how it is remembered, and how
events are remembered depends in turn on the texts now giving them form.
 — James E. Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust
This essay deals with a body of literary works that represent Taiwan’s 2/28
Incident and its aftermath, the White Terror. By looking at this mushrooming
corpus of works, I explore aspects of contemporary Taiwanese culture as
it is manifested in this literary restoration of history, situating my analysis in
the larger context of third-world women and their changing roles vis-à-vis
tradition during national crises. I have chosen the term literature of atrocity
to serve two purposes: one that will become evident in my discussion of the
2/28 Incident and White Terror, the other a more ambitious attempt to contribute,
by examining these writings from Taiwan, to scholarship that deals
positions 17:2  doi 10.1215/10679847-2009-008
Copyright 2009 by Duke University Press
positions 17:2  Fall 2009	 412
with similar issues elsewhere, such as Holocaust studies, or John Treat’s eloquent
examination of the atomic literature.1
The 2/28 Incident and the White Terror
The 2/28 Incident is by now an event well known to historians and scholars
of Taiwan. Briefly, on February 27, 1947, a Taiwanese woman selling
illegal cigarettes was severely beaten by agents of the Tobacco and Alcohol
Monopoly Bureau formed by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government,
which had taken over Taiwan from the Japanese colonial administration. A
bystander was shot and killed in the ensuing public outcry. The unnecessarily
violent assault sparked an island-wide protest against the brutality
toward, and prejudice against, indigenous Taiwanese by the Nationalist government,
which would soon be driven off the Chinese mainland by Mao’s
Communist forces. In retaliation, Governor Chen Yi ordered the arrest and
execution of any Taiwanese related, however remotely, to the protests. Martial
law was declared. The beating and the ensuing massacre of Taiwanese
elite, known as the February 28, or 2/28, Incident, was promptly buried in
history, and any mention of the event could result in arrest and imprisonment,
even execution.
The subsequent decades-long silencing of public opinion and persecution
of dissidents is generally referred to as the White Terror. It was only after
the lifting of martial law on July 1, 1987, that many people, particularly the
young, became aware of this forgotten page of Taiwanese history. Following
the election of Lee Teng-hui, the first Taiwan-born president, materials
on the incident, no longer taboo, have been gradually unearthed through
both official and civilian efforts. Reparations were discussed and later
implemented; a memorial park was designated. Apparently to compensate
for forty years of silence, relatives of the victims, scholars, and artists have
vied to represent the event, supplanting “official history” with “personal
histories.”
Concurrent with scholarly research and compilation of eyewitness
accounts has been a burgeoning body of literary works that describe both
the incident and its aftermath. Most people agree that the era of White Terror,
which exerted a pervasive pressure for people to censor themselves to
Lin | Engendering Victimhood	 413
avoid arrest and imprisonment, was the result of the incident.2 It is fitting
for literary production dealing with these two topics to be studied together,
hence, the inclusive term, literature of atrocity, in which neither is privileged
over the other; the “atrocity” can take on diverse forms, including indiscriminate
shooting and extralegal execution, as well as infringements upon basic
human rights such as living without fear of persecution or enjoying freedom
of speech, freedom of congregation, and freedom of information.
Women and National Crises
In her essay “The Female Body and Nationalist Discourse: Manchuria in
Xiao Hong’s Field of Life and Death,” Lydia Liu examines the co-optation of
Xiao Hong’s work by male-centered critics throughout modern Chinese literary
history. Beginning with Lu Xun and Hu Feng, Xiao Hong scholarship
has been subsumed in a national discourse that insists on interpreting her
novel as an anti-Japanese allegory while obscuring or ignoring the plight of
rural women in a field of life and death.3 In a way, by refusing to acknowledge
that the women in Xiao Hong’s novel are women first and Chinese
second, critics (mostly male) deny them a gendered victimhood and actually
inflict a second (albeit symbolical) victimization. Using a rape scene in Xiao
Jun’s Village in August (Bayue de xiangcun) as a contrast, Liu is critical of
this patriarchal national consciousness: “As a sign of symbolic exchange, the
raped woman often serves as a powerful trope in anti-Japanese propaganda.
Her victimization is used to represent — or more precisely, to eroticize — 
China’s own plight.”4
What is revealed in Lydia Liu’s now classic essay is, among many insights,
the contestation over the representation of women and interpretive ownership
of the female body vis-à-vis foreign aggression at a time of national crisis.
Such contestation is by no means unique to China; similar battles were
waged over the matter of women’s veils in colonial Algeria or the practice of
sati in British-ruled India. In “Algeria Unveiled,” Frantz Fanon delineates
the changing role of the women’s veil in colonial Algeria: “If we want to
destroy the structure of Algerian society, its capacity for resistance, we must
first of all conquer the women; we must go and find them behind the veil
where they hid themselves and in the houses where the men kept them
positions 17:2  Fall 2009	 414
out of sight.”5 Unveiling the women, the French colonizers believed, would
lead to the total subordination of the Algerian (male) population, owing
to the veil’s metonymic nature. During the Algerian struggle for independence,
many women unveiled and reveiled themselves in their participation
in the revolutionary action. Whether the aim was total subjugation or
independence, the Algerian women, veiled and unveiled, were called forth
to perform for colonial conquest and later national salvation. Ironically, as
Winifred Woodhull points out in “Unveiling Algeria,” the postindependent
Algerian government demanded reveiling the women because it was
essential in recovering the Algerian traditional culture and critical in uniting
a nation that would otherwise be torn apart by economical disparity
and political struggle.6 The imposed reveiling exposes the high stakes and
underlying anxiety at issue when colonial or nationalist patriarchal narratives
address the symbolic value of women.
Similarly, sati, or widow self-immolation, took on overcharged religious,
nationalistic, and colonial implications in British-ruled India. Lata Mani
investigates how the image of self-immolating widows was manipulated
by the British colonial government to solidify and substantiate its authority:
“The widows were presumed to be uneducated and incapable of both
reason and independent action.”7 What necessitated this denigration of
Indian women in general was an imperialistic desire to demean the colonial
subjects via a convoluted route of reasoning: “Officials in favor of abolition
argued that such action was in fact consistent with upholding indigenous
tradition. And indeed this was how the regenerating mission of colonization
was conceptualized by officials: not as the imposition of a new Christian
moral order but as the recuperation and enforcement of the truths of indigenous
tradition.”8 In other words, the Hindu intelligentsia were considered
ignorant of their own culture, hence, their endorsement (active or passive)
of sati; the widows were double victims of such ignorance. It is therefore not
surprising to see that “the widow was often described as a ‘tender child.’ ”9
This is not to say that Indian male intellectuals were all staunch defenders
of the practice; there were, among them, passionate and eloquent opponents
of sati. What is of interest here is the exploitation of “widow’s will,” that is,
whether the widows willingly burned themselves along with their husbands.
The proponents of sati emphasized women’s will, but “the petition [against
Lin | Engendering Victimhood	 415
the prohibition of sati] seeks to demonstrate that the East India Company’s
criminalizing of sati is based on an erroneous reading of the scripture.”10
Women receded to the background but at the same time were turned into
a battleground, where the colonial authority and indigenous intelligentsia
vied to prove each other wrong in their interpretation of the Hindu tradition.
In short, a debate on a practice that is cruel beyond measure became a
competition for the claim of authoritative reading of the scripture, while the
contest between indigenous sovereignty and colonial domination remained
the underlying subtext.
Whether in overtly ideological or fictional discourse, women in these
three regions at various times of their nations’ history were classified and
then declassified as victims of the conquest of imperialism; they were simultaneously
the manifestation of indigenous tradition and the embodiment
of the inferiority of their culture. Each case points toward a similar tendency
to exploit women in the name of nationalism, while simultaneously
relegating women to the margin of national discourse. By looking at these
regions together, I am not suggesting that the issues facing the women in
China, Algeria, and India were necessarily identical or comparable. Rather,
these three regions provide us with a multifaceted point of departure in
our inquiry into the interplay between women and the restoration of history
in Taiwan. What we have seen is the changing demand made by the
nation (read males) on women at a time of colonial domination and national
crisis. But what happens when the crisis is long over, or when the crisis has
remained obscured for decades? What role are women then asked to play in
the recuperation of that critical moment?
Literature of Atrocity and Women
As we have seen, the four decades following the 2/28 Incident were marked
by a government-imposed collective amnesia.11 Essential to the Guomindang
(GMD) government’s successful domination on Taiwan, this amnesia
is similar to what Homi K. Bhabha calls “the obligation to forget”: “It is
through this syntax of forgetting — or being obliged to forget — that the
problematic identification of a national people becomes visible. The national
subject is produced in that place where the daily plebiscite — the unitary
positions 17:2  Fall 2009	 416
number — circulates in the grand narrative of will. However, the equivalence
of will and plebiscite, the identity of part and whole, past and present,
is cut across by the ‘obligation to forget,’ or forgetting to remember.”12 To
defy this “obligation” and dismantle the nation imagined by the Nationalist
government, scholars and creative writers have undertaken to reconstruct
history by recording and constructing narratives, a process that attempts
to recoup the Taiwanese past and redefine Taiwanese culture. However, in
most of the current scholarship and witness accounts on the 2/28 Incident,
women are simply called forth to recount the men’s stories, while their own
stories inevitably recede into the background.13 It is as if the sole significance
of their existence were to bear witness to the fact that atrocity happens; their
victimhood is thus obscured.
Literary works dealing with the 2/28 Incident, in contrast, generally present
women as victims in a much more complex and sometimes controversial
circumstance. The complexity derives partially from the fact that the choice
is virtually obligatory, since the men were either executed or in prison. As
Shen Xiuhua notes, “For the men who died in the 2/28 Incident, the day
marked the end of their stories, while for the women they left behind the
2/28 Incident was the beginning of theirs.”14 However, while women are
unavoidably portrayed as victims, the discussion would go no further if that
was all the writers accomplished, since women as a trope for victimhood is
a well-worn literary device, as seen in the scholarship on Xiao Hong’s The
Field of Life and Death, or the debates surrounding self-immolated widows
in colonial India. Although women can serve as a powerful metaphor for
atrocity, Taiwanese women are victimized twice in the 2/28 discourse; they
are expected to represent themselves while signifying something larger than
themselves. Then, too, a problem inevitably arises in the literary project of
restoration of history. History, as Jacques Le Goff so succinctly traces, is
related to seeing: “This conception of vision as the essential source of knowledge
leads to the idea that istor, the one who sees, is also the one who knows,
istorien.”15 In the Taiwanese situation, we must interrogate how women,
who were mostly absent at the scenes of atrocious acts, and who, therefore,
do not see, can lay claim to legitimate representational authority, and to
what extent their absent presence in history accomplishes the monumental
task of restoring history.
Lin | Engendering Victimhood	 417
In the following, I analyze four short stories by prominent Taiwanese
writers to examine their portrayals of female victims of government atrocity,
both the 2/28 Incident and the persecution of dissidents during the White
Terror era (1950 – 87). To trace the evolution of the image of women as victim,
I begin with Chen Yingzhen’s “The Mountain Road” (1983), continue
with Lin Shuangbu’s “A Minor Biography of Huang Su” (1983) and Yang
Zhao’s “Yanhua” (1987), and conclude with Li Ang’s “The Devil in a Chastity
Belt” (1997). As my analysis shows, these stories entail literary exploitation
of women as victim, but I seek also to highlight the complexity of
engendering victimhood in post – martial law Taiwan.
“The Mountain Road” and Revictimization
Chen Yingzhen’s “The Mountain Road” (“Shanlu”) is one of the earliest
and best- known stories on the effects of the White Terror.16 Written in 1983,
before the lifting of martial law, the story is significant on at least two levels:
historically speaking, it is audacious in its subject matter, as Chen’s own personal
life can attest to the intolerance of the ruling Nationalist government
for any dissenting or critical views.17 Structurally, “The Mountain Road”
sets an example for a narrative style that Yomi Braester calls “post-Chiang
mystery,”18 a retelling of the past that can never be complete, as opposed to
a straightforward, linear narration, such as that employed by Lin Shuangbu
for his “A Minor Biography of Huang Su” (“Huang Su xiao biannian”), also
published in 1983.19
“The Mountain Road” is told from the perspective of Li Guomu, whose
sister-in-law, Cai Qianhui, is hospitalized at the beginning of the story. Doctors
at various hospitals have not been able to diagnose the cause of her illness.
Li Guomu recalls how his sister-in-law wept over a newspaper report
on the parole of four political prisoners who were arrested in the early 1950s
along with Li’s older brother, Li Guokun, who was executed. The report
marks the beginning of the deterioration of the sister-in-law’s health. After
she wills herself to die, Li finds among her effects a letter to one of the newly
released prisoners, Huang Zhenbo, with whom she had a romantic relationship.
The letter discloses that not only was she not married to Li’s brother,
but obviously did not even know him well. In the early 1950s, when the gov-
positions 17:2  Fall 2009	 418
ernment conducted massive arrests of left-leaning intellectuals, her parents
made a secret deal with the government for her brother to turn himself in;
he complied but was ultimately arrested nonetheless. Guilt and shame over
her family’s action prompted her to pretend to be the wife of Li Guokun and
toil for them for the following thirty years.
In this story, Chen Yingzhen creates the figure of a self-sacrificing
woman in order to launch his indictment of capitalist society as a stark contrast
to the idealism and self-devotion of young men like Li’s brother and
Huang Zhenbo. In the process, Chen describes the inhumane and lasting
effects of the White Terror — a family sacrifices other families in order to
save their son; a woman sacrifices her own youth as a form of reparation; a
younger brother’s inability to face the past is the result of many decades of
self-censorship.
Examining “The Mountain Road” in terms of the ways in which literature
bears witness against history, Yomi Braester argues that the story
“points to literary testimony as always-already belated, addressing either the
mute dead or the deaf living. The author cannot recover a voice free of the
doubts — his own and his readers’ — that have been ingrained during years
of oppression and suppression.”20 Indeed, literary recuperation of a historical
past by its very nature cannot but remain fragmentary at best. In Braester’s
view, such a characteristic in fictional works by Chen and others “is a sign of
Taiwanese writers’ recognition of their inability to redress past wrongs and
rewrite history into a narrative of progress and redemption.”21
The inability posited by Braester is not a strictly personal failure, but,
more importantly, is caused by the White Terror; the devastating effects of
oppression are exemplified in the action of the main character, Cai Qianhui,
which can be best analyzed by applying Maurice Halbwachs’s notion of
autobiographical memory. As summarized by Lewis A. Coser: “[Autobiographical
memory] is memory of events that we have personally experienced
in the past. It may also serve to reinforce the bonds between participants, . . .
It stands to reason, however, that autobiographical memory tends to fade
with time unless it is periodically reinforced through contact with persons
with whom one shared the experiences in the past. . . . In any case, autobiographical
memory is always rooted in other people.”22 What the power of
suppression exerts on people is not solely the loss of historical memory (the
Lin | Engendering Victimhood	 419
“forgotten” 2/28 Incident) but also the more sinister effect of isolation, of
which Cai Qianhui is a prime victim. Without the periodic reinforcement
through contacts with other participants, because they were either killed or
still imprisoned, she “loses” her memory of the past until the day she reads
about the release of one of the political prisoners — a coparticipant.
On the other hand, the fading of Cai Qianhui’s autobiographical memory,
though serving the purpose of protest against government suppression,
is exploited by the author in his attack on the detrimental effects of capitalism,
which in turns calls into question the portrayal of victims of atrocity,
particularly women. Like Li Guokun, whose brother is executed, Cai Qianhui,
who also loses a brother, is a victim herself, though she may not consider
herself to be one, for she believes that her parents, by collaborating to save
her brother, have deprived her family of the victim status. The development
of the story suggests that there can only be one kind of victim. Moreover,
what is most disturbing about Chen’s story is the double victimization the
author inflicts upon Cai Qianhui in order to convey his well-known hostility
toward capitalism. As Braester points out, “her survival seems immoral
when compared to the fate of the long-imprisoned and the dead.”23 To put it
more bluntly, Chen Yingzhen criticizes the Taiwanese people’s complacency
and indulgence in material comfort by having Cai Qianhui confess in her
letter to Huang Zhenbo: “Your release from prison has shocked me into
awareness. I have been tamed by the capitalist commodity society, have been
so well nourished that I have become a sort of domestic animal.”24
One cannot help but question the employment of women as the embodiment
of comfortable domesticity and, more importantly, Chen’s portrayal of
a self-sacrificing devotee to the dissidents’ cause. Her redemption is denied
her twice; she willingly turns herself into a de facto servant of the victim’s
family to redress the crime committed by her family. She slaves away for
the victim’s family, not only as a way to compensate for the family whose
son is implicated by her own family, but also as a way to punish herself: “I
worked extremely hard. I worked myself as though I were being driven
by a cruel and abusive master, making myself a slave physically and emotionally.”25
But her labor only leads to the enjoyment of a comfortable life
(albeit self-proclaimed), from which she needs to be redeemed once more,
this time, by her death. On the narrative level, when her mission of atoning
positions 17:2  Fall 2009	 420
for a crime she did not commit is accomplished, author Chen Yingzhen has
her summarily will herself to die, in order to deliver his political diatribe.
We are reminded of the Algerian women, who were unveiled and veiled at
the whim of the male colonial and Algerian governments in their effort to
recoup (male) dominance and authority.
On the surface, Cai Qianhui appears to be a positive, sympathetic character,
a figure like Mother Earth; she is, in fact, a triple victim: of White
Terror, of her own convictions, and of the author’s need to condemn capitalism.
Her death, as David Wang has noted, “is a necessary means for filling
in the blanks in history.”26 One can even argue that her death is inevitable,
for the author needs her to die to make a point. Moreover, the narrative
strategy renders her a powerless woman who seems to live in the past and
for the past. The occasions in which we see her speaking are mostly taken
up by reminiscences of the past and often in fragments, as she lacks contacts
with coparticipants in the past. The last instance of her inability to speak
for herself is the letter — unsent, discovered posthumously. The mystery of
the cause of her death and the reason for her self-sacrifice is finally solved by
the male narrator, who refuses to share the letter with anyone, including his
wife, who is also portrayed as a caring, hard-working woman. The textual
violation and narrative violence in the way female victims are presented is
disturbing.
“A Minor Biography of Huang Su” and Madness
Compared with other works analyzed in this essay, Lin Shuangbu’s story
falls into a category all by itself; it presents a different kind of female victim.
While women in the other stories are all “guilty” by association, “A Minor
Biography of Huang Su” places the female victim at the scene of the massacre.
In other words, the female victims in other stories suffer because men in
their families (parents, a brother, or a husband) are implicated or involved,
while Lin’s story, rather than characterizing these women as victims of family
connections, describes the firsthand experience of an innocent victim
who happens to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
“A Minor Biography of Huang Su” relates the story of nineteen-year-old
Huang Su, who, in the space of a single day, changes from a happy bride-to-
Lin | Engendering Victimhood	 421
be into an accused murderer, and eventually into a madwoman. The story
opens on a spring day in 1947, as Huang Su awakens at the crack of dawn,
filled with excitement. She is getting married in two weeks and her mother
is taking her shopping in town. After making purchases at a fabric store,
Huang Su and her mother arrive at a sundry shop where her mother picks
out a cleaver for Huang Su, just as a commotion breaks out on the street.
Two angry mobs attack each other with clubs, pieces of brick, and broken
liquor bottles. Huang Su, separated from her mother, is carried along
with the mobs and eventually falls down on a corpse when she suffers two
heavy blows on her back. The cleaver, intended as a domestic instrument
for her wifely duties, is mistaken as a weapon in the public outcry, and she
is arrested, imprisoned, and sentenced to death. But she is proclaimed not
guilty just moments before she is to be shot. She is literally shocked out of
her wits and goes mad. When she returns home, she learns that her parents
have both fallen ill during her imprisonment and that the marriage proposal
has been withdrawn. After both parents die, she is neglected by her brothers
and sisters-in-law and wanders around the village aimlessly as an aging
madwoman. The story ends with her walking down a railroad track as a
train bears down on her.
Scholars who have examined this story by Lin Shuangbu inevitably mention
the author’s revelation of its background. According to Lin, the character
of Huang Su is based on a madwoman in the village where the author
received six years of high school education. But the significance of this story
is enhanced by another extratextual figure — Lin’s high school English
teacher, who somehow let the words 2/28 slip into his lecture one day. Lin
claimed that he raised his hand to ask the meaning of 2/28, but the teacher,
in a state of panic, adamantly denied he had said anything. The author continued
with questions after class until finally the teacher, using Taiwanese,
told Lin some things about the 2/28 Incident, which Lin had never heard
before. The teacher also mentioned the madwoman in town and explained
how she had gotten to that pitiable state.27 It was many years later that Lin
Shuangbu finally decided to write the story.
It is difficult, perhaps pointless, to determine the veracity and credibility
of the extratextual story, but the author’s intention to re-create history is
crystal clear, as Lin himself explains: “A concrete individual case in a his-
positions 17:2  Fall 2009	 422
torical event emerges and the cold setting now finds a lively protagonist.”28
In a way, we can argue that the re-creation of history — the story of Huang
Su — is the joint effort of a high school English teacher, his student, the
adult author, and the madwoman; the story would likely be radically different
if it were missing any one of the participants. The creation process
mirrors the unearthing of 2/28 history: from ignorance (the young author)
and self-imposed silence (his teacher), to inquiry, to finally putting a name
to the victims. While one may fault the author for exploiting the image of a
madwoman, one can also make a valid case that the author is attempting to
redress historical wrongs and is providing a name to the suffering woman.
Both Xu Junya and Jian Suzheng consider the story to be a manifestation
of gender stereotype by male writers: “[Lin Shuangbu] employs a gender
conception based on a patriarchal value system and turns women into a
symbol of Taiwan. When the country is in turmoil, women cannot help but
be dragged in to become the most innocent victims.”29 Echoing Xu Junya’s
reading, Jian Suzheng adds that what truly concerns the author is not women’s
experience but the destiny of the collectivity. Indeed, what can better
represent the ultimate effect of the 2/28 Incident than an innocent woman,
particularly one who is just about to be married? We recall how the widow
who carried out sati was often portrayed as a “tender child.”
On the other hand, Xu and Jian’s critique seems incomplete, if not misapplied
altogether. What is at issue in this story is not merely a helpless
woman representing a powerless Taiwan at the total mercy of the Nationalist
government, but the trope of betrothed woman and madness. In her
analysis of Jane Eyre, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has suggested that the
function of the madwoman, Bertha Mason, is “to render indeterminate the
boundary between human and animal and thereby to weaken her entitlement
under the spirit if not the letter of the Law.”30 In a similar vein, it is
only through a description of the subhuman figure of Huang Su that the
author can convey a sense of outrage over injustice and senseless killing. A
novel published in 1989, Chen Ye’s Muddy River, also features a woman gone
mad after her fiancé was arrested and executed.31 But madness alone cannot
and does not adequately represent the severity of suffering endured by the
Taiwanese. Interestingly, Chen Ye’s madwoman, Yinchai, like Huang Su,
also loses her fiancé, which makes one wonder if the combination of a mar-
Lin | Engendering Victimhood	 423
riage proposal, a woman, and her madness is the most effective means of
representing atrocity (we recall that Cai Qianhui and the nameless woman
in Yang Zhao’s story are both unmarried).
“Flower in the Smoke” and Questionable Victimhood
In an essay on women, provincial origin, and history in 2/28 fiction, Jian
Suzheng delineates three stages in the fictional representation of women
in 2/28 literature: the period between retrocession and the martial-law era
(1945 to early 1980s), the years shortly before the lifting of martial law (in
1987), and the post – martial law era. This periodization helps illustrate the
changing portrayals of women, from innocent victims, to ameliorating and
unifying figures of provincial divides, to personification of the complex relationship
between public/national history and private life.32 The lifting of
martial law in 1987 was indeed a watershed for Taiwanese literature; prior
to that demarcation year, writers understandably practiced self-censorship,
whereas the post – martial law era ushered in a cacophony of literary subjects,
including political satire and female sexuality. Hence, the periodization
encompasses this subgenre of 2/28 literature both synchronically and
diachronically, although the expansion of topics and increasingly transparent
reference to 2/28 were contingent upon the gradual relaxation of government
control. While it is not my intention to conduct a survey of Taiwan’s
literature of atrocity, let alone in a periodized manner, it is important and
imperative to examine how the representation of women evolved. To do
that, I look at a 1987 story by Yang Zhao titled “Yanhua” (“Flower in the
Smoke”).33
Narrated by a third-person omniscient voice, “Yanhua” tells of an encounter
between a young Taiwanese woman and a man from the mainland
named Jin Hongzao, who was a friend of her deceased father. The young
woman’s father, who had been a member of a local committee investigating
the bloodshed caused by the illegal cigarettes incident and later a member
of a settlement committee, was arrested and then executed shortly afterward.
Jin Hongzao’s wife, also a mainlander, died during the incident
when a group of angry demonstrators stormed the police station where she
sought refuge. The intertwined past of the only two characters in the story is
positions 17:2  Fall 2009	 424
revealed through their conversation; the story does not contain much action
until one day the young woman invites Jin to her house, where she asks
him in and guides his hand in touching her naked body. Shortly after that
night, which appears to be the climax of the story, Jin is arrested and dies
in prison.
Jian Suzheng places Yang Zhao’s story in the second period, with the following
justification:
2/28 fiction written toward the end of the martial law era was gradually
divested of its angry, dark accusatory tone, and the indiscriminate antipathy
toward the Mainlanders slowly dissipated. Most of the works now
took into serious consideration the fact that the Mainlanders were also
victims of political persecution. Yang Zhao’s “Yanhua” . . . , though also
using female characters to describe the fate of the Taiwanese, broadens
the definition of “Taiwanese” to include the Mainlanders and eliminates
the dichotomy of “self” and “other” that in earlier 2/28 fiction placed the
Taiwanese at the center. Moreover, the kindness and tenderness of female
characters was also used as a medium of communication between provincial
groups.34
Jian’s characterization of Yang’s story aptly underscores the common features
of fictional works written during this period.35 However, without a critical
analysis, Jian’s approach merely points out similarities. A closer examination
of the story exposes the fallacy of deploying women as a trope for harmonious
coexistence between the mainlanders and the Taiwanese.
What immediately attracts an informed reader’s attention is the fact that
the young woman does not have a name, whereas the mainland man is
called Jin Hongzao, although, at one point, the woman is referred to as
Wang Heshun’s daughter. The lack of a name symbolizes the absence of
a discernible individuality, which may signal the author’s intention to present
her as the quintessential Taiwanese woman, or the “Everywoman” of
Taiwan, if you will. Moreover, it also underscores the double victimization
derived from the contaminating effects of the 2/28 Incident. For many
members of the victims’ families, the 2/28 Incident was a contagious disease;
they were shunned by society and harassed by military police or the secret
service. In the young woman’s own words: “Except for the closest relatives,
Lin | Engendering Victimhood	 425
‘none of his friends, colleagues, supervisors and subordinates dared come
[to pay respects at his bier]. Not a single one of them dared to come.’ All of
a sudden, [the family] was isolated like quarantine during the plague. . . .
From then on, she felt she was just like a plague. Shunzi’s daughter. That
was Shunzi’s daughter. Occasionally someone would sneak something to her
or help her secretly because she was Shunzi’s [Wang Heshun’s] daughter, but
in public every one of them stayed clear of her, absolutely clear of her.”36
Her profession seems to confirm this authorial intention. Although
nowhere in the story does the author explain how she becomes a prostitute,
it requires little imagination to deduce that, after her father’s death, the
girl’s family fell on hard times and she turned to prostitution as a means of
survival. Prostitution, like rape, is a well-worn metaphor for the injustice
inflicted upon the subjugated.37 In this story, prostitution carries another
level of significance and serves an important if disturbing narratological
function. The woman sleeps with American GIs, not Taiwanese men.
Although one can read too much into this trope, it is impossible to avoid
discussing the meaning of such a choice of profession (albeit by the author).
Is prostitution the only weapon in the author’s narratorial arsenal to portray
the devastating effects of the 2/28 Incident? Can no other line of work adequately
convey the sense of injustice? By personifying the atrocious crimes
of the 2/28 Incident in this way, the author symbolically victimizes the victim’s
daughter a second time.
The young woman’s profession further serves to criticize the absurdity
of provincial differences. She reveals to Jin Hongzao that, after her father’s
death, her grandmother made every child in the family swear never to
marry a mainlander. Her own romantic relationship with a mainlander is
forcefully terminated by the elders in the family. “ ‘I cannot marry a mainlander,’
she said, giving him an eerie but enchanting smile, ‘but I can sleep
with foreigners.’ ”38 Jian Suzheng reads this passage as a stricture against
control of the female body: “The female body becomes a battleground for
political struggle; women, under the domination of family clan and provincial
groups, lose autonomy and control over their own bodies and sexuality.”
Earlier in the essay, Jian describes Yang Zhao as a male writer with a feminist
consciousness, and the comment quoted above suggests a positive reading
of Yang’s work, as one that condemns irrational hatred for mainlanders.
positions 17:2  Fall 2009	 426
While it is difficult to disagree with such a reading, it is important to question
whether the juxtaposition of provincial divides and nationality difference
is itself biased and whether a censure of provincial disharmony must
be presented in a way that further emphasizes the division between self and
other. In other words, the author seems to imply that sleeping with foreigners
is a more serious violation of Taiwanese individuality and supremacy
than marrying a mainlander. He has found it necessary to articulate the
narrowly defined provincial identity through a nationalistic paradigm.
Jian Suzheng approaches the issue from a drastically different perspective,
particularly in regard to the scene where the young woman asks Jin
Hongzao to touch her. The section is worth quoting in full:
His hand shook slightly as it rested on her gaunt, bony shoulder. He wanted
to remove his hand, but he couldn’t. . . . Taking a deep breath, he let his
hand slide along her shoulder, her right arm, her right elbow, her right
wrist, and her right palm. Her hand grabbed his and put it on her neck. . . .
Carefully he moved his hand along the space between her breasts all the
way down to her abdomen and her navel. He realized it wasn’t as difficult
as he’d imagined, but she suddenly grabbed his hand again, this time to
place it on her right breast. . . . She took a deep breath and placed his hand
on her private part while opening her legs slightly. . . .
Shaking his head, he said, “No, we can’t.” She said insistently, “You
promised.” His hand touched her hair, very very gently caressing the most
sensitive area. He arched his upper body to look at her. The expression on
her face was not the kind of flushed beauty or charm associated with sex;
instead it was more like peace from redemption.
She nearly jumped up to grab hold of him. Choking on tears, she said,
“I always felt that my body was so filthy I could never cleanse it no matter
how I tried.” Her tears dripped onto his body through the open collar of
his shirt. “Last night that White GI pushed down hard on me and kissed
every part of my body, including . . . . I hate him. It’s fine now; now I feel
fine. My body is mine again.”39
In Jian Suzheng’s view, the young woman’s action represents a new attitude
toward provincial identities: “The contradiction that [the young woman]
‘cannot marry a Mainlander but can sleep with foreigners as a prostitute’ can
Lin | Engendering Victimhood	 427
be resolved only after the barrier between provincial groups is dismantled
and the provincially based labels of ‘self’ and ‘other’ are peeled off. There is
nothing sexual about the young woman playing an active role and guiding
Jin Hongzao to caress her body. First of all, it is a symbolic gesture of the
mingling of the Taiwanese and mainlander, and secondly, it represents a
female resistance to political struggle and demand to take back control of
her own body.”40 Jian’s well-intentioned reading notwithstanding, it is difficult
not to consider this passage an expression of male fantasy, as it remains
unclear how a young woman guiding an older man, her own father’s friend,
to touch her naked body constitutes the elimination of provincial differences.
Jian, and perhaps the author, seems to suggest that the mere fact that
the young Taiwanese woman asks a mainland man to touch her is evidence
enough for the emergence of a new attitude toward provincial differences.
Such a reading/writing inevitably elides the issue of atrocity and simplifies
the cause of the 2/28 Incident. That is, by using the intimacy between a Taiwanese
woman and a mainland man, both of whom are victims of 2/28, to
suggest the elimination of provincial hatred, Jian’s reading of Yang’s work
appears to claim that provincial differences were the sole cause of the incident.
I do not intend to present historical research to refute such a simplistic
explanation, but the voluminous work conducted by historians and scholars
clearly points to far more complicated causes.
Then, too, how the young woman’s action represents a resistance against
political struggle remains unclear, logically or narratologically. The reading
likely comes from the fact that since, at the request of her grandmother,
and before her father’s bier, she had sworn not to marry a mainlander, her
action in seeking body contact with Jin, a mainlander, can be considered a
defiant act. But the passage displays at best a crude understanding of female
subjectivity vis-à-vis ethnic conflict. If indeed the young woman is motivated
by a desire to defy familial control over her body, does Jian Suzheng’s
idea of symbolic attitude toward provincial harmony not then mean a different
kind of ideological yoke? Once again, female subjectivity has been
subsumed under ethnic politics.
positions 17:2  Fall 2009	 428
Who Is the Victim in “The Devil in a Chastity Belt”?	
“The Devil in a Chastity Belt” (“Dai zhencaodai de mogui”) is the first story
in Li Ang’s famous (and infamous) collection titled Everyone Sticks Incense
into the Beigang Burner (Beigang xianglu renren cha).41 Criticism of the collection
following its publication is well known but not particularly relevant
to the present study.42 Suffice it to say that the story and others in the collection
explore the relationship between sex and politics and how women
gain power in Taiwan. However, the debates and scandal have obscured
the aspect of victims of atrocity and Li Ang’s subversion of the definition
of victimhood. The stories examined so far focus on female victims who
suffer either because of family members (father or brother) or because of an
untimely presence at the scene of massacre; all of them are “guilty” by association.
Common among literature of atrocity in Taiwan, women seem to be
“innocent” even by today’s standard; that is, none of them are portrayed as
members of the Communist party or as left-leaning intellectuals. Furthermore,
these women are usually presented as passive recipients who atone
for others’ crimes or are simply incapable of living on their own. It is within
this discursive milieu that Li Ang’s story becomes especially poignant and
meaningful.
The nameless protagonist, later nicknamed the “Grieving Founding
Mother” (or “Grieving Mother of the Nation”) comes from a Taiwanese
middle-class family, which furnishes her with an education in music, Japanese
tea ceremony, flower arrangement, and literature. A high school music
teacher, her only connection with politics at first is her husband, “Cannon,”
a legislator who was arrested during a crackdown on political dissent. After
her husband, whose only “crime” was meeting with foreign observers, is
sentenced to fifteen years in prison, she is elected as a people’s representative
and later becomes a legislator.
Similar to other female protagonists in stories dealing with the 2/28 Incident
or the White Terror, this nameless woman is an involuntary participant
in politics. Thus, Li Ang underscores the gendered political arena in
Taiwan; women are not expected to play, and likely discouraged from playing,
any active political roles. Unique to Taiwanese opposition politics, however,
a few women gained visibility and political positions when the men in
Lin | Engendering Victimhood	 429
their lives were arrested and imprisoned during the White Terror, and this
circumstance is mirrored in the protagonist’s life. The irony of the Grieving
Mother is that it is precisely her husband’s arrest that gives her the opportunity
to be in politics. If active participation in politics is a form of female
empowerment, then Li Ang has subverted the definition of a female victim
by problematizing the meaning of victimhood. That is, without her husband’s
arrest, she would never have become a victim, but her victimhood,
in turn, gives her political resources unavailable to many other Taiwanese,
men and women alike.
However, the author refuses to pin down the definition of victimhood by
making the character’s participation dubiously motivated; she has thrown
herself into politics not because she is interested in the cause of the opposition,
but because she believes it is the only way for her to be reunited with
her husband. Even she, despite a remarkable performance in Congress, intimates
to a woman who is writing about her that “there is nothing great or
admirable about me; I didn’t choose to make these sacrifices willingly. All I
want is to go back to the life I had before, with my husband back beside me,
and a home of our own, and our two children.”43
Moreover, we can detect a different kind of victimhood, one derived not
from the imprisonment of the protaganist’s husband but from the unbearable
burden of martyrdom. Although ambiguous about the force behind the
character’s transformation from gracious music teacher into political activist,
Li Ang is explicit in portraying her as a desexualized being: “Her romance
and her love-life as a woman had forever ceased to be in her thirty-second
year, on the Christmas Eve of the Big Arrest.”44 From then on, frozen in
time and space, she could only be the Grieving Mother of the Nation, not a
woman with feeling and desires.
This kind of victimhood is gender specific, and inflicted upon the woman
not only by an oppressive government but also by the men in the opposition
camp. In order to exploit the image of a political prisoner’s wife, the men in
the party prescribe a rigid quasi-widowhood, and her career as a public figure
is forever shrouded in a cloud of suspicion regarding her ability to fully
participate in opposition politics.45 As Kathleen B. Jones points out, “Since
women were defined in terms of reproductive and caretaking functions for
which they were assumed to be suited by nature, they were excluded from
positions 17:2  Fall 2009	 430
full participation as citizens.”46 Ironically, it is precisely this function of caretaker
that is exploited by the opposition camp; that is, the image of a mother
grieving for her fatherless children (not for her loss of a husband, mind you)
serves as the ultimate gesture of accusation against government oppression.
Also noteworthy is Li Ang’s moniker for the female protagonist: the
Grieving Founding Mother (of the Nation) (Beishang de guomu). Quoting
John Schaar, Jones observes that “the founding of communities constitutes a
symbolic birth unique among all births: it is a birth without mothers.”47 But
the birth of an imagined Republic of Taiwan is precisely a birth by mothers
alone. Whether by serendipity or by design, Li Ang creates a guomu (mother
of the nation) that not only counters the dominant discourse of the GMD,
whose iconic founder, Sun Yat-sun, is a founding father (guofu), but who
can also function as a gesture toward reclaiming women’s authority within
the opposition camp. Consequently, the Grieving Mother in Li Ang’s story
operates in a narrow space cracked open by the unique political conditions
of Taiwan; but she is forever walking a tightrope that is the very embodiment
of such ambiguous victimhood.
Conclusion
At the beginning of this essay, I discussed the pivotal role that women from
three different regions have played (willingly or unwillingly) in the shaping
of their respective nation’s traditions at a particular historical juncture. In
colonial Algeria, the unveiling of the indigenous women became a civilizing
project for the French and their reveiling by Algerian male authority
represented a sign of recovered Algerian cultural heritage; Indian widows
and sati were turned into a virtual site of immolating Indian tradition in a
contest of scriptural interpretation. In both these cases, women were inevitably
marginalized; they were set aside as trophies to be claimed by the
victors. Similarly, in their readings of Xiao Hong’s novel about women and
suffering, Chinese male intellectuals chose to view the women as victims of
foreign aggression rather than as women oppressed by Chinese culture and
poverty.
It is no coincidence that women in Algeria, India, and China gained such
Lin | Engendering Victimhood	 431
discursive attention at similar junctions of their history — the birthing of a
new nation, which was carried out through the contestation of traditions
and creation of new historical narratives. In a similar way, post – martial
law Taiwan witnessed the birthing of a new nation with burgeoning writings
of a new historiography, particularly in the literary field. Writers have
re-created scenes of atrocity and its effects to fill in the gaps in history, and
a new Taiwan is being written into existence. In this body of literature,
women as victims have been clearly considered the most powerful trope to
convey a sense of injustice. However, as I have shown in analyzing Li Ang’s
story, the definition of victimhood is, in fact, never readily transparent. As
David Wang has noted: “A ritual account of the most repugnant crime can
degenerate into a most boring pastime and ultimately trivialize the crime
itself. A literature of constant engagement will produce the effect of a literature
of alienation.”48 In this sense, the equivocal portrayals of women as
victims not only constitute a sign of an evolving understanding of Taiwanese
history, but also serve as a crucial narrative device that helps to avoid the
pitfall of trivialization.
Notes
	 All translations in this essay are mine unless otherwise specified.
  1. 	See John Whittier Treat, Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
  2. 	Some, however, such as Chen Yingzhen and Lan Bozhou, have argued that the White Terror
was the by-product of the Cold War and American imperialism on Taiwan. See, for
instance, Chen’s introduction, “Meiguo diguo zhuyi he Taiwan fangong pusha yundong”
(“American Imperialism and Anti-Communist Extermination in Taiwan”) to Lan’s Huang
mache zhi ge (Song of the Covered Wagon) (Taipei: Shibao Chuban Gongsi, 1991), 15 – 24.
  3. 	Lydia H. Liu, “The Female Body and Nationalist Discourse: Manchuria in Xiao Hong’s
Field of Life and Death,” in Body Subject and Power in China, ed. Angela Zito and Tani E.
Barlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 159 – 77. A different version of the
essay, “The Female Body and Nationalist Discourse: The Field of Life and Death Revisited,”
which I consulted but do not quote, appears in Scattered Hegemonies, ed. Inderpal Grewal
and Caren Kaplan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 37 – 62. As Liu
points out (176 n. 4), scholars such as Howard Goldblatt (in 1976) and Meng Yue and Dai
Jinhua (in 1989) have resisted a nationalist reading.
positions 17:2  Fall 2009	 432
  4. 	Liu, “The Female Body and Nationalist Discourse,” 161.
  5. 	Frantz Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” in A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New
York: Grove Press, 1965), 35 – 67.
  6. 	Winifred Woodhull, “Unveiling Algeria,” Genders 10 (1999), 114.
  7. 	Lata Mani, Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1998), 27.
  8. 	Ibid., 29. This is but a simplified account of Mani’s extensive analysis of colonial presumption
in terms of Indian tradition and its malleability in the British imperialistic endeavor.
  9. 	Ibid., 32.
10. 	Ibid., 51.
11. 	In the meantime, deliberate measures were taken to ensure that the local heritage was suppressed
and supplanted by a constructed national memory. See Marshall Johnson’s “Making
Time: Historic Preservation and the Space of Nationality” for an insightful analysis of how
the GMD government claimed its political legitimacy, in positions 2 (1994): 177 – 249.
12. 	Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern
Nation” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 310.
13. 	Shen Xiuhua made a similar observation in her introduction to a volume devoted to adding
women’s voice to the 2/28 scholarship; see Shen Xiuhua, Chamouren de Ererba (Women’s
2/28) (Taipei: Yushan she, 1997), 11.
14. 	Ibid., 14.
15. 	Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 101.
16. 	Chen Yingzhen, “Shanlu” (“The Mountain Road”), in Chen Yingzhen duanpian xiaoshuo
xuan (A Collection of Short Stories by Chen Yingzhen) (Taipei: Renjian Zazhishe, 1985). The
English translation is by Anne White with Chu Chiyu and Huang Liangbi, Renditions 39
(1993): 3 – 25.
17. 	In 1968 Chen Yingzhen was sentenced to ten years in prison for his “subversive” activities by
the Garrison Command but was released after seven years, following the death of Chiang
Kai-shek in 1975. For more details, see Lucien Miller, “A Break in the Chain: the Short
Stories of Ch’en Ying-chen,” in Chinese Fiction from Taiwan: Critical Perspectives, ed. Jeannette
L. Faurot (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 108n1.
18. 	Yomi Braester, “Retelling Taiwan: Identity and Dislocation in Post-Chiang Mystery,” in
Witness against History: Literature, Film, and Public Discourse in Twentieth-Century China
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 156 – 76.
19. 	Lin Shuangbu, “Huang Su xiao biannian” (“A Minor Biography of Huang Su”), in Ererba
Taiwan xiaoshuo xuan (A Collection of Taiwan 2/28 Short Stories), ed. Lin Shuangbu (Taipei:
Zili wanbaoshe, 1989), 58 – 68.
20. 	Braester, “Retelling Taiwan,” 166.
Lin | Engendering Victimhood	 433
21. 	Ibid., 100.
22. 	Lewis A. Coser, “Introduction,” in Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and
trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 24. Halbwachs analyzes
autobiographical memory in its relation to historical memory preserved in written records
and other types of records.
23. 	Braester, “Retelling Taiwan,” 163.
24. 	Chen, “Shanlu,” 25.
25. 	Ibid., 23.
26. 	David Der-wei Wang, “Lichengbei xia de chensi — dangdai Taiwan xiaoshuo de shenhuaxing
yu lishigan” (“Lost in Thought under the Milestone: Myth and History in Contemporary
Taiwanese Fiction”), in Zhongsheng Xuanhua (Polyphonous Clamor), quoted in Braester,
“Retelling Taiwan,” 163.
27. 	Lin Shuangbu, “Jianzheng yu guwu — bianxuan xu” (“Witness and Encouragement: An
Introduction”) in Lin, Ererba Taiwan xiaoshuo xuan, n.p.
28. 	Ibid.
29. 	Xu Junya, “Bianxuan xu: xiaoshuo zhong de ‘Ererba’ ” (“The ‘2/28’ in Fiction: An Introduction”),
in Wu yu de chuntian: Ererba xiaoshuo xuan (Silent Spring: A Collection of 2/28 Short
Stories), ed. Xu Junya (Taipei: Yushan she, 2003), 20.
30. 	Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” in
“Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1985), 268.
31. 	Chen Ye, Ni he (Muddy River) (Taipei: Zili wanbao wenhua chubanbu, 1989).
32. 	Jian Suzheng, “Ererba xiaoshuo zhong de nüxing, shengji yu lishi” (“Women, Provincial
Origin, and History in 2/28 Fiction”), www.complit.fju.edu.tw/complit98/papers/paper12
.htm (accessed July 14, 2003).
33. 	Yanhua is a euphemism for a prostitute, but also refers to a kind of flower that thrives and
blooms in smog, the subject studied by one of the main characters, Jin Hongzao. For lack
of an English counterpart, I have chosen to translate the title literally and have used the
romanized title throughout my discussion. Yang Zhao, “Yanhua,” in Xu, Wu yu de chuntian,
195 – 218. The story first appeared in Yang Zhao, Wu Xiang Zhi Hun (Soul of My Hometown)
(Taipei: Shibao Chuban Gongsi, 1987).
34. 	Jian, “Ererba xiaoshuo zhong de nüxing, shengji yu lishi.”
35. 	Jian includes a brief analysis of another story, “The Base of Wind and Snow” (“Fengxue
diceng”) by Lin Wenyi, which features a woman with a mainland background who is
arrested at the airport after attending several lectures given by mainland Chinese in the
United States.
36. 	Yang, “Yanhua,” 216.
37. 	We recall how Huang Chun-ming criticized Taiwan’s economic reliance upon Japan by
positions 17:2  Fall 2009	 434
portraying the narrator in “Sayonara/Zaijian” as a pimp for seven Japanese businessmen on
their pleasure trip to the narrator’s hometown.
38. 	Yang, “Yanhua,” 217.
39. 	Ibid., 213 – 14.
40. 	Jian, “Ererba xiaoshuo zhong de nüxing, shengji yu lishi.”
41. 	Li Ang, “Dai zhencaodai de mogui” (“The Devil in a Chastity Belt”), in Beigang xianglu
renren cha (Everyone Sticks Incense into the Beigang Burner) (Taipei: Maitian chubanshe,
1997), 49 – 82. The English translation is by Laura Jane Way, in The Chinese PEN (2000):
75 – 111.
42. 	A huge scandal ensued when one of the stories was first serialized in one of Taiwan’s preeminent
newspapers; the story became an instant roman à clef. The director of public relations
for the DPP was identified as the purported real-life model for the female protagonist, who
sleeps her way to power. Li Ang was sued by the director, and many in the opposition camp
attacked her for painting such a negative picture of women in politics. The controversy
turned a serious exploration of women’s accessibility to power into a sensational catfight
between two women.
43. 	Li, “Dai zhencaodai de mogui,” 59; “Devil in a Chastity Belt,” trans. Way, 87.
44. 	Li, “Dai zhencaodai de mogui,” 69; “Devil in a Chastity Belt,” trans. Way, 97.
45. 	Before her husband’s arrest, people even raised the possibility that she might become an
obstacle to her husband’s political career: “Would she ever stand in the way of her husband’s
opposition work for the sake of her young son and daughter and her lovely home though?
Nobody openly discussed this. People spat betel-nut juice on the ground and said with gruff
tenderness, ‘Well, she’s a woman.’ What they left unsaid was: ‘They’re all like this.’ ” (Li,
“Dai zhencaodai de mogui,” 55; “Devil in a Chastity Belt,” trans. Way, 81).
46. 	Kathleen B. Jones, Compassionate Authority: Democracy and the Representation of Women
(New York: Routledge, 1993), 27.
47. 	Ibid., 83.
48. 	David Der-wei Wang, “Reinventing National History: Communist and Anti-Communist
Fiction of the Mid-Twentieth Century,” in Chinese Literature in the Second Half of a Modern
Century: A Critical Survey, ed. Pang-yuan Chi and David Der-wei Wang (Bloomingon:
Indiana University Press, 2000), 61.