ABSTRACT
Wang Ying’s question about what constitutes a “genuinely strong humanity” or “the humanly strong” (Zhengzheng de qiangzhe) recurs in many modern Chinese women’s writings and lives including, most of all, those of Ding Ling, the most prominent Chinese woman writer of the long twentieth century. Ding Ling’s literary and political journey spanned over half a century and was shot through with radical shifts, uncertainties, alterations, and turmoil. Looking back at her life and work in 1985, one year prior to her death, she gave an oral account of her “memories” that an assistant arranged as a prose work titled “Songs of Death” (Sizhige). An autobiographical narrative and a historical document worthy of reproduction in its entirety, the first three passages read as follows:
In my earliest memory, what I feared most was the hat used for our Chinese traditional funerals, the kind that has three soft cotton balls hanging at the front. I had a hat of this kind when I was three and half years old, because my father died. Members of my family dressed me in a funeral outfit including a hat with white cotton balls hanging like tears trembling down, which etched itself deeply into my memory. They then put me in the Front Hall that was covered with lengths of white cloth. They wrote elegiac couplets on those cloths that I did not understand; I only saw a lot of disorderly things inscribed there. My mother, also dressed in a white outfit made of crude cloth, was kneeling behind a long black box, and I was deposited next to her. I then cried loud and hard, letting my screams go with all my strength. I was not crying about my fate, I did not have any sense yet about the meaning of this moment as a turning point in my life: From then on, my entire life trajectory was completely changed. I cried because I sensed something in the atmosphere. People removed me from the scene and yet the scene stayed with me for all these decades.
