ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 dealt with the collective spatial experience of men organized in a military troop after losing their base. In this chapter I will examine the individual journeys of women searching for a home(land). My premise is that travel from one place to another is a spatial practice. In the 1930s and 1940s, Chinese intellectuals were involved in a series of nationwide migrations due to the Japanese invasion and internecine struggles between the Nationalists and Communists. The most visible of these migrations occurred when China’s three leading universities (Peking, Tsinghua, and Nankai) were moved to Kunming and united into a single institution to avoid being bombed by the Japanese. Of the thousands of intellectuals and writers who traveled extensively when China was in crisis, I focus on two female writers-Xiao Hong and Ding Ling-as examples of the interrelation between individuals and changing space. In the epigraph above, Hélène Cixous stresses the essential role of travel, the experience of displacement and wandering, in writing. I argue that Xiao Hong’s and Ding Ling’s journeys interconnected with their writings in both form and content, and their works convey both their sense and their sensibilities of locality and dislocation. Despite their different degrees of engagement with revolution, both Xiao Hong’s and Ding Ling’s works show an identification with the national consciousness. This chapter highlights the relationship between individual journeys, revolutionary acts (or the lack of revolutionary acts, in the case of Xiao Hong), and writings as a complement to the collective migration, glorified revolution, and grand narrative of the Long March. Besides the textual analysis based on their mobility and writings, I
draw two maps of the life routes of Xiao Hong and Ding Ling in order to illustrate their spatial trajectories. Xiao Hong (1911-42), a prominent writer with a powerful realistic yet lyric portrayal of Chinese life in the 1930s and 1940s, moved from Manchuria to Shandong, to Shanghai, to Wuhan, to Shaanxi, back to Wuhan, to Chongqing, and ultimately passed away at 30 in Hong Kong (Figure 3.1). Ding Ling (1904-86), a leading leftist writer, led a legendary life amid the vicissitudes of Chinese politics for nearly half a century, a trajectory interwoven with the different periods of China’s revolution and politics. By creating a dialogue between their wandering lives and writings, I seek to understand how each female writer articulates her own experience of locality and dislocation and perception of space in relation to the fate of the nation. Xiao Hong’s works demonstrate an obsessive concern with the loss of a nation on the macro level, represented by a personal longing to return home. In contrast, Ding Ling embraced revolution throughout her life, but her writings, especially in the private genres, including diary and memoir, reveal the polemics of her revolutionary agenda. The geographical sites where she engaged in the revolution-Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Yan’an, Hebei, and Heilongjiang-constitute a mini-topographical history of women’s experience in the tumultuous Chinese revolution (Figure 3.2).
