ABSTRACT
Ming Ying was 30-years-old and already had a bachelor’s degree from a university in Beijing, but English was a challenge for her. When she read Christa Wolf’s 1968 novel Nachdenken über Christa T. in English translation in my modern European literature class, she was struck by the ways—elegant and inelegant—that people try to function ethically within the tremendous limitations imposed upon them, how one finds an authentic but fluid self set adrift by shifting outside forces. Huiwen Zhang terms such moments of pause and reflection “prompted transreading.” For her paper for this unit of my course, Ming Ying juxtaposed Wolf’s novel to Chen Ran’s 1992 novella Sunshine Between the Lips, emphasizing the transgressive nature of fin-de-siècle Chinese writing, particularly by women. Ming Ying’s “transreading” of Wolf’s and Chen’s respective versions of the German Democratic Republic and the People’s Republic of China raised a number of questions for her. What are the relationships between the individual and the collective in terms of agency, freedom, and fulfillment? How do these authors fit into their national milieux? How do we understand the pasts and futures of our countries, native and adopted, and our own roles in those chronotopes? Xiaomei Chen argues in Occidentalism: A Theory of Counter-Discourse in Post-Mao China that, since 1978, there has been prevalent in China an unremittingly favorable depiction of Western culture and a negative characterization of Chinese culture. Ming Ying, however, muddied both approaches—the pro-Western approach and the pro-Chinese one—not seeing either as utopian, but critiquing the dystopic globalization of each, wondering whether women are better able to self-define in one system, or the other, or both, or neither.
