ABSTRACT
About a century ago, the Chinese reformist KangYouwei (1858— 1927) said: 'Western women do not bind their feet and they are healthy, so they give birth to healthy children. Look at Chinese women: their feet are bound and their bodies frail. They cannot give birth to physically strong and mentally sound sons and daughters' (Lin 1995: 122). 1 The feet-bound, ill-educated woman was seen as the foremost obstacle to progress at the historical juncture when China was turning from its last feudal dynasty towards becoming a modern nation.The liberation of women, therefore, foregrounded the discourse of China's nationalism, in which the term 'mother' is charged with nationalist meaning, whose mythological root can be traced back to Niiwa, the goddess of Chinese genesis. The Chinese discourse of the nation-state could thus be seen as 'feminized' from the start. This paper examines the notion of feminization as a strategy for power formation and offers a reading of Nüwa , a novella by the contemporary Chinese woman writer Xu Kun. The reading will demonstrate the text as a national allegory which, while establishing itself as such, deconstructs the myth of the adorable mother of fertility and the mother of national subjects.
