ABSTRACT
Ding Ling and her writing disappeared in April 1933, together, as if an inseparable pair made of a real woman and her imagined sister. The KMT secret police who put her under house arrest saw the value of her literary fame and offered rewarding scenarios whereby she would either go abroad to study or continue to write at home, in return for which she would be expected to “stay away from politics.”2 Ding Ling refused both scenarios and would neither write nor publish from Nanjing, the seat of the KMT government and the capital of Republican China. Such writings and publications, whatever their claimed social orientation, would in her view render the identity of “Chinese woman writer” into a symbolic capital for the prevailing regime as an effective concealment of its policing violence. Here lies a basic feminist message: The inseparability (alongside irreducible distinctions) between the artistic and the actual, the discursive and the physical, the imaginative writing and the material living, which are always bound up with larger contextual issues of social conditions and political connotations. It was literary writing that led Ding Ling to the critical mapping and ethical evaluation of the conditions uninhabitable for her female figures. And yet such conditions in real life worked to render her writings unpublishable and hence what I, by way of evoking a range of contemporary theorizations on modern politics of visibility and disappearance, call unreal.3
Concomitantly, if her imaginative writing gave rise to a critical impetus to change such conditions for society and humanity to develop modern forms, such changes were urgently in need of being made not only as the preconditions for but also as constitutive exponents of her life itself in writing. Ding Ling needed to do something to bring about such changes and, surviving some of the most agonizing hours in her life and several failed attempts, she succeeded in taking the first step.4 After a life-threatening bout of typhoid fever, Ding Ling began to write again. Some months later, on September 18, 1936, with the help of leftist literary friends, Ding Ling escaped from Nanjing and arrived in Shanghai. As the woman who went to meet her at the train station recalls, she
