Bamboo Shoots After the Rain: Contemporary Stories by Women Writers of Taiwan

THREE GENERATIONS OF TAIWAN’S CONTEMPORARY WOMEN WRITERS: A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang

During the last four decades, relative political stability and rapid socioeconomic changes in Taiwan have fostered shifting intellectual trends, contending artistic viewpoints, and remarkable literary production. Particularly since creative activities in the People’s Republic of China were largely stifled by the straitjacket of a narrowly-defined socialist realism before the thaw in 1979 (three years after the official ending of the Cultural Revolution), literature from Taiwan has come to represent the best that has been written in the Chinese language for the greater part of the last forty years.

Linguistically and culturally, postwar Taiwan reflects two intricately mixed heritages: that of Chinese intellectuals on the mainland following the May Fourth Movement of 1919,¹ and a local Taiwanese tradition, with fifty years of colonial experience under Japanese rule. Since 1949, however, dynamic interactions among disparate social and historical realities have resulted in the emergence of a new and distinct cultural identity. Literature created in this period, which has included several major transitions in artistic presuppositions, reflects precisely the complicated evolutionary process of this new identity.

Writers active in Taiwan’s postwar period fall into three age groups generally referred to by critics as generations. The older generation were already adults when the period began in 1949; most of them were born on the mainland and fled to Taiwan when the Communists took over. The middle generation were educated after the war and started their literary careers in the 1960s when the modernist influence was at its height. The younger generation are the postwar baby boomers who were brought up in an increasingly affluent society and became active during the 1980s.

Women writers have been a major presence in these three generations. Several are recognized as leading figures of literary movements, and women’s work constitutes an important part of the canon. The fourteen stories selected in this volume, therefore, may be appropriately regarded as representing the mainstream of postwar fiction from Taiwan. ² There are, however, considerable differences among generations in thematic preference, artistic approach, and attitude toward women’s issues. This introduction, while primarily aiming to situate these writers’ works in the context of Taiwan’s postwar literary history, will also address factors that directly or indirectly account for such differences.

A LITERATURE IN THE PAST TENSE: THE OLDER GENERATION

Taiwan, a Chinese offshore island-province, was colonized by Japan from 1895 until 1945, when it was returned to China. In 1949, when the Chinese Nationalist government lost the civil war to the Communists and hastily retreated to Taiwan from the mainland, Taiwan and several smaller nearby islands became the Republic of China. Mandarin Chinese became the official language, taking the place of Japanese and the Taiwanese dialect. Middle-aged native Taiwanese³ writers suddenly found themselves in the ironic quandary of having to start writing in an unfamiliar language in their mother country. The output was understandably scant, and as a result the literary scene during the 1950s was dominated by immigrant mainlander writers.

These writers were immersed, before the postwar era, in the mainland tradition of Hsin wen-hsüeh, the Western-influenced New Literature written in modern vernacular language since the May Fourth Movement. However, because of the enmity with the People’s Republic of China, this tradition has been partially suppressed in Taiwan. Revolutionary literature and critical realism, dominant in the New Literary tradition before the war, were seriously stigmatized. Most of the New Literature by writers who remained on the mainland was banned.

Partly through coercion from the government and partly through writers’ self-censorship, literature of the older-generation writers in the 1950s and early 1960s was largely privatistic and nonsubversive. The subjective structure of feeling, such as idyllic lyricism and sentimental, romantic idealism, prevailed in both fiction and the literary essay. As the subjective, sentimental style was conventionally regarded as feminine, there was an unusual proliferation of women writers in this period.

Writers of the older generation, both male and female, frequently evoked life on the Chinese mainland before the retreat. A conspicuous difference in their themes, however, is apparent in the female writers’ preoccupation with the fate of women in the early part of the century, which marked a pivotal transition in the history of their emancipation from the feudal system.

China’s traditional family system, which was heavily patriarchal, was challenged along with other feudalist social institutions after the May Fourth Movement. The older generation women writers in Taiwan are among the first to have benefitted from this wave of women’s liberation. They come mostly from upper- or middle-level gentry families and have received Western-style educations. Educated in modern ways of thinking, they were deeply disturbed by the pervasive, institutionalized oppression of women in the immediate family environments where they grew up, by the abuse of bondmaids who were bought as slaves and frequently taken as concubines against their wills, by the fate of country women who were forced out of their families by poverty to serve as amahs or wet nurses in the city, and by the deep animosity between first wives and concubines living in the same household.

Firsthand experience enables these writers to demonstrate penetrating insights into the complex mechanisms by which women of different classes were repressed in feudal society. Lin Hai-yin, for example, has brilliantly illustrated in Candle the intricate family politics involved in women’s struggle for men’s favor under the polygamous system. Probing the deeper recesses of the psychological reality of women at different levels of the family hierarchy, she is able to indict the system without making one particular class the scapegoat, as the antifeudalist, leftist writers of the 1930s frequently did.

Despite their sympathy for oppressed women of the past, the dominant temper of the older-generation women writers was that of moderation, derived from a general satisfaction with the status quo. For instance, both Candle and The Chignon, by Ch’i Chün, are set in a narrative framework that leads the reader to see the events through the perspective of a younger generation which is not bound by the repressive family system that dominates the lives of the stories’ protagonists. This framework functions to remind us that the author’s indictment is directed toward a social institution of a bygone age, a system that already has greatly disintegrated. The purpose of these works is, therefore, not to protest, but to praise the status quo. Looking back at the tremendous disadvantages faced by women in the traditional family reinforces general contentment with the present, when women enjoy the hard-earned freedom and independence denied to those of their parents’ generation.

The conciliatory ethos is particularly pronounced in The Chignon, a story about woman’s suffering couched in a thematic framework of self-enlightenment. The narrator expresses profound sympathy towards her own mother, who has lost her husband’s favor after his marrying a younger and more attractive second wife. However, the daughter’s initial grudge against her mother’s foe is gradually assuaged as she herself grows older and has a deeper understanding of the human condition. When she sees that the interference of an unjust system in individual lives must also be cancelled by time, an enemy common to all humankind, she develops a compassion that transcends personal animosity. Her forgiving understanding resonates with the Buddhist and Taoist teachings of nonaction and unconditional acceptance. The recourse to a persistent strain of traditional Chinese thought to alleviate grief, as well as the culturally preferred feminine trait of passive submission, have made this story exceptionally appealing to Chinese readers. In consonance with the guiding spirit of conformism of their time, Lin Hai-yin and Ch’i Chun have tried to draw readers away from a facile identification of the oppressors in an evil social system. Instead of provoking action, they seem to be more interested in imparting wisdom and inspiring compassion.

Writers of the older generation also frequently seem to today’s readers to be politically conservative. Many of them, having directly experienced the turbulence of war, are genuinely appreciative of Taiwan’s current stability, and their allegiance to the Nationalist government is often accompanied by a staunch anti-communist sentiment. This stance is made explicit in P‘an Jen-mu’s A Pair of Socks with Love. This story was written in the 1980s, but the rationale on which the author bases her attack on communism is clearly a product of the Cold War mentality most prevalent in the 1950s. In her condemnation of the horrifying irrationality of radical politics rampant in the Cultural Revolution, P’an’s humanitarian indignation is both powerful and legitimate. On the other hand, however, the story’s espousal of a fatalistic, passive attitude toward social change and its uncritical endorsement of feudalist ideology have some problematic qualities.

Eileen Chang, who settled in the United States instead of Taiwan after leaving China, is also considered to be a rightist, conservative writer. Her novels Rice-Sprout Song and Naked Earth are often categorized as anti-communist literature. And, since her fiction in general portrays lives of the aristocratic and bourgeois classes, it has been frequently dismissed by left-wing critics as decadent and reactionary. However, compared to literature of the older-generation writers residing in Taiwan during the 1950s, who were constrained by the conformist atmosphere there, Chang’s fiction has a keener subversive edge; its overall temper is more poignant, and its criticism more uncompromising. For example, in the story included here, Shame, Amah!, the working-class woman Ah Nee is portrayed both as a proud individual with a delicate sense of dignity that conflicts with her demeaning position as a Westerner’s servant, and as someone whose very sense of value is shaped by the class and gender ideology of the oppressive system of which she is a part. The story thus offers not only trenchant criticism of the snobbery and materialism of the semicolonial society in Shanghai of the 1940s, but also insight into the socially constructed nature of individual subjectivity.

Finally, in reading works of the older-generation, one must be aware that the authors have adopted drastically different literary conventions. The dramatic presentations of Shame, Amah! and Candle are typical of the Western-influenced modern short story. This genre easily incorporates counterperspectives through the manipulation of narrative voice and often articulates multilayered meanings through the use of symbols. The theme of Candle, for example, is greatly enriched by the powerful image of the candle, which simultaneously evokes the notions of burning agony and self-consumption. On the other hand, the narrative mode of The Chignon and A Pair of Socks with Love bears all of the formal traits of the traditional Chinese lyrical essay, which has the author’s subjectivity, rather than the plot, as its main organizing principle. The author’s lament over the vicissitudes of life at the end of The Chignon follows a time-honored literary convention and thus reinforces the traditional world view expressed in this work.

QUEST FOR THE UNIVERSAL, CHALLENGING BOUNDARIES: THE MIDDLE GENERATION

The middle generation consists of both native Taiwanese and mainlanders who were in their early childhood or teens in 1949. Coming of age in the 1960s, writers of this generation joined the country’s other intellectuals in emulation of Western high culture. They unquestionably favored the artistic idiom of elitist literary modernism and consciously rejected the sentimental, lyrical, Victorian inclinations of their older contemporaries. Inspired by avant-garde literature of the West and the stylish trend of formalism, they devoted tremendous energy to technical experiments. The accomplishments of women writers in this respect have been widely recognized. Two of the stories included in this volume, Shih Shu-ch’ing’s The Ritual of the Clay Idol and Li Ang’s Flower Season, for instance, were not chosen for their realistic portraits of juvenile psychology and witchcraft in the society of Taiwan, but rather for the authors’ exuberant imaginations and pioneering efforts in creating innovative, modernist works of literature in the Chinese language. Flower Season provides a good example of the technique of constructing the story’s symbolic structure through an extraneously derived referential framework, so that events in the story appear to revolve around universal patterns of human experience. The girl’s bicycle trip is organized around important junctures in a life cycle and can be read as symbolically depicting initiation. The Ritual of the Clay Idol, a poetic piece of vividly rendered sensuous details, is an even more daring, if somewhat obscure, exploration of the fantastic structure of human imagination.

Having established themselves as part of the canon, the middle-generation women writers also tend to perceive themselves as enlightened, liberal, mainstream intellectuals. They have enjoyed an educational opportunity equal to men’s, which is constitutionally protected in postwar Taiwan, and have furthermore procured for themselves an elite status by overcoming various hidden forms of discrimination perpetuated in the family and society at large. They zealously assimilate orthodox values and standards of the intellectual community (values and standards that are often defined from a male perspective), and deliberately dissociate themselves from negative images culturally linked with femininity. Li Ang, for example, chose a masculine, or at least neutral, pen-name (ang implies uprightness and pride). Ou-yang Tzu stresses objectivity in the craft of fiction and considers herself a neutral, rational, and to some extent detached observer of humanity.

A persistent concern in Ou-yang Tzu’s short stories is the boundary between normal and abnormal human behavior, which clearly shows the influence of Enlightenment rationality and the modern science of psychology on her work. As epitomized by Vase, her stories often deal with how the self-entrapment of men and women, a result of egoistic obsession, blinds them to the objective truth of reality and eventually leads to alienation or even self-destruction. While one could regard the portrait of the jealous husband in Vase as a feminist protest against male dominance in gender relations, that is clearly not the conscious intention of the author. Another story by Ou-yang, The Bewitched Woman, for example, portrays a woman, who, in a state of uncontrollable passion, is capable of ignoble behavior equal to that of the man in Vase.

Like Vase, Hsi Hsi’s A Woman Like Me is primarily concerned with permanent human conditions. The story should not be read simply as a realistic portrait of a young Chinese undertaker whose unconventional line of work frightens off most of her suitors. The plot is clearly fabricated (in fact it seems to anticipate the more radical fabrications of Hsi Hsi’s later, postmodernist works) to dramatize a philosophical comment on life: the narrator’s modest but insistent adherence to her principle of true courage in life ultimately becomes a testimonial to the hypocrisy, cowardice, and self-deception of her friends and suitors, who are the normal people in the world’s opinion. The story’s questioning of commonly held ethical values, its occasional touches of morbid humor, and its allusions to existential absurdity are reminiscent of Western existentialist literature. A common feature of this literary subgenre is the placement of characters in a fictitious situation of extreme aberrance in order to test the strength of human will.

So far I have focused on the middle-generation writers’ artistic endeavor to probe into the universal dimension of human reality, and their shared inclination to downplay the potential of literature to represent contemporary social reality. Such tendencies are certainly derived from Western modernist aesthetics. Yet the very fact that these writers have chosen such an aesthetic approach—that many of them have avoided historical specificities in their works—is also partly attributable to the general plight of Taiwan’s intellectuals in the 1960s. Possessing only a conditional freedom of expression, these writers were unable, and sometimes unwilling, to identify directly the sociopolitical causes of a stagnant, suffocating cultural climate. Some of them channeled their iconoclastic instincts into radical literary experimentation, surreptitiously undermining the authoritarian social control. Others, having adopted a rationalistic, scientific approach to conventional knowledge, were skeptical of established ethical and social norms and tried to penetrate more deeply into the human psyche. Ultimately, it is this kind of redirected intellectual commitment that distinguishes the modernist writers from the older generation, who often reflect traditional morality, and also from the younger generation, who are generally less interested in soul-searching inner quests.

Finally, although the middle-generation women writers have not consciously dealt with women’s issues from a feminist perspective (at least in their modernist phase), but instead strive for an idealized intellectual neutrality toward gender issues, the thematic choices of their literature often show a deep awareness of constraints upon women in modern society. For instance, in questioning established social norms, a common method is through challenging the conventional code of sexual behavior, indirectly asserting female sexuality in the treatment of extramarital relationships. Although, as a rule, they do not directly confront the issue of gender inequality, these modernist writers support with great fervor liberal, humanist ideals that value self-development.

MIRRORS OF TRADITIONAL CULTURE RETAINED IN A CHANGING SOCIETY: THE YOUNGER GENERATION

Although Taiwan’s modernist literary movement attracted many avid followers, it also greatly incensed groups of native critics and writers. In the summer of 1977, there arose a heated discussion known as the Nativist Literary Debate, which summed up the deeply factionalized, politically inspired critical discourses on literature that had been going on since the early part of the decade.

While the Nativists ostensibly anchored their movement in the realm of literature, their real goal was to challenge the existing order of Taiwan’s postwar society as a whole. The movement arose from the cumulative frustrations of Taiwan’s native intellectuals brought up after the war, catalyzed by adverse developments in the country’s sociopolitical arena since the late 1960s. In the international scene, within a decade Taiwan experienced a series of diplomatic losses—the worst among them its expulsion from the United Nations and U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s 1971 visit to the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan’s official enemy. Domestically, the country’s accelerated process of industrialization generated social problems, an increasing number of political groups vocalized demands for redistribution of power between mainlanders and native Taiwanese, and a worldwide energy crisis further aggravated the economic imbalances of a newly capitalist society.

As literary modernism is a product of the capitalist West, it became a convenient scapegoat for the Nativist critics’ anti-Western sentiment, and modernist writers were blamed for being collaborators in foreign cultural imperialism. Although Nativists’ literary criticism was fraught with oversimplifications and dogmatism, its calling attention to the conflict between indigenous and foreign cultural forms had great impact. As a result, realistic stories set in rural Taiwan and written in a mixed language of Taiwanese dialect and Mandarin thrived, and the formalist, introspective, ahistorical approach of the modernists became out of fashion.

By the mid-1980s, however, it was clear that urban expansion under capitalism had become a reality in Taiwan. Remarkable success in the process of modernization and an economic miracle have transformed Taiwan into a prosperous, fast-growing, exporting country. With the formation of an opposition party and the termination of martial law between 1986 and 1988, a new political era began. The country is making great strides toward a fuller realization of democracy in spite of continual tension between it and the People’s Republic of China, and its long-standing internal conflict between mainlanders and native Taiwanese.

In the increasingly cosmopolitan milieu, the transnational nature of cultural forms has rendered clear-cut opposition between the foreign and the indigenous untenable. Artistic approaches within this new cultural context are characteristically pluralistic, and consumerism and the mass media have assumed powerful roles.

The younger generation of writers has established a close alliance with the mass media. As their works are frequently best-sellers and are adapted into film scripts and television series, many younger writers have begun to write with an eye on monetary reward. Subject to demands of the market, these writers have adopted a more popular stance and have avoided the elitist obscurantism of the modernists, even though the best of them clearly are adept at the sophisticated techniques introduced in the modernist literary movement. At the same time, while most do not subscribe to the Nativists’ heavy-handed political agenda, they have positively responded to the Nativists’ call for greater social consciousness. Compared to works of their predecessors, the fiction of the younger generation reflects much more faithfully current attitudes and values in contemporary Taiwan.

Particularly noteworthy is that the society’s new openness and the influence of the international feminist movement have had an impact on progressive intellectuals. The early 1970s may be regarded as the pioneering period of the women’s movement in postwar Taiwan. Lü Hsiu-lien, a young intellectual who studied law in the United States, returned in 1971 and launched a number of programs advocating gender equality. While Lü’s many accomplishments in improving women’s welfare met with general approval, her effort to raise women’s consciousness concerning their rights provoked stubborn resistance from conservatives. Her 1977 book New Feminism was banned six months after its publication and Lü herself was arrested in 1980 for political activism.

Despite these setbacks, ideas introduced by Lü were disseminated among young intellectuals, and the groundwork for continued endeavors to promote women’s self-development was laid. When Li Yuan-chen, a college professor of Chinese literature, started a magazine called Awakening in 1982, the women’s movement in Taiwan entered a new stage. Feminist concepts endorsed in this magazine, as well as by an increasing number of academic feminists, have received greater support from the media and a better educated, more liberal-minded public than did similar ideas ten years before. The passing of the Eugenics Protection Law in 1984, which made abortion legally available if pregnancy might damage a woman’s mental health or family life, was a landmark in the advancement of women’s rights in Taiwan.

The younger generation of women writers, however, have not responded in unison to these waves of thought. Positions taken by these writers range from one end of the political spectrum to the other. On the one hand, there was the bold feminist exposure, in Li Ang’s 1984 novella The Butcher’s Wife, of the extremely exploitive nature of traditional marriage and of women whose repressed sexuality makes them accomplices in society’s persecution of other women. On the other hand, there are also ultraconservative writers, such as Hsiao Li-hung, who celebrate, with a tone of nostalgia, traditional virtues of female self-sacrifice and self-denial in protest against the growing utilitarianism of Taiwan’s urban life.

Their conscious reactions to feminist thinking notwithstanding, the younger-generation women writers have unquestionably made more direct contributions than did their predecessors to our understanding of Taiwan’s prevailing gender ideology as well as women’s changing status, simply because they do not evade problems relevant to contemporary social development. Many of the common issues in their literature—such as late marriage, divorce, extramarital relationships, aging, prostitution, and juvenile delinquency—play significant roles in women’s lives. A comparison of the work of Hsiao Sa and Yuan Ch‘iung-ch’iung illustrates two different artistic approaches found in the younger generation by two writers whose responses to feminism are dissimilar.

The literary approach of Hsiao Sa may be characterized as that of journalistic realism. With their matter-of-fact style (well exemplified by The Aftermath of the Death of a Junior High Coed), Hsiao’s stories often read like dramatized case histories from Time or Newsweek. Using typical characters selected from various social strata to illustrate conflicting human values and the intricate interplay of social forces, she identifies emergent problems and spells out their sociological implications with laudable perceptiveness.

The messages in Yuan Ch‘iung-ch’iung’s stories, however, are often not as directly presented. For instance, the interaction between the two protagonists in The Mulberry Sea, who have responded differently to prescribed social roles, subtly illustrates some larger ideological forces that are still controlling lives of modern Chinese women, attributable to the Neo-Confucianist repression of female sexuality. Yet, unlike that found in Hsiao Sa’s work, Yüan’s critical vision is not a direct outcome of her conscious didactic intentions. In fact, as indicated by her other writings, Yüan’s position on feminist issues tends to be rather conservative, or at best nonpartisan. She has written an essay criticizing women who are forced to neglect their young children in order to hold a job as inexcusably irresponsible. On other occasions, she has explicitly expressed her skepticism toward what she sees as the opportunist, fashion-seeking tendency in Taiwan’s burgeoning feminist movement. It is therefore solely because of her primary allegiance to experience—to presenting truthful images of experience through art—that Yuan has through the power of good literature offered valuable, penetrating insights into culturally-specific forms of social domination of women.

The social transformation in Taiwan in the last few decades has been both rapid and pervasive, and on the surface, traditional, feudalistic, and patriarchal values are quickly being superseded by the values of a modern, capitalist society. Nevertheless, one should not conclude that feudalist gender ideology has completely lost its grip on ordinary people’s way of thinking. The most valuable treatment of women’s issues by the younger-generation women writers is in their common focus on the traditional culture retained in modern society. In a society like Taiwan’s, which still tends to ascribe glory to traditional values, social consensus almost always favors conventional roles for women. Thus, upon reading their stories one discovers that the most inhibiting social constraints are usually the most invisible, as women tend to internalize social demands in order to safeguard community approval. The awakening effect of such a discovery would need to be fully realized in order to change fundamentally the self-perception of modern Chinese women in Taiwan.

THE OLDER GENERATION: LOOKING BACK THROUGH WOMEN’S EYES

SHAME, AMAH!

Eileen Chang

Translated by the Author

BORN IN 1921 in Shanghai of a distinguished family, Eileen Chang (Chang Ai-ling) studied at the University of Hong Kong until the outbreak of World War II. She lived in Shanghai from 1942 to 1952 and in Hong Kong from 1952 to 1955. During those years, she produced a significant body of short fiction and two novels which have placed her among the most important women writers in Chinese. Although she has never lived in Taiwan, her work has exerted wide influence on younger women writers there. C. T. Hsia, in his History of Modern Chinese Fiction, states that her best known work, The Golden Cangue, is the greatest novelette in the history of Chinese literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961, p. 398). Two of her novels, Rice-Sprout Song (1954, Hong Kong) and Naked Earth (1954, Hong Kong), and several short stories have been translated into English.⁴ Her other works include The Embittered Woman (1968, novel), Half a Lifetime’s Romance (1969, novel), the collection Short Stories of Chang Ai-ling (1954, Hong Kong; 1968, Taipei), Floating Words (1968, essays), and Chang’s Outlook (1977, essays). Eileen Chang now lives in the United States. Shame, Amah! was first published in Chinese in 1944. (ACC)

SHAME, AMAH! belongs to Eileen Chang’s brilliant series of literary portraits of China’s largest port city, Shanghai, well known for its materialism and cosmopolitan life style. The story represents its author at her best with its caustic sarcasm, freezing irony, and grim vision of reality—all of which contribute to the mood of desolation, a hallmark of Chang’s fiction.

The arduous, straitened life of Ah Nee, who occupies the lower end of Shanghai’s social ladder, is aptly suggested by the dreary landscape described in the opening passage: all back yards, rear windows, back alleys, from which even Heaven had turned its face away. The numerous obstacles which are inevitable parts of Ah Nee’s everyday life, from the crowded train to the rain that prevents her from meeting her husband, are constant entrapments, to which she responds with passivity and wordless submission, fully aware of the futility of resistance.

It is quickly apparent that not a shred of hope for real improvement exists in Ah Nee’s life. The story itself, however, goes on to reveal Ah Nee’s nurturing of repressed aspirations and her arduous efforts to maintain a sense of respectability despite her underclass status. For example, Ah Nee has made every effort to simulate the ideal of the traditional, normal family. When her husband comes on a rare visit, she slips automatically into the subservient, attentive wifely role, demonstrating in every possible manner that he is the focus of her attention, while the reader is aware that the couple is not actually married. Or, whereas Ah Nee feels the need to adopt a son and send him to school, we know she is barely able to support herself financially.

Shame, Amah! is also about a working woman’s struggle to survive with dignity in a demeaning servant-master relationship with her foreign male employer, an interaction complicated by imperialism and sexism. Ah Nee apparently enjoys a sense of superiority over Chinese women with poor English pronunciation, and is defensive about her master in front of his girlfriends despite her real contempt for him. Even though her delicate sense of dignity is unappreciated, one cannot but be impressed by her resourceful, imaginative, and complex character, fully manifested in her acute sensitivity to the subtle variations in status and manners in relation to class and ethnicity.

Ah Nee develops this propensity to discriminate, however, both because it is essential for survival as a low-status worker and because she feels it elevates her in the oppressive system of which she is a part. She, like many other people in her society, is both a victim of and an accomplice in the system’s denial of humanity. The author’s artistic portrayal of people unconsciously enacting their social roles powerfully dramatizes the historical reality of her time. (SYC)

Ah Nee climbed ten stories holding her son Shin Fa by the hand. From the back of the tall apartment building the city spread like a wilderness, a rubble of gray and rust-red roofs, all backyards, rear windows, back alleys. Even Heaven had turned its face away, the sky blank and sunless. Nobody knew what it was thinking of. The Moon Festival had passed and still so hot. Many sounds floated up from below: cars and buses, carpets being beaten, school bells ringing, carpenters sawing and hammering, motors humming, but all very vague, Heaven paying no attention to any of it, as if all were just wind past its ears.

The next door neighbor’s amah was eating rice gruel on the back veranda with her children. She made her mouth a beak to blow on the scalding gruel, frowning on the snow-white mush. Sweat pasted a wisp of bobbed hair on her yellow cheek.

Morning, Younger Sister, she called out to Ah Nee and her children cried, Morning, Aunt!

Ah Nee and her son chirped back, Elder Sister! Aunt! Elder Brother!

Late today, Ah Nee said. The cursed trams were so crowded I couldn’t get out at my stop. The foreigner must have rung.

Isn’t this weather crazy, so hot, the next door amah said.

Really crazy. Almost the Ninth Moon now, Ah Nee said.

She hastily let herself in. The Master did not have dinner at home last night and had let her go home two hours early, so she guessed he would be especially difficult today to make up for it. She lifted the lid off the big brown water jar embossed with pale yellow dragons, filled the kettle and put it on the gas range. Water was rationed because of the war. She glanced at herself in the chipped little purse mirror pasted on the wall. Her hair was not too mussed. She had her back hair twisted into little braids until they disappeared, and the front was worn high and tight so it needed combing only every three or four days. She looked neat in her white blouse and black pajama pants. She put on her apron. Being tiny she had to step on a stool to reach for the coffee on the shelf.

Shin Fa! Now where are you running to? Only a moment left and your mind still on playing! Feed, you little devil, and go to school. When she yelled, her thin, pretty face was like a stepmother’s.

Shin Fa brought a stool outside and set his plate on it, put his arms around a biscuit can, brought it out and sat on it waiting quietly with a sweet expression on his round face with slit eyes.

Ah Nee took out half a loaf of French bread.