The pane of sorrow: Public uses of personal grief in modern China

Daedalus

Volumn 125, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 119-148

  Schwarcz, Vera ^a  

^a WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0001389194     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (56)

1. Cynthia Ozick, Memory and Metaphor: Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 279.
2. Veena Das, "Moral Orientations to Suffering: Legitimation, Power and Healing," in Lincoln C. Chen, Arthur Kleinman, and Norma C. Ware, eds., Health and Social Change in International Perspective (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Series on Population and International Health, 1994), 163.
3. Helen F. Siu and Zelda Stern, eds., Mao's Harvest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 16.
4. For a fuller discussion of Gu Cheng's generation of poets - the so-called "wounded" generation that came to public attention in the late 1970s - see Vera Schwarcz, "In the Shadow of the Red Sun: A New Generation of Chinese Writers," Asian Review (Fall 1989): 4-16.
5. It is interesting to note that many of the same terms that are used to dull the edge of suffering in China are also used in Japan. See Margaret Lock's discussion of bunmeibo ("diseases of civilization") in Margaret Lock, "Flawed Jewels and National Dis/Order: Narratives on Adolescent Dissent in Japan," The Journal of Psychohistory 18 (4) (Spring 1991): 511-17.
6. Gu Cheng, Bulin's Last Will (Hong Kong: Nineties Press, 1989).
7. Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narrative (New York: Basic Books, 1988).
8. For a fuller discussion of the way in which Chinese theories of language can affect (and change) Western thought, see Chad Hansen, "Chinese Ideographs and Western Ideas," The Journal of Asian Studies 52 (2) (May 1933): 373-99.
9. My translation of Li Yu's "Yu Mei Ren," in Kuei Yeh Chi, ed. Wu-chih Liu and Irving Yuching Lo (Sunflower Splendor) (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1976), 133.
10. Han Yu, "Song Meng Dongye Xu" (A dedication in honor of Meng Dongye), quoted in Qian Zhongshu, "Poetry as a Vehicle of Grief," Renditions (Spring & Autumn 1984): 29.
11. I am indebted to Professor Yü Ying-shih of Princeton University for extended conversations about the sources of personal and public memory in traditional China. It was Professor Yü who first drew my attention to the late third-century Taoist classic Jin Shu. The Taoist injunction against memory as the focus of disturbing emotion is also echoed in Confucian admonitions on filial piety that require one to maintain mental well-being - if not for one's own sake, at least for one's parents'. According to Han Confucians, as well as Taoists, to dwell on the painful past is to arouse distressing, dangerous, and - in the long run - unfilial emotions.
12. For a fuller discussion of the term "Wen hua geming" during the late 1910s, see Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1986), 94-144.
13. Chen Duxiu, "Rensheng wenti faduan" (The origins of the question of human existence), Xin qingnian (New Youth) (February 1918): 101.
14. Lu Xun, Quan Ji (The Collected Works of Lu Xun) (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chuban she, 1982), vol. I, 416-17.
15. Lu Xun, "Dao nian Wei Suyuan," in Quan Ji (The Collected Works of Lu Xun) Ibid., vol IV, 67.
16. Jack Belden, China Shakes the World (New York: Pelican Books, 1973), 389.
17. Jack Belden, China Shakes the World Ibid., 390.
18. Jiwei Ci, Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution: From Utopianism to Hedonism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 82-83.
19. Benjamin Blech, The Secret of Hebrew Words (Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson Inc., 1991), 90.
20. Adolph Rudnicki, Ascent to Heaven, trans. H. C. Stevens (London: Dennis Dobson, Ltd., 1951), 23.
21. This story and its assumptions about Jewish memory are discussed further by Sidra Ezrahi in "The Holocaust Writer and the Lamentation Tradition," Confronting the Holocaust, ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1978), 134-39.
22. I am greatly indebted to Professor Stewart Miller from the University of Connecticut for drawing my attention to distinctively Jewish conceptualizations of suffering, especially in Louis Jacobs, "The Beraita On Sufferings in B. Berakhot 5a b," Studies in Aggadah, Targum and Jewish Liturgy (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1981).
23. John Edgar McFayden, The Problem of Pain: A Study in the Book of Job (London: Jame, Clarke & Co., 1909), 259.
24. Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 497.
25. David Rosenberg, Job Speaks (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1977), 25.
26. In contrast to China, with its waves of war and revolution and often forcible expressions of private grief in the public domain, Japan has maintained its reticence about suffering. Even with the rich Buddhist vocabulary available to talk about the problem of pain (both individual and social), people in Japan, according to Margaret Lock, "do not share suffering by speaking about it or spewing it out - on the contrary one swallows it down. But, one can relive it in memory by reading and reflecting on the sorrowful writings of others, on poetry and reconstructed historical accounts all of which individuals can draw from privately to help them swallow the pain." Personal communication, 29 August 1994.
27. Gu Cheng, "Ziwo jieshao" (Resume), translated in Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience, ed. G. Barme and J. Minford (New York: Hill and Wang, 1988), 238.
28. Gu Gong "The Two Generations," in Siu and Stern, eds., Mao's Harvest, 14.
29. This passage from Book VIII of the Analects is translated and discussed at length in Lawrence Schneider, The Madman of Ch'u (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1986), 17-21.
30. Rubie Watson, ed., Memory, History and Opposition (Santa Fe, N.Mex.: New Mexico School of American Research Press, 1994), 7.
31. This specific translation of Qu Yuan's much studied Li Sao comes from Lyman P. Van Slyke, Yangtze: Nature, History and the River (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company Inc., 1988), 135.
32. For a further discussion of Qian Xuanton's self-appellation yigu ("doubter of antiquity") as well as the entire New Culture Movement see Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment, 25-35.
33. Arthur Hummel, "Introduction," in The Autobiography of a Chinese Historian (Leyden: E. J. Brill Ltd., 1931), vii. In this introduction, Hummel suggests that the closest parallel in modern Western writing to the Chinese tradition of objective autobiography may be found in Thoreau's "Walden."
34. Arthur Hummel, " in The Autobiography of a Chinese Historian Ibid., 8.
35. Arthur Hummel, " in The Autobiography of a Chinese Historian Ibid., 174.
36. Zhu Guanqian, Beiju xinli xue (The psychology of tragedy) (Anhui: Jiaoyu chuban she, 1989), 433-34.
37. This encounter with Zhu Guanqian is described in Vera Schwarcz, Long Road Home: A China Journal (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984), 242-44.
38. ZHu Guanqian, "Gei qingnian de shier fengxin" (Twelve letters to youth), Zhu Guanqian quanji (Complete Works of Zhu Guanqian) (Anhui: Jiaoyu chuban she, 1987), vol. I, 55.
39. Ji Xianlin, "Ta shixian le shengming de jiazhi" (He realized the value of life), Zhu Guanqian jinian ji (Commemorating Zhu Guanqian) (Anhui: Jiaoyu chuban she, 1987), 28-29.
40. This wordplay came up several times during my interview with Professor Ji Xianlin on 2 November 1993 at his home on the campus of Beijing University.
41. Das, "Moral Orientations to Suffering," 139.
42. Interview with Ji Xianlin, 2 November 1993.
43. Hummel, The Autobiography of a Chinese Historian, 183.
44. Hummel, The Autobiography of a Chinese Historian, Ibid., 177.
45. This image of social life as a suffocating "net" appears in much of the writing of the "wounded" generation of former Red Guards and is discussed in Jonathan Spence, The Gate of Heavenly Peace (New York: The Viking Press, 1981), 370.
46. Qian, "Poetry as a Vehicle of Grief," 21.
47. Qian Zhongshu, "Preface" to Yang Jiang, A Cadre School Life (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing Co., 1982).
48. Qian, "Poetry as Vehicle for Grief," 32.
49. Qian, "Poetry as Vehicle for Grief," Ibid., 35.
50. Rosenberg, Job Speaks, 39, 61, 78. Job's insight into difficulties of broken speech are also mirrored in a poem by Ellen Bryant Voight. As an American writer, her voice is not scarred by the Jewish poet's religious outrage nor by the historical burdens of Qian Zhongshu. Yet Voight comes to the same conclusion: we must not confuse real suffering with the beauty and depth it imparts to the voice of those who endured its humiliations: This wasn't the music of pain. Pain has no music, pain is a story: it starts, Eurydice was taken from the fields. She did not sing - you cannot sing in hell - but in that viscous dark she heard the song flung like a rope into the crater of hell.
51. Ellen Bryant Voight, "Song and Story," The Best American Poetry 1993 (New York: Collier Book, 1993), 212.
52. Gu Cheng, "Ganjue" (Feeling), translated in Siu and Stern, eds., Mao's Harvest, 40.
53. Gu Cheng talked to me about his life and writing in New Zealand during a 1985 symposium on poetry held at Asia Society in New York. See Schwarcz, "In the Shadow of the Red Sun," 4-5.
54. Gu Xiang, "Gu Cheng, Xie Ye zuihou de rizi" (The last days of Gu Cheng and Xie Ye), Jiushi niandai (The Nineties) (May 1994): 80. I am very grateful to Professor Kim-Ya Tam of Trinity College for drawing to my attention these three essays by Gu Cheng's older sister.
55. Jiushi niandai (July 1994): 103.
56. Simon Leys, The Burning Forest (New York: Holt, Rineholdt and Winston, 1984), 223.