Mulberry and Peach (33 page)

Throughout
Mulberry and Peach
Nieh meticulously alludes to specific events or issues in recent Chinese history. In part one, for example, the stranded boat represents the ship of state at a touch-and-go moment of suspension between survival and destruction, weakened after years of devastating war. The Refugee Student complains about the (Nationalist) government's indifference to the common people's welfare; he plans to start a signature campaign, hold a news conference, and buy a protest ad in the newspaper “as soon as we get to Chungking” (32). He also dreams of a rescue helicopter to airlift the passengers out of the gorge. The Refugee Student's faith in
the trappings of the modern nation-state and in the promise of technology is typical of generations of Chinese intellectuals dating back to the late Ch'ing Dynasty. Informing the young man's indignant speeches are memories of national humiliation and an obsession with finding ways to save China. (“Mr. Democracy” and “Mr. Science,” for example, were two of the most touted panaceas in the 1910s and 1920s.) Juxtaposed against the student's naïve optimism are the old man's obdurate Confucian orthodoxy, the illiterate Peach-flower Woman's indifference to politics, and the hardworking Boatman's fatalism and quiet strength. The passengers constitute a microcosm of the contending social forces and perspectives present as China desperately attempts to shed its imperial and colonial past.

In part two the revelations made by Mrs. Shen (the mother of Chia-kang, Mulberry's fiance) in besieged Beijing may also be read as a historical allegory. For years Chia-kang has been presented as the legitimate heir of the once-wealthy Shen family. His older brother, Chia-ch'ing, the son of a family maid, Phoenix, and thus considered a bastard, has run away from home to join the Communist guerrillas; it is rumored that he is returning to Beijing as one of the victors. Mrs. Shen now reveals that “heir” and “bastard” are reversed. After the maid had given birth to Chia-ch'ing, Mrs. Shen, infertile thus far, feared her status threatened: in the traditional Chinese family, a woman's power was dependent upon her ability to produce a male child. (Although both Nationalists and Communists made efforts to “free” women from such rigidly prescribed roles, such as passing laws to ban concubinage, this sexism still persists today.) Mrs. Shen sought help at a Taoist temple; Chia-kang, the product of a tryst between her and a Taoist priest, was then presented as the legitimate heir of the Shen family. (Though Chia-ch'ing was also born of an extramarital affair, Chia-kang, not sharing Mr. Shen's bloodline, is the “real bastard” by patriarchal standards.) Mrs. Shen then murdered Phoenix to secure her own position, and Chia-ch'ing was driven out. With Mrs. Shen's deathbed confession, all the sins of the old order are brought out into the open.

While this appalling tale is comprehensible on its own as an expose of the patriarchal family's atrocities, readers aware of the Communist-Nationalist conflict will find in it an allegory of the Communist Revolution. The oppressed and dispossessed of old China, whom Chia-ch'ing symbolizes, are implied by Nieh to be the legitimate future rulers of China—but only at this specific juncture in history,
when the Communists had yet to commit their purges. Anyone familiar with the Communists' ideological campaigns would hear ominous, ironic notes in Mrs. Shen's expressed hope that Chia-ch'ing would protect them on the basis of family ties. In one Communist political movement after another, up through the Cultural Revolution, parent and child, friend and friend, were encouraged to turn against each other in the name of party loyalty. Rather than showing leniency, the returning Chia-ch ing might well be the first to persecute his family.

The political allusions in part three of
Mulberry and Peach
are so powerful that, upon its first appearance in Taiwan, the novel was banned in mid-serialization. Chia-kang's making his way south to Taiwan obviously parallels the Nationalist regime's flight from the mainland. His embezzlement is a reference to the untold wealth amassed through corruption by Chiang Kai-shek and those in his circle of power—a corruption which impoverished the mass of the people of China. The Nationalists created and clung to the mythic conceit that they were the temporarily displaced representative of all China, recouping strength for the final restoration. In the name of anti-Communism, Chiang Kai-shek ruled his island refuge by martial law. Nieh responds to this history and myth with a macabre tale of chronic imprisonment in an attic punctuated by surprise security checks from the police. In this cramped space, people are afraid to speak, resort to communicating with their hands, and can't stand up straight. The younger generation grows up distorted: “Eight-year-old Sang-wa can stand up. But she doesn't want to. She wants to imitate the grown-ups crawling on the floor” (118).

Although part four is geographically set in the United States, it is clear that the protagonist can never escape from the nightmare that is modern Chinese history. Part of that history is the Cold War: the Immigration Service agent's interrogation of Peach obsessively revolves around the question of whether she and her family members and contacts are Communist or not. From Peach's answers about her family background, it is clear to anyone familiar with recent Chinese history that, as a former warlord's daughter and thus a target of class struggle, the protagonist would never have been able to survive under communism, even though she herself has been powerless and victimized by the “old society.”
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But to the Nationalists, as the wife of a fugitive, Peach is guilty by association: in a police state the individual has no rights under law. Thus her only alternative is to extricate herself from this Left-Right dilemma—ironically, by
applying for permanent residency in America, a supporter of Taiwan. In the meantime, she is stateless—a wanderer cut off from homeland, family, and community, a representative of the Chinese in diaspora.

In this context, the question of what Peach eventually does with her unborn baby—abortion? adoption by the professor's American wife? adoption by a robotic/neurotic Chinese American couple oblivious to China's tragedy? raising the baby by herself?—also becomes a question of whether the Chinese people will survive, and if so, on what terms.

But reading
Mulberry and Peach
as historical allegory is just one way to approach the text. In fact, if one believes that the writer's creative genius always exceeds her ability to give analytic accounts of her work, one would find
Mulberry and Peach
to be a radically uncontainable text. Each scene, each dialog exchange, is laden with interpretive possibilities, some of them mutually incompatible.
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A reading frame centered on China actually obscures one of the most important facts about the novel: namely, that the embodiment of the fate of the Chinese people is a woman. The customary pattern in modern Chinese literature is to assign this role to a male, often a male intellectual.
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Certainly,
Mulberry and Peach
constitutes a conspicuous exception to this rule; yet many critics seem to have found this incidental. Once the protagonist's female gender is taken seriously, however, widely received views on the meaning of the novel will be subverted, and other aspects of Hualing Nieh's vision—notably feminist ones—begin to emerge.
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In my feminist reading of
Mulberry and Peach,
the interests of nation and the interests of women are, more often than not, at odds with each other, and the crises of nation are typically a contest between patriarchal structures in which women have no say.
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A striking image from Refugee Student's story about his family (in part one) sets forth the uneasy relationship between the lot of modern Chinese women and the historical injuries suffered by the modern Chinese nation-state(s):

This image suggests that when the nation is intact along with all its cultural controls, the wives' lives are “dark and gloomy.” When upheavals like Japan's imperialist attack destroy China's existing social structures—in particular, the polygamist patriarchal family underwritten by Confucianism—and maim with indiscriminate fury, they also expel oppressed woman from their prison/shelter and expose them to “sunlight.” This is, to say the least, an unorthodox view of what Pai Hsien-yung terms “the fate of modern China in all its tragic complexity.”
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Thus when Nieh makes Mulberry/Peach the symbol of that condition, a contradiction is inevitably introduced: if an oppressed “part” is made to stand for the abstract whole, sooner or later the seams will show. And to a preternaturally observant artist like Nieh, the seams are everywhere.

To take just a few more examples, in part one, when the Refugee Student advocates a signature campaign to protest government incompetence, Peach-flower Woman responds by saying that she cannot even write her own name. How this comes to be is explained by the old man when he recites a Confucian adage, “‘It's a great virtue for a woman to be without talent”' (33): the Chinese woman has traditionally been excluded from the nation's political structure through imposed illiteracy. Though change has begun—Mulberry and Lao-Shih are students—the Chinese woman still commonly serves a metaphorical function for the nation. When the Refugee Student tries to rally his fellow passengers with a stirring anti-Japanese song, he hoists up one of Peach-flower Woman's blouses, which the wind blows into a suggestive shape like ample breasts. This image recalls Cynthia Enloe's analysis of how women, especially their sexuality, have typically been appropriated to support the nation-state at the expense of their own voices and welfare.
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As part one comes to a close with the news of Chinese victory over Japan, Nieh leaves us with a remarkable vignette of three generations of men clinging to, and gratifying themselves on, Peach-flower Woman's reclining body: her baby sucking noisily at her breast, and the Refugee Student and the old man at her feet, each smoking a cigarette stuck between her toes (55).

In another inspired image from part one, from the old man's
story about the Nanking Massacre, a Chinese man and a naked Japanese soldier, a would-be rapist, are shown tussling absurdly over a Chinese woman (the Chinese man's newly wedded wife). The Chinese man yanks at the Japanese soldier's tiny penis while the Japanese soldier bites the Chinese man's neck, but the fight is broken up by a German member of the International Relief Committee in Nazi uniform, whose sleeve insignia sends the Japanese soldier fleeing (43—44). Thus the grand narratives of nation, stories capable of justifying world wars and rousing armies of patriots to action, are reduced to a farcical scuffle between inept and insecure men—men whose power is derived from accoutrements rather than from any inherent strength. National dramas are enacted upon the woman's body, but the woman in whose name men fight fades from the old man's narration. (She eventually becomes crazed from repeated trauma.)

This episode is echoed in part four, when Teng, a young Chinese graduate student, tells Peach of a casual sexual encounter with an American girl. When the American girl exclaims, “‘This little Chinaman on me has a huge prick,”' Teng suddenly goes limp (198). This association between China's national honor and a Chinese man's sexual performance not only makes a mockery of both “nationalism” and “masculinity” but raises a stark, fundamental question: Such conceptions of “nationalism” and “masculinity” are possible only by defining woman as lack; so in a world where political power and the phallus are conflated, is there any room for women at all?

With clinical precision, Nieh details the process by which sexism assumes a neutral, innocent face: male desire is projected onto women, who are then held responsible for the welfare of the world. Woman is bifurcated into virgin and whore; victim and victimizer are reversed. Hence Mulberry's unshakable sense of guilt: over and over, just to survive, she has to strike the only bargain allowed women—selling her body. But doing so automatically brands her as a ruthless seducer who sucks the strength out of men and causes the ruin of the world. Even her own young daughter has internalized this misogynistic view. When Mulberry makes daily excursions out of the attic to serve as the house owner's mistress/servant, in exchange for him hiding her family, Sang-wa understands her as “[going] outside every night . . . to eat people” (142). In truth, Mulberry is not predator but prey. Read through a feminist lens, then, the protagonist's split into Mulberry and Peach is a vivid literalization of the impossible split inflicted by society upon women.

Though Nieh indicts Chinese sexism and patriarchy with passion,
it would be a serious mistake to assume that she finds adoption of Western values a solution to the protagonist's problems. As indicated above, there is little reason to believe that part four, set in America, constitutes an exception to the novel's gestalt of confinement followed by spurious liberation. By opening part one with references to the anti-Vietnam War movement, Nieh makes clear the continuity between the United States's involvement in the Vietnam War and other imperialistic /colonial wars like those plaguing China's past. She seems to take issue with some aspects of the feminism of the 1960s as espoused by middle-class American women: specifically, the aforementioned scene between Teng and the American woman suggests that Nieh may find its focus on female sexual gratification and personal fulfillment to be superficial and insensitive to questions of racial and cultural oppression. Without historical understanding, the sexually “emancipated” American woman is complicit in the history that has made “Chinaman” a term of insult.
Mulberry and Peach
is a text that resists being used to “prove” an ahistorical, universal sisterhood, or to define the “Third World Woman” solely through her difference.“
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