Mulberry and Peach (34 page)

One of Peach's graffiti in the prologue hints at an ideal of universal androgyny: “When women grow beards / and men bear children / the world will be at peace” (4). But to the extent that this vision is formulated in biological rather than cultural terms, one must consider Nieh's sentiments on such possibilities to be pessimistic. Such an impression is confirmed by the lesbian character Lao-shih, runaway Mulberry's traveling companion, in part one. A strong woman who scorns the title of “Miss,” Lao-shih understands the workings of patriarchy and empathizes with Mulberry's pain. At a carnivalesque moment during a game of dice, Lao-shih, the winner, dresses Refugee Student in Peach-flower Woman's clothes and makes him perform the “Flower Drum Song.” (One line in his well-known ditty makes fun of unbound feet, which in old China were considered undesirable in women.) But in the end Refugee Student grabs Lao-shih, forces a kiss on her so that she is “choking and can't speak,” and all but rapes her (54). Perhaps it is no accident that Lao-shih literally means “old history”—what symbolic gender destabilizations cannot overcome.

Mulberry and Peach
is full of subversive potential, threatening political regimes Left and Right as well as cultural values East and
West. It is not surprising that it has had a complicated publication history, one that resonates uncannily with the physical and psychological traversals experienced by the protagonist, which in turn echo the author's own ordeals—partly in biographical detail but mainly in spirit.“
¹⁹

Born in Wuhan in Hubei Province in 1925, Hualing Nieh was uprooted numerous times during her formative years as a result of the unremitting Nationalist-Communist strife and the Japanese invasion and occupation. Her father was a minor Nationalist official killed when Communist troops on the Long March passed by the area under his control. Upon the fall of Wuhan to the Japanese in 1938, Nieh left her family at the young age of fourteen to attend high school and then college, first in Szechuan (Sichuan) Province and then in Nanking. In 1948, on the eve of the Communist victory, she fled with her mother and siblings to Taiwan. There, Nieh became the literary editor of a dissident publication,
The Free China Fortnightly
. In 1960 her colleagues were arrested and the journal closed down for criticizing Chiang Kai-Shek's repressive rule; Nieh had a firsthand taste of Nationalist “White Terror.”
²⁰
After teaching literature in Taiwan for a few years, Nieh went into exile: hired by the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, she left Taiwan in 1964 and has lived in the United States since then.
Mulberry and Peach
was written while she was with the International Writing Program, which she and her husband, Paul Engle, founded at the University of Iowa in 1967. Many of her experiences were incorporated into the novel—artistically transformed, of course.

Over the decades the International Writing Program has supported numerous writers from all over the world. In 1976 over three hundred writers nominated Nieh and Engle for the Nobel Peace Prize. Nieh is the author of nearly twenty books (novels, short stories, essays, literary criticism, translations) and the recipient of several honorary doctorates.

Sangqing yu Taohong
, the Chinese original of
Mulberry and Peach
, was first serialized in Taiwan's
United Daily News
in the early 1970s. Upon the serialization of part three, however, the work had drawn such vicious political and moralistic attacks—for satire of the Nationalist regime and for “pornographic” accounts of Peach's sex life—that the editors were forced to discontinue the serialization. The ban on this material was not lifted until after the death of Chiang Ching-kuo, Chiang Kai-shek's son and successor, in 1988.
²¹
It was left to Hong Kong, then a British colony caught in but not committed
to either side of the Nationalist-Communist conflict, to provide the relative neutrality needed for
Sangqing yu Taohong
to first see the light of day in its entirety. Hong Kong's
Ming Pao Monthly
, a journal for intellectuals, took up the serialization, and the novel finally appeared in book form in 1976 (published by Youlian chubanshe).
²²
The second edition was published by Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe in Beijing in 1980, after the resumption of diplomatic relations between the People's Republic of China and the United States. But this edition was a drastically expurgated version, with a number of changes, including the deletion of part four, initiated by the press but acceded to by the author.
²³
(The United States setting in part four was deemed of little interest to mainland Chinese readers; the sexual content, inappropriate.) On the mainland, the unexpurgated version at last appeared in 1989 and again in 1995.
²⁴

In 1981 the English translation by Jane Parish Yang and Linda Lappin,
Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China
, was simultaneously published by New World Press in Beijing and Sino Publishing Company in New York. Nieh added some clarifications to aid the English-language reader, such as the subtitle and dramatis personae-type lists introducing the main characters in each part.
²⁵
But unbeknownst to the author at the time, New World Press made some changes to the typescript (despite reassurances to the author that the project, which was intended for non-Chinese audiences, was politically “safe”).
²⁶
The altered version became available in Great Britain from The Women's Press of London in 1986. In 1988 Beacon Press of Boston, using the typescript of the uncut translation, reissued
Mulberry and Peach
as part of its Asian Voices series (which included titles by both Asian and Asian American authors). This first U.S. publication earned the novel an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, which honors important works that advance cultural understanding. Beacon later dropped the title due to unsatisfactory sales. This Feminist Press edition follows the Beacon edition and is unexpurgated.

As this brief publication history shows,
Mulberry and Peach
is not a single book but an unstable textual complex that traverses multiple national, political, linguistic, and cultural borders. Each component of this textual complex, each episode in its reception, says something about the historical and cultural forces that have shaped this work.

Nieh's investment in “Chineseness” is unquestionable: her desire to see her book published on the Chinese mainland was strong
enough to override protectiveness toward her creation, leading her to reluctantly agree to the expurgation of part four. The fact that Nieh writes about things familiar to her—and that there are no direct portrayals of Communists in the novel—may have enabled some mainland critics to construct
Mulberry and Peach
as pro-People's Republic of China, if somewhat short on revolutionary consciousness. Yet the unauthorized alterations made in the English translation suggest the ways in which Nieh's novel questions, and perhaps threatens, Communist authority even as it critiques the Nationalists. Through its tense complexity
Mulberry and Peach
contests ideological and nationalist appropriation.

The terms of discussion in this afterword have certainly been shaped by the Anglo-American feminist context of this publication, the centrality of translation in such a context, and by my position in the American academic world as a biliterate scholar of Asian American literature. But much lies beyond the scope of this essay. One would do well to remember that English is only one of the several languages into which
Mulberry and Peach
has been translated, and that readers elsewhere have their own standards of relevance and salience. Eastern European readers, for example, have found Nieh's novel to be an especially compelling account of totalitarianism and exile.
²⁷

An important revelation of
Mulberry and Peach'
s history is the importance of institutional mediations in determining access to and reception of a literary work, whether negatively (e.g., through outright censorship, editorial pressures, or commercial constraints) or positively (e.g., through sales promotion, teaching, library collections). A book unread is a book shorn of influence. The only way to render its due to a literary work as rich as
Mulberry and Peach
is to ensure that it is kept available, and that dialogs about it continue among readers from diverse perspectives and diverse places. In this, the Feminist Press's decision to reprint the novel will play an invaluable role.

 

Sau-ling Cynthia Wong
Sunnyvale, California
January 1998

NOTES

1
In addition to English,
Mulberry and Peach
has been translated in full into Croatian, Dutch, Hungarian, and Korean, while sections of the novel have been translated into Polish. The author's name sometimes appears with family name first, in the Chinese manner, transliterated as Nieh Hualing or Nie Hualing.

2
I am indebted to Jeannie Chiu for pointing out such Gothic elements in her dissertation-in-progress, “Uncanny Doubles: Nationalism and Humanism in Twentieth-Century Chinese American Literature and African American Literature,” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley).

3
This list is based on the discussion of classification in Kirk Denton's review of
Mulberry and Peach in Journal of the Chinese Language Teacher's Association
24, no. 2 (1989): 135-38; on consultations with colleagues who have taught the book (Norma Alarcon, Genaro Padilla, Shu-mei Shih); and on interpretations of the novel made by some of the graduate students who worked with me at the University of California, Berkeley.

4
Each of Nieh's chosen historical moments looks back to the past and forward into the future. Such pivoting allows Nieh to suggest enormous temporal and spatial reach, without being overburdened by the details of how the protagonist gets from point A to point B. In fact the gaps between the novel's formal parts, which skip some key events in Chinese history and time periods in the protagonist's development, are pregnant with meaning—and take on a special eloquence. These textual gaps also resist any easy interpretation of the connections between such events; the reader is challenged to forge connections between events, including piecing together the horrors that Mulberry/Peach has had to endure in order to escape her previous predicament.

5
For transliterations of Chinese names, versions that I judge to be most familiar to the contemporary American reader are given first, followed by alternative versions.

6
Yandi and Huangdi, associated with the elements of fire and earth respectively, are mythical early emperors of China. Yandi is usually credited with creating culture; Huangdi, with territorial conquest. The phrase
yanhuang zisun
(descendants of Yan and Huang) refers to the Chinese people. I thank Yum Tong Siu for his help with this note.

7
This is where the reviled Orientalist practice of translating Chinese names—Lotus Blossom and the like—would actually be more helpful!

8
See, for example, Nieh, “Langzi de beige” (The wanderer's lament), preface to
Sangqing yu Taohong
(Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe), 1-7.

9
The phrase “obsession with China” is critic C. T. Hsia's from “Obsession with China,”
A History of Modern Chinese Fiction
(New Haven: Yale University Press,
1961), 533-54. The best known reading of
Mulberry and Peach
in this vein is offered by Pai Hsien-yung, himself a celebrated writer, in “The Wandering Chinese: The Theme of Exile in Taiwan Fiction,”
Iowa Review
7, nos. 2 & 3 (1976): 205-12. The Chinese original probably influenced every subsequent Chinese critic on Nieh's novel, including, for example, virtually all the authors in
Nie Hualing yanjiu zhuanji
(Anthology of studies of Nieh Hualing), eds. Li Kailing and Chen Zhongshu (n.p.: Hubei jiaoyu chubanshe, 1990); and Shiao-ling Yu, “The Themes of Exile and Identity Crisis in Nieh Hualing's Fiction,” in
Nativism Overseas: Contemporary Chinese Women Writers
, ed. Hsin-sheng C. Kao (New York: State University of New York Press, 1993), 127-56. Leo Ou-fan Lee, “On the Margins of the Chinese Discourse: Some Personal Thoughts on the Cultural Meaning of the Periphery,” in
The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today
, ed. Tu Wei-ming (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 221-38, departs from Pai's orientation by suggesting that a location ex-centric to China, such as that occupied by Peach in the United States, could actually help “decipher—and in a way to deconstruct—the master narrative of Chinese history” (230).

10
The translation of the title is mine; the original is “Langzi de beige” (see note 8).

11
“Old society” is a Communist phrase referring to Chinese society before “Liberation,” that is, before 1949.

12
Due to the particular emphases of this afterword, I will not discuss a variety of approaches, including “Asian American readings,” which stress the historicity of the protagonist's United States experiences and downplay the novel's Chinese elements. My understanding of
Mulberry and Peach
has certainly been influenced by the readings presented in dissertation chapters by Tina Chen, Jeannie Chiu, and Viet Thanh Nguyen, all at the University of California Berkeley, and by Monica Chiu at Emory University, as well as by comments made in class discussion by Eliza Noh, Marie Lo, Sandy Oh. I thank them for sharing their insights with me.

13
Some noted examples are Ah Q in Lu Hsun's (Lu Xun's) “The Story of Ah Q,” Wu Hanhun in Pai Hsien-yung's “Death in Chicago,” and Mou Tianlei in Yu Lihua's
Again the Palm Trees
.