A Voice Silenced and Heard: Negotiations and Transactions Across Boundaries in Ling Shuhua's English Memoirs

Abstract

Among all Chinese women writers of the 1920s and 1930s, Ling Shuhua (1900–1990) is probably one of the most frequently anthologized. However, due to a marginalization of modern Chinese women writers in the study of Chinese literature, up to now scholars have not paid sufficient attention to her writings. Aggravating the difficulty of producing a comprehensive assessment of her writing career is Ling’s use of both Chinese and English in her writings, her low-profile and peripatetic lifestyle, and the antileftist political stand of her husband, Chen Yuan (1896–1970), who wrote under the pen name Xiying. Though recent years have witnessed the republication of many of her works in China, in particular her short stories, few scholars have paid attention to her 1953 English memoirs Ancient Melodies (published under the name Su Hua Ling Chen). In fact, these memoirs did not appear in China and in Chinese until 1994 when the Overseas Chinese Press in Beijing published them. It is sad and ironic that decades after she disappeared from China’s literary scene, she had to rely on her identity as an overseas Chinese to secure the publication of her memoirs in her homeland. In the English-speaking world, the past two decades have seen only a few English studies on Ling Shuhua. These include Rey Chow’s 1988 essay “Virtuous Transactions: A Reading of Three Stories by Ling Shuhua” and half of a chapter in Shu-mei Shih’s 2001 monograph The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937. Chow’s essay is inspiring in that it provides us with a new way of looking at modern Chinese women writers and their very act of writing. At the outset of her essay, Chow attacks commonly adopted criteria for evaluating