Finding the Way: Chuang Hua's Crossings and Chinese Literary Tradition

Abstract

One evening she visited Dyadya and found in his study a magazine sent from China. On the first page was a poorly reproduced photograph of a farmer's house built up of mud and rushes and roofed in tile standing in the middle of a neatly tilled field. A tree clung by the wall of the house, a line of mountains beyond the fields. With a shock she recognized the landscape, could smell the tilled soil, felt the embrace of the house, climbed the mountains. Unguarded, a seizure of loss struck her. For an instant she could not breathe.... (Chuang Hua 124) The literary style of Crossings like Dyadya's magazine: it transports us China. As Amy Ling observes in foreword the novel, Chuang Hua's fragmented narrative is a collage of dream, nightmare, autobiography, and fantasy. Its prose often elegantly spare, its punctuation and syntax often unconventional. Quotation marks may be omitted; fragments and run-on sentences abound, and characters are referred only by pronoun. Spatial and temporal settings are unspecified, and chronological leaps may occur, even within a single paragraph (1-2). Crossings, Ling argues, America's first modernist (2). Ling suggests that the formal fragmentation of the novel mirrors the fragmentation of Fourth Jane's anguished and rootless existence, an existence redeemed by an coherence of and Jane's acknowledgment of the small but crucial proofs of love, exemplified in the simple tasks of daily -mundane memories of good times spent with Dyadya, and continual engagement in the arts of suitcase-packing, travelling, and cooking (Between Worlds 110). But I want push Ling's suggestions further, investigate whether Chuang Hua's fragmented images are ever meant achieve any coherence, or whether Fourth Jane's remembering, packing, travelling and cooking might be part of a distinctly Chinese tradition and spirituality which Fourth Jane and family, in departing China, have not completely abandoned. Crossings, in a strangely silent and poignant way, full of China. It not only speaks of Asian American dislocation or modernist fragmentation but also whispers of a Chinese literary and philosophical heritage North American readers may initially fail discern. The lyrical prose style of Crossings, its oddly laconic syntactical forms, its parallelisms and juxtaposed images, its Taoist balances of natural progression and regression, of life and death, and its teleological, yet circular disjointed narrative structure - all are characteristics reminiscent of Chinese traditions which sustain Fourth Jane, and which were begun approximately three thousand years before American modernism. I would like examine some of the implications of looking at Crossings exclusively as a modernist text. If Chuang Hua adhering the tenets of modernism as proposed by Euro-American initiators like Flaubert, Eliot, or Pound, must we then regard Crossings as a strictly formalist work? As modernist art frequently claims, does it transcend real - that largely pessimistic realm of meaningless-ness and fragmentation in which the Chinese-American emigre lives? Must it be structured so that a certain artistic coherence or unity, as well as a universally shared (Western?) mythical consciousness prevails over paradox or disunity? Crossings certainly demonstrates the type of disinterested and dispassionate detachment with which the modernists wrote, that quality which T. S. Eliot would have termed the objective correlative. We must constantly remind ourselves of the tremendous emotional pain that Fourth Jane experiences, a pain we seldom glimpse in its rawness, but which takes breath away when, unguarded, a seizure of loss struck her (124). Jane's dashing to the door, so happy be alive, simply greet a complete stranger she met earlier at a Paris bus stop seems, again, suggest isolation and loneliness. Is Chuang Hua's work, then, primarily a formalist commentary on this Asian American sense of displacement in America? …