Reading ethics and the body in Geling Yan’s The Flowers Of War

Abstract

Michel Foucault has written of the body that it is also directly involved in a political field. This understanding of the body and its direct relation to political realms may also illuminate much in the war context of Chinese Resistance against Japanese Invasion (1937–1945) which saw an intense focus in many of the social and political issues in China feeding into historical inquiry on the performance of the human body. In recapturing this history Geling Yan turned out her novella The Flowers of War, rendering a different perspective into the Japanese rape of Nanjing notoriously known as the Nanjing Massacre. As a writer, Yan projects a cogent historical vision, and throughout the novella, she makes particular demands on her readers who must serve as capable interpreters of the historical record of the Nanjing Massacre. In interpreting this work, both writer and readers participate in constituting the cultural currency of the traumatic experience resulting from the Japanese seizure of the city and assigning value to the varied subjectivity Chinese women assume in the narrative. Here we read the body as a realm of meaning and follow the ways the female Chinese characters including the prostitutes of the Qin Huai River brothels teach us to read it. Human behavior is central to most literary texts which demand ethical responses. The Flowers of War is exactly a case in point.