Scar Literature reconsidered: Yan Geling's novels The Criminal Lu Yanshi and A Woman's Epic

Abstract

This paper reconsiders the political dynamics, social disorder, and personal traumas endured during China's socialist revolutionary times by examining the Chinese American writer Yan Geling's (b. 1958) two Scar Literature novels, The Criminal Lu Yanshi (Lufan Yanshi, 2011) and A Woman's Epic (Yige nuren de shishi, 2006). Employing Hannah Arendt's theory on totalitarianism, this paper investigates how Mao's authoritarian rule transmutes Chinese society into an atomized and individualized society. It will reveal how this totalitarian rule over the Chinese intellectuals, by the brutal use of the re-education system, succeeded in isolating them, which then led to intense feelings of solitude. The objective of this paper is to undo and rectify the historical and cultural “memory loss” caused by the current trend of depoliticizing, commercializing, and sensualizing the socialist revolutionary memories as demonstrated by the televisual postmodern repackaging of the Maoist past to be found in the mediasphere of present-day China, which forgets the horrors of the Cultural Revolution as crimes against the Chinese people.