Chinese 503 (OSU)

Ling Shuhua (1904-1990)

I. Biography

-born 1904 to a wealthy Cantonese family residing in Beijing
-daughter of father's fourth concubine (out of six)
-father appointed to be Mayor of Beijing by the Manchu court
-she grew up in luxury, living in a huge traditional compound in the city
-educated in classical letters; studied painting and became a very traditional style painter
-during the New Culture movement she was in middle-school and not sympathetic to the aims of the movement; actually scorned the baihua poetry of Hu Shi and Bing Xin
-in English department of Yenching U. (mid-20s) begins to writer stories in the vernacular, which causes a rift with her father
-marries Chen Yuan (Chen Xiying, editor of Xiandai pinglun (Modern critique), conservative critic of the Anglo-American school; frequently attacked by Lu Xun, ie. over his support for the suppression of a student movement at Beijing Nuzi Shifan daxue; later professor of English at Wuhan Daxue, 1929-46)
-as campus wife at Wuhan, Ling was active in writing short stories and editing a journal called Wuhan wenyi
-Chen appointed to UNESCO; husband and wife leave London where she becomes involved with literary types like Sackville-West, Andre Maurois...
-visiting professor of Chinese at Nanyang U. in Singapore (1954-60)
-Chen Yuan dies in 1970; she continues to live in London
-in the 1990s, Hong Ying wrote a novel, translated into English as K-The Art of Love, allegedly based on the life of Ling Shuhua and an illicit affair she had with Julian Bell, nephew of Virginia Woolf; Ling Shuhua's daughter sued Hong in what became a highly publicized case in China

II. Collections

A. Hua zhi si (The temple of flowers, 1928)
B. Nuren (Women, 1930)
C. Xiao ge'erliang (Little brothers, 1935)
D. Ling Shuhua xiaoshuo xuan (Ling Shuhua's selected stories) (1960)
E. Ancient Melodies (1953); English language autobiography; intro by Sackville-West
F. Aishanlu mengying (Dreams from a mountain-lover's studio, 1960); essays

"The Night of Mid-Autumn Festival" (1928)

Intro:

-one of the early women writers to emerge in the May Fourth period
-read at the time, but later not taken as a serious writer by those leftist oriented literary critics for whom literature of social engagement (like that of Lu Xun) was exalted; her fiction generally concerned the subjective lives of its female characters and with the domestic sphere was belittle as superficial and trivial; so even in the modern period women writer had a hard time of it
-yet we can find that even in its subjectivism, it concern with the domestic, it speaks about the objective historical problems of women's oppression, patriarchy

Questions

1. What is the story and around what is its plot organized?

2. What is the importance of the festival settings

3. In some sense, though written by a woman, this doesn't seem like much of a feminist work. How

4. Yet in other ways it surely has a feminist side to it in revealing the complex nature of patriarchy and oppression? How?