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Where is my Chineseness? It’s right in my body. (Gao Xingjian, “What Has Exile Given Us?”)
CHINESE writers in exile(1) are often subject to otherizing and racial profiling in their new country. Their writings are invariably condemned to nostalgia, as they are perceived as unwilling or unable to break away from the memory and documentary of what transpired in their home (Chow, 1998, p. 11). Especially if the writers are from the Mainland, they are conveniently cast as either political refugees or freedom fighters. Their Chineseness follows them like a shadow, and they suffer a loss of agency in the face of marketable Orientalism and political journalism. To an extent the reception of Gao Xingjian outside China, unfortunately, has not been able to escape from this rut. Even though the Swedish Academy alleged apoliticality in awarding Gao the Nobel Prize in Literature, Western media like CNN, BBC, Time, Newsweek, etc., all zeroed in on Gao’s dissidence and his suffering days during the Cultural Revolution. In the eyes of the press, it seems that his Chineseness is a requisite to being Gao Xingjian the Nobel laureate. Ethnicity is the easiest way of identification by the self and the other. This begs the questions: Is it possible to shake off one’s Chineseness? And for a writer who claims to have positioned himself in between East and West, what place does Chineseness occupy in his life and art? There is no denying that Gao Xingjian is perhaps the most successful of all the Chinese writers in exile. So how has he, while still using the Chinese language as the medium in most of his works, solved the problem of the clash of cultures? And finally, as Gao himself poses a similar question: “What has exile given him?”
What is the so-called “Chineseness”? Like the concept of “nation”, it is a discursive construct, but it is more in the abstract, as there are no geopolitical borders. Chineseness can be consanguinity, acquired through descent. It can also be said to contain the essence of Chinese civilization and represent the collective consciousness of the Chinese people accumulated throughout history. Or it can refer to an assemblage of the attributes of the Chinese race, or their national characteristics, which of course can lend themselves to be used in racial stereotyping by the other.
The authenticity of Chineseness has always been problematic and a subject of interrogation. Tu Wei-ming has argued for a “cultural China”, in which Chineseness, rather than being monopolized by a geopolitical China (the PRC), can also be authorized by Chinese diasporic communities, their experiences and cultures, thus his conception of “the periphery as the center”:
“While the overseas Chinese may seem forever peripheral to the meaning of being Chinese, they assume an effective role in creatively constructing a new vision of Chineseness that is more in tune with Chinese history and in sympathetic resonance with Chinese culture.” (Tu, 1994, p. 34)
Politics aside, Tu seemingly underlines the periphery’s power to transform, as he unwittingly reinforces the hegemony of a geopolitical China as the center for Chineseness to grow and develop, thus homogenizing the various narratives of the diasporic constituents. On the opposite side, a kind of cultural militancy exists among critics like Rey Chow, who asks the question: “Can we say no to China?” (Chow, 1997, p. 150-151). They criticize Tu Wei-ming for reinforcing the dependence of the periphery on the center and argue against the cultural centrism of a hegemonic China in favor of a “diasporic paradigm.” This is to rescue Chineseness from the dogmatic grand narrative coming out of a geopolitically well-defined China, fixed in content and impervious to outside interventions (Ang, 1998, p. 2; Chow, 1997, p. 147-151). Ien Ang even goes one step further and urges the diasporic subjects to break out of the “prisonhouse of Chineseness” and “construct open-ended and plural ‘post-Chinese’ identities” (Ang, 1998, p. 10-11).
Gao Xingjian has not been at all concerned with China’s hegemony in the constitution of Chineseness. In exile, he has never had any contact with the Chinese government, except when he renounced his membership in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the wake of the Tiananmen Incident in 1989. (In retaliation, the CCP took away his membership and confiscated his house in Beijing.) In the aftermath of that cataclysm, his relationship with the exile Chinese Democratic Movement also soured, as the latter accused him of unsympathetic portrayal of its members in his play Escape (逃亡 Taowang, 1989). It was around this time (1989-1990) that Gao declared that his nostalgia for China was over and confessed that China rarely appeared in his dreams (Gao, 1993c, p. 152). Throughout the early 1990s, he seldom wrote about China or used it as the setting for his writings. In 2003-2004 during the Année de la Chine in France, Gao was given the brush-off and was not invited to any of the official functions. His books and plays are still banned in China, which he expects and accepts. And while living in Paris, he purposely shies away from the circle of local Chinese residents. In steering clear of China and things Chinese, he appears to be leading a life of exile while in exile.
However, he continued to write in Chinese in the 1990s and beyond. When his plays were commissioned by French government agencies, he would first write in French and then translate the scripts into Chinese himself. One may also remember that when Gao delivered his Nobel speech, it was in his native tongue of Chinese, and it was the first time that any Nobel Prize speech was given in Chinese. And a large part of Goran Malmqvist’s citation at the Nobel Prize awarding ceremony was also in Chinese, apparently in deference to Gao’s Chineseness.
Gao Xingjian once described his life in France as “like a fish in water”. In his early days as a little known writer, he supported himself by selling paintings. (He admitted that he was never destitute.) The French have been good to him. Besides commissioning him to write plays, the French government also awarded him the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts des Lettres de la France in 1992. And after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2000, the French welcomed him as one of their own. His plays were staged in various French cities, including Paris (in the prestigious Comédie Française) and Avignon. In 2003, the city of Marseille honored him by declaring the year L’Année Gao, providing him with an office and a secretary for his stay in the city, mounting an art exhibition, and staging his plays The Man Who Questions Death (考问死亡 Kaowen siwang, 2003) and Snow in August (八月雪 Bayue xue, 1997). Recently the French (and people of other nationalities) have fallen in love with his paintings, which are exhibited in and bought by famous galleries and museums. We can enumerate many more things and incidents to show Gao’s total assimilation into French society, and it is certain that he revels in it and enjoys the freedom it affords him.
In 1996, Gao applied for and was granted French citizenship, perhaps out of practical necessity, or perhaps as a subconscious counterbalancing act of de-sinicization. While it may be relatively easy to identify ourselves, how the other categorizes us is out of our control. The Chinese Australian poet and scholar Ouyang Yu laments: “My effort to ‘English’ myself has met with strong resistance from all sorts of people ever since I came here. Even if I wanted to be English, they wouldn’t let me...
[ End of sample | Please purchase the magazine for full articles ]
1. Said defines exile as “anyone prevented from returning home”. He also makes distinctions among exiles, refugees, expatriates, and émigrés:
Exile lives an anomalous and miserable life, with the stigma of being an outsider... The word “refugee” has become a political one, suggesting large herds of innocent and bewildered people requiring urgent international assistance, whereas “exile” carries with it... a touch of solitude and spirituality... Expatriates voluntarily live in an alien country, usually for personal or social reasons... Technically, an emigre is anyone who emigrates to a new country. Choice in the matter is certainly a possibility. (Said 2001: 181)
For our purposes, “exile” is defined rather broadly; i.e., anyone who lives in a foreign country, whether or not he or she is being forced to do so, and there is a permanence to being absent from the home country. The Chinese term 流亡 liuwang has the connotation of “banishment,” which may or may not be the case in modem days.
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Prof. Gilbert Fong graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto. Afterwards, he taught Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Toronto and York University in Canada. He has written many articles on modern and contemporary Chinese literature and literary translation. Presently he is professor at the Department of Translation, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and is heading several research projects, including the history of Hong Kong drama, movie and television subtitling, and translated drama. An acclaimed translator, he translated five plays by Gao Xingjian, winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature, and published them in a collection entitled The Other Shore. He is also editor of the books Studies on Hong Kong Drama and Plays from Hong Kong, and the journal Hong Kong Drama Review. |
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| Issue 7.2 |
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Priceless Friendship
—Matteo Ricci’s Legacy
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