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PARTISAN REVIEW
tale" recounts her sordid affair with a fifty eight-year old high-ranking
cadre . Her rather daring descriptions (including a graphic, though
brief, account of her first wedding night) created a furor soon after
these pieces were published . Some Party elders voiced their displea–
sure in the newspapers, generating a wave of conservative "public
opinion" that accompanied the court hearings of her divorce case .
This overreaction itself met with criticism from some quarters . But
luckily for the heroine of this little comedy, she succeeded in obtain–
ing her divorce and is now happily remarried. The third installment
of her saga, a short narrative which includes a defense of her case by
her third husband has, however, received its share of moral censure .
Yet even this romantic
scandale
manifests a degree of
humanism. Yu Luojin chose to reveal her emotional and sexual
tribulations in a fashion that reminds one of Ding Ling, China's
foremost woman writer, who had shaken the literary world half a
century ago by a daring confessional story, "Diary of Miss Sophie."
Now acknowledged as one of the first feminist works in modern
Chinese literature, the diary registers the ambivalent emotional and
sexual feelings of the heroine toward two men. Like Miss Sophie, Yu
Luojin in her own autobiographical accounts strives for personal
emancipation from the rigidities of conventional society. But behind
the particular pathos of Yu's story, as well as numerous real-life
stories like hers, is imprinted the memory of the political back–
ground: the radical ideology imposed by the Cultural Revolution
had served to "dehumanize" the human individual by submerging
him in social roles; the Maoist ideal of public collectivity
(gong)
had
eclipsed any consideration of the private self(si). Yu's autobiograph–
ical trilogy, a
cri du couer,
is a plea for privacy and personal happiness .
Thus it can be said that in Chinese literature today, following a
brief phase of political and social expose (1978-80), the dominant
motif has been the preoccupation with self: subjectivity and in–
dividualism have become two salient motifs of the humanistic ethos
enveloping creative writing. Mao's injunction ofYan'an is now stood
on its head. The young writer I talked to that evening in Beijing,
Mr. "Yin," proved to be prophetic.
As Yu Luojin's case illustrates, the most eloquent spokesmen of
this romantic, self-centered humanism are writers now in their thir–
ties or early forties, most of whom had themselves participated ac–
tively as young Red Guards or as their sympathizers in the early
phase of the Cultural Revolution . One such writer is Dai Houying,
now an instructor of Chinese literature in Shanghai. Dai once served
