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On an April evening in 1998, a chance meeting brought the three of us together in a hotel room somewhere in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We sat around chatting and enjoying a rare moment of free conversation among peers. As the topics of our conversation flowed from one to another, we stumbled onto one that would eventually result in this collection of intellectual memoirs.2
The idea of such a collection formed when we began talking about existing memoirs, those written in English by Chinese and about the authors’ experiences in the Mao era, especially during the Cultural Revolution. Because we happened to be talking about gender and women’s issues in China, we naturally focused our attention on such well-known works as Wild Swans and Red Azalea. We wondered why we had often felt the representations in these memoirs and their popular reception in the West to be problematic. 3 Surely we did not expect a few memoirs to tell everybody’s story, but what bothered us was not so much that they did not tell our stories (which no one should or would expect), but that they were being treated as if they had precisely done that. As we went on, more questions were asked. If (urban) Chinese women’s (and men’s) experiences in the Mao era are in fact diverse, what is it about the existing memoirs that do not seem to indicate and speak to this kind of divergence?4 If it is because these memoirs have in many ways helped reinforce a simplistic view of modern and recent Chinese history, in what ways does one begin to challenge and complicate such a simplistic view?5 And more importantly, does it matter or is it historically significant to remember that during the Mao era the majority of (urban) Chinese women lived their lives beyond the dichotomy of being either a victim or a victimizer, beyond the assumptions that they were sexually repressed, and beyond a monolithic view of what their lives must have been like? If so, what would be the significance?
Along with these questions, an idea emerged: Perhaps it was time for us to give our own experiences a serious look, collectively. At the end of this accidental meeting, we decided to organize a group of Chinese women who grew up during the Mao era and who were currently working and studying in the United States. We wanted to find out, via an online discussion, if there were shared sentiments among them and if there was interest in our proposed project.
Much to our delight and encouragement, our inquiry met with active and enthusiastic responses. Most called it “a fascinating topic” that they themselves had been thinking about for some time. One participant stated: “My impulse to write about my experiences in the Mao era began when I studied the U.S. women’s history in the first few years of my graduate program. The sharp contrast between the social background against which I grew up and that of the U.S. women could not but call into question the ‘total negation’ of the Mao era. Over the years, I have tried to explore a way to express my reflections on the Mao era. I do not think that I have completed this process, which is why I am highly interested in doing a project which may help me think through a lot of issues.” Another echoed this way: “Thanks for inviting me to participate in this evolving and important project. I have personally been thinking about the issues for a long time and also been wondering what would be the most viable means to tackle and represent them. A collective effort is certainly most productive, as it could present to our readers that it was a rather pervasive and culturally embedded past that needs to be articulated in light of the present.”
Together, the respondents echoed one sentiment: there is a need to tell stories that present a less clear-cut picture of an era and the people—in this case, women—who grew up in it. Over the years many of us have carried out dialogues with people around us about our past experiences, about what they mean for us, and, sometimes inevitably, about how to understand them in relation to the era in which we grew up and, for that matter, in relation to the time and place where we find ourselves today. We decided that perhaps it was time we raised and discussed all of this in a more public manner. We wanted to do so in a format that most of us had so far consciously resisted: memoir writing. Even though on an empirical level our experiences vary and, given the limited space of our project, we would be able to represent only a tiny fraction of them (not to mention those of millions of other Chinese women out there), we wanted to take advantage of our intellectual positions negotiated and evolved not just through our study in the United States but also, and more importantly, through the questions we felt compelled to ask in our study. As women who grew up during the Mao era, we differ in age and regional and family backgrounds; and while we currently work, study, and live in the United States, we also differ in the fields in which we have received Ph.D. degrees (literature, history, sociology, women’s studies, and cinema studies). Together, however, we occupy a unique position— both as individuals who grew up in the Mao era and as intellectuals who have accumulated multilayered cross-cultural perspectives and who share a willingness to explore some difficult issues. One such difficult issue is our interest in responding to the ways in which the relationship between the social condition, women’s lives, and women’s positions in the Mao era has been understood both in China and in the West.
This position, of course, when perceived from the perspective informed by the now all-too-familiar postcolonial debate, consists of more than the dual aspects identified here. Our experiences coincide with postcolonial histories that consist of, among others, the Mao era (as one kind of postcolonial context) and the post-Mao era (as another), when China moved into the larger framework of the neocolonial globalization context. And it is within the latter context that we embarked on our journeys traversing to and in the West. It is also within this context that we feel compelled to confront the historical implications of our Mao era experiences. On this level, the desire to tell our stories is, once again, to challenge the existing paradigm or framework of understanding the part of history in which we grew up, and, to echo one of our contributors quoted earlier, to articulate “a rather pervasive and culturally embedded past . . . in light of the present.”
Even though we did not always agree with one another, our lively discussion helped shape one thing on which we all agreed: in telling our stories, our purpose is not to produce yet another set of exotic stories that cater to the expectations of Western readers, that is, political campaigns, political persecutions, sexual repression, and so forth.6 Not only because we do not necessarily have the kind of stories (or want to tell them in the way) that will meet some of the existing expectations in the West, but also, and more importantly, because we do not share some of the assumptions embedded in such expectations. Instead, we want to explore the necessarily more complex dimensions of issues raised and debated in recent scholarship on how to assess and understand twentieth-century China and, especially, the Mao era. Given the specificity of our project, we want to weigh in on the question of historical representation, exploring the relationship between “experience” and “history” and tackling the conundrum of why some people’s memories seem to be treated as more legitimate than others. As such, we perceive our collection as a necessary intervention that starts with a set of seemingly simple questions: what does it mean to have grown up in the Mao era? What does it mean to have grown up as a girl and woman in the Mao era? How are we to understand the less clear-cut and seemingly mundane daily existence of our early lives, and how are we to do so in conjunction with the existing views and interpretations of the Mao era?
Along this line of questioning, we hope to rethink and reexamine the underexplored dimensions of that time and space—its ironies, paradoxes, and various contradictions—that were mani- fested in our lives in various social and personal relationships, in the political and popular culture that we were exposed to, the “high/low” culture that lurked somewhere around the corner of our homes and schools, the familial settings, as well as other domains within and without the state control. We want to factor in the unstable nature of such terms as qingnian (youth), funü (woman/ women), nan nu pingdeng (equality between men and women), lixiang (ideals), and the contradictions within, especially how they played out in daily life within a state-controlled context while often being subverted at the same time. Through exploring the various intersections between “official ideology” and “lived experience,” we want our stories not only to “enrich and complicate” the existing understanding of that era but also to open further discussion of the Mao era and, by extension, its relationship to China’s centurylong quest for modernity. Our intention, in other words, is not only to argue for the values of individual experiences but also to signify profound, complex social changes whose implications still await further exploration.
Needless to say, writing narratives with so much intended is a daunting task. Throughout we ran into implicit and explicit challenges to the central theme of this collective endeavor and the difficult questions regarding memoir writing, representations, and history.