A New Literary History of Modern China by David Der-Wei Wang

Author:David Der-Wei Wang
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Yi-Tsi Mei Feuerwerker, Ideology, Power, Text: Self-Representation and the Peasant “Other” in Modern Chinese Literature (Stanford, CA, 1998). Zhao Shuli, Zhao Shuli Quanji, 5 vols. (Taiyuan, China, 1999).

HUI JIANG

1944 · NOVEMBER 14

Mei Niang’s novel Crabs is honored with the Greater East Asia Literary Award at the Third Greater East Asian Writers’ Congress in Tokyo.

The North Has Mei Niang

On November 14, 1944, the career of twenty-four-year-old writer Mei Niang (1920–2013) was marked by an event that cast a fateful shadow over her life. On that day, at the Third Greater East Asian Writers’ Congress, a trans-Asian literary association operated under Japanese auspices, her novel Crabs was honored with the Greater East Asia Literary Award. For that distinction, and a cash prize reputedly worth 20,000 yen, Mei Niang traveled from Beijing (then named Beiping) to Nanjing, a city traumatized by the Japanese military. It was a signal honor for the young writer, bestowed with terrible timing in a location haunted by the horrors of Japanese atrocities. Within months of her celebration, Japan’s empire was swept from China, leaving in its wake a deeply divided people. In the following decades, those who had achieved success during the Japanese occupation and remained in China, including Mei Niang, saw their lives torn apart as the Communist Revolution expelled foreign imperialists and turned the Chinese on each other. As a young adult, under Japanese dominion, Mei Niang forged a career criticizing patriarchy and socioeconomic decline. For that, she was persecuted for three decades. But Mei Niang survived, and in 1997 she was officially recognized as one of modern China’s one hundred most important writers.

Mei Niang, the most popular pen name of Sun Jiarui, was born in Vladivostok on December 24, 1920, and grew up in a wealthy household in Changchun. Her mother, a concubine, was hounded to suicide by her father’s wife, leaving the girl to be raised by a cold step-mother and doting father; Sun’s chosen pen name, Mei Niang, is a homonym for “motherless.” From childhood, she aspired to a career in writing, hoping to emulate authors who had a formative influence on her, including Bing Xin (1900–1999), Lord Byron (1788–1824), and Maksim Gorky (1868–1936). Following the Japanese invasion in 1931, her father, a wealthy industrialist, rejected offers of high-ranking positions and moved his family south of the Great Wall. Economic pressures soon forced their return to Changchun. Back home in the newly formed Manchukuo, Mei Niang resumed middle school.

The year 1936 was momentous for Mei Niang. At the age of sixteen, her first volume of short stories, A Young Lady’s Collection, was published. Shortly thereafter, Mei Niang’s father died and she was sent to Japan to study. There, she fell in love with Chinese student Liu Longguang (1916–1949), who worked at Tokyo’s Chinese-language bookstore, where they enjoyed access to literature that was difficult to acquire at home. In 1938, Mei Niang returned to Changchun (then renamed Xinjing [New capital]) and Liu followed in 1939, whereupon they lived together in defiance of her family’s attempt to arrange her marriage.

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