A blatant request for help1:
I’m teaching my 20th century China course in the Spring, and book order season is upon us already! Last time I taught it, I used Jung Chang’s Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, with some success. But I’m not sure if I want to use it again. The discussion of her biography of Mao raised questions about the reliability of her earlier work — some implicit, some explicit — and I haven’t seen much to sway me one way or the other since then.
I am going to have to think about how I’m going to address the Mao question, too, but first and foremost I’d like to know if there’s anything out there which I could use with my students to address the basic questions of family, women, gender and life experience over the course of the 20th century?
I’ve read through this bibliography of Chinese womens’ history, and done some other looking around, but I really can’t find anything remotely comparable. I’m OK with using monographs or edited collections — it wouldn’t kill my students to wrestle with a little scholarship now and then — but I’m not finding anything that looks right.
Any thoughts?
The two that come to mind are
Wang Zheng Women in the Chinese Enlightenment
Xie Bingying A Woman Soldier’s Own Story
Those look interesting, yeah, especially the Xie Bingying. I’d like something that covered the Communist era, perhaps Some of us: Chinese Women Growing Up in the Mao Era. I might have to do two books.
I really like Spence’s ‘Gate of Heavenly Peace’ for early 20th century history. Like it or loathe it, it is incredibly readable, and perhaps you could include some selected readings on some of the fiesty girls that are included in its pages… there are some good overviews that may give students a wider idea of some of the life choices available to women at the time.
I’m already using Spence’s Search for Modern China as the main text; would it be safe to assume that most of what he wrote in 1982 was integrated into his 1999 view of the history? From the reviews, I’m not seeing too much that isn’t in the later text.
Here’s an oddity: I looked the book up at Amazon and they claim that it references a book published 20 years later (“Mao Zedong by Jung Chang”) eight times! Of course, even a single post-dated citation would be extraordinary, but Spence’s intimate familiarity with scholarship of the future surely distinguishes him in the annals of Asianists!
I find Elizabeth Croll’s Changing Identities of Chinese Women an engaging read.
I really like “Chinese femininities, chinese masculinities: a reader” for my modern Chinese class. Each article in it addresses a specific issue relating to a specific historical moment from the eighteenth century to the late twentieth century in modern China. The articles touch many aspects of Chinese women and men’s life experiences, from gender boundaries in the Qing to violence of women red guards in the cultural revolution, etc. I realize these articles give students a basic idea of how women and men’s life experience were related to the trajectory of modern Chinese history itself. In addition, students could use these articles to compare women’s life experiences in different time periods in modern China
Not that my opinion matters, but I must confess I find it odd that Xinran’s “The Good Women of China” never made it onto the bibliography linked above, or into this conversation. It addresses the four ‘basic questions’ you mention above, and is presented with what I consider to be a distinctly Chinese sensibility. In its own way, perhaps it can even be considered an important book. Anyway, I found it deeply affecting, and my memory of many sections is still entirely vivid, many years after having read it.
Cheers
I came across Xinran’s book in my searches a few times, but couldn’t get enough information from the sites I found. I’d love to look at a copy, though, because it sounds fascinating.
I finally decided to go with one which I freely admit I’m picking because it looks really interesting in the publisher’s materials (and I haven’t found any reviews which gainsay my impression): Ye Weili with Ma Xiaodong, GROWING UP IN THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC: Conversations between Two Daughters of China’s Revolution.
I’m also goinig to be using Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones, which covers a fair bit of contemporary ground for women, plus some vivid Cultural Revolution material.