Liang Hong on Feminism

Liang Hong, “Letting People from my Home Village have their Say”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Liang Hong (b. 1953) is a professor of literature at Renmin University in Beijing, as well as a novelist, but she is best known for her non-fiction work, particularly for what is now a trilogy based on Liang Village, her hometown in Henan.   In the first volume, China in One Village 中国在梁庄 (2010), Liang “rediscovers” her home village after having lived in Beijing for some twenty years, spending several months there, talking with friends and family, taking stock of what has changed and what has not.  The second volume, Leaving Liang Village 出梁庄记 (2013), explores what migrant labor has meant to the village and villagers, and is based on interviews Liang carried out with some who had left and some who had returned.  Finally, in January of 2022, she published her third book, Liang Village Ten Years On 梁庄十年, noting the changes that have taken place in the village and its people’s lives over the course of the last decade.  The English-language version of Liang’s first volume came out recently, ably translated by Emily Goedde, and would make excellent reading for students (and teachers!) at all levels.

The text translated here is taken from a recently published high-profile book on women in academics, entitled Opening the Curtain:  Interviews with Female Scholars 开场：女性学者访谈 (2022), and is surely part of the publicity campaign for the book.  The volume includes interviews with such outstanding figures as Chizuko Ueno 千鹤子 (Japanese sociologist and feminist), Dai Jinhua 戴锦华 (cultural critic), Mao Jian 毛尖 (writer and film critic), Zhang Li 张莉 (actress), and Bao Huiyi 包慧怡 (poet and literary translator).  The theme of the book is explicitly feminist, as the interview with Liang Hong suggests.  It is interesting to read how Foucault and feminism came to rural Henan.
 
The Curtains Open:  Women in Academia 
 
The Scholarly Path: From Women's Literature to Writing the Liang Village Trilogy
 
"Knowledge should become a part of one’s emotional being”
 
Liu Yaguang: As someone born in the 1970s, your youth and adolescence coincided with an important cultural era:  the intellectual thaw of the 1980s, together with many new intellectuals trends and the emergence of popular culture,all of which had a profound impact on a generation. Looking back now, what works or scholars do you feel had a great impact on you during that period? 
 
Liang Hong: In the 1980s, I was only a teenager living in the countryside, so I wasn’t all that aware of thought emancipation at the time, even if of course some of it made its way to the countryside, such as television shows from Hong Kong.  I remember that everyone would hurry off to the county town to huddle around the doors of the families with televisions to watch “The Legend of the Condor Heroes 射雕英雄传,”[2]  and feeling a certain kind of liberation and freedom.  In terms of actual influences, that started in the late 1990s when I was reading on my own, and books like Foucault’s The History of Sexuality had a huge impact on my scholarly ideas, showing me that “sexuality” is not just something given but instead is wrapped up in a series of discourses concerning discipline, punishment, and power, and that it was something that was constructed, not something natural.  In this way I discovered that many of the things that we think “have always been like this," whether it is a big civilizational discourse or something from everyday life, have structures behind them, and you have to discover and think about these structures.

At the same time, I was also constantly reading the many of the kinds of intellectual writings that have been popular in Chinese society since the 1980s, in fields such as aesthetics, philosophy, literature, etc. I think that what we called liberation is actually a different way of seeing and understanding the world: it turns out that there is not just one life, but countless lives, countless possibilities.  This liberation reached an entire generation of Chinese people not only through books, but through different forms of imagination about life as an individual person, about life in the universe, about beauty and society.
 
Liu Yaguang:  Your doctoral dissertation was on the Henan local literature, and you started work on your non-fiction trilogy on Liang Village in 2008, and you also studied feminist literature. Looking back on it now, how did you start off on your scholarly path?  How has the focus of your attention changed in recent years? 
 
Liang Hong: It was because I like literature that I started reading again, and enrolled in the Chinese literature department, but I didn't expect that I would do a Master’s and a Ph.D. and become a scholar. The first time I published something was in 1998, when I was a second-year M.A. student, and I published my thesis on Eileen Chang's family narrative. At the time, my concerns were shaped completely by my own interests and inner compulsions. I am still grateful to the editor of the Zhengzhou University Journal for his comment that my first attempt at publishing something was "thoughtful and at the same time emotionally warm.” This was a great encouragement to me, and later became a standard for my idea of what a good paper should be. 
 
At the time, we had no idea of submitting to the “top” journals, and scholarship was about enjoying yourself. The advisor for my M.A. had a big study room at the university, and he gave us students the key so we could borrow books or read there whenever we wanted to. I clearly remember being impressed by the number of books I read from the Commercial Press, through which knowledge of aesthetics and structuralism flowed over me like the waves of the ocean. Then it just seemed normal to do a Ph.D. and to stay on at the university after finishing. The most important part of academic training is to make people understand that the way you think about things, about literature, is not natural, but instead the fruit of your education, and evolves out of the collision between your rich internal knowledge and the outer world. 
 
Seen in this light, my shift in focus to Liang Village after 2008 was a very natural process. During my years of academic training, I also gradually came to realize that knowledge is not something you acquire once, and let it sit there and ossify, but instead must become part of how you think or even your emotional being, and only then can you internalize into an “angle” from which you can observe the world.   Of course, this is a very “macro” explanation. To be more specific, returning to Liang Village and writing about my hometown was actually a natural impulse. Whether you’re writing an academic paper or literature, good work must have some relationship to your emotions.
 
An example I often cite is Levi-Strauss's Triste Tropiques.  The first sentence of the book is:  “I hate travelling.” He didn't mean it literally, but he didn't like the way anthropologists were doing ethnography at the time.  Certain anthropologists undertook arduous journeys to study primitive peoples, using a set of fixed models to exoticize the customs of the local “ecology,” a posture that was somewhat condescending, and Levi-Strauss wanted to interrogate these narratives.  The reason I liked this book so much was because behind what the author said were his feelings and thoughts about the discipline.
 
"Although I studied feminism, I rarely mentioned the names of the women in Liang Village”
 
Liu Yaguang: Your collection of essays The Fading Aura 灵光的消逝 has just been reissued in a new edition, and it contains several studies on women's literature. Have you been interested in women’s literature ever since graduate school? Has your recent research experience also influenced your gender awareness? 
 
Liang Hong: When I was in graduate school, research on feminism in China was in fairly full swing.  Kate Millett's Sexual Politics, Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future, Susan Sontag's essays, Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality and Discipline and Punish, as well many other works that are now familiar to us, were all introduced to China during this period. In fact, this was not limited to people working on feminism; students in almost all fields of humanities and social sciences were exposed to these notions of postcolonial theory. I should particularly point out that these theories were not abstractions to me. I grew up in rural Henan, and in fact, in the years before being exposed to these theories, I had not "reflected seriously" on women's identities, and simply viewed everything that happened as normal. So as you can imagine, I was very excited to encounter this knowledge, and I was almost hungry to read it. 
 
Consequently, I was originally going to do my Ph.D. dissertation on women's literature.  I was going to write about Ding Ling 丁玲 and how she changed from a new kind of woman advocating thought liberation into a revolutionary. I wrote up a detailed prospectus, but my supervisor, Wang Furen 王富仁, thought that we were too unfamiliar with the theoretical literature and would easily go to extremes, falling into a kind of dichotomous thinking, so I ultimately took his advice and wrote about the history of Henan literature instead. But all the reading I did and the training I received were actually laying the foundation for my later long-term interest in feminist theory and women's literature.
 
Liu Yaguan: You once analyzed the symbolic transformation of male characters in the writings of contemporary Chinese women, but at the same time pointed out that women's voices in public space often wind up being filtered through the "male-centered perspective" of social discourse. What do you think of the current discussion of women's issues in public discourse? For example, there is an "economic reductionist" argument that insists that many gender conflicts are not gender issues, but merely economic issues. 
 
Liang Hong: The economy is an issue, but of course gender itself is also important, and there is definitely an interaction between the two. Given China's family structure, even if both of you start out with the same background, financial ability, etc., the family division of labor may slowly come to be prejudicial to the woman. The traditional belief that women should stay at home can end up affecting not only women's economic ability, but also their position in the cultural sphere, and thus their ability to voice their concerns, meaning that they may more harshly treated morally. More importantly, women's work under this division of labor is onerous but often unrecognized. These are the gender dimensions we have to consider. 
 
Liu Yaguan: Women's discourse in today’s public space today is often at risk of being exoticized. Like non-fiction writing, women's narratives are also full of "narrative traps" for those trying to write. 
 
Liang Hong: It is hard for any kind of writing to be completely independent, and there are traps in all kinds of writing, many of which are unconscious. Although I specialized in feminist literature, it wasn’t until the third volume in my Liang Village Trilogy that I realized that I very rarely used the names of the women in Liang Village, and in the first two books, it was a kind of subconscious behavior to refer to them by the location of their husbands' villages. If we want to avoid these traps, questioning yourself and thinking about what you are doing are the only solutions. 
 
Liu Yaguang:  So even with your training in feminist theory, you still found it easy to ignore the names of the women in Liang Village. There is often a distance between theory and conscious self-awareness. Why is it so difficult for women to escape this collective unconsciousness even after they have achieved theoretical enlightenment?
 
Liang Hong: Cultural inertia within a group is the hardest thing to be aware of, it exists in all aspects of our lives, so much so that we do not even see it in our daily lives, and women’s consciousness is the same thing. What's more, women have always occupied a subordinate status since the beginning of civilization, both in the East and in the West, so it's hard to get rid of it in daily life. For theory to have an impact in life and at the level of individual consciousness requires a huge turning point and sustained self-reflection. 
 
Non-fiction writing: an adventure full of narrative "traps" 
 
It took ten years to get close to the "inner life" of Liang Village, and discovering that life was more than just pure sadness 
 
Liu Yaguang: When you read the Liang Village Trilogy, it is obvious that the most recent book, Liang Village Ten Years On, is very different from the previous two books in terms of how they are written.  In Leaving Liang Village and China in Liang Village we find a good deal of theoretical analysis, which is different from the almost pure description and even oral narratives of Liang Village Ten Years On.   How do you understand the relationship between these three works? How do you deal with the relationship between theory and experience in non-fiction writing?
 
Liang Hong: When I wrote the first book, China in Liang Village, this was the first time that I went back home with a research perspective in mind. In fact I was quite shocked to go home, and while I felt a certain closeness, this was outweighed by a sense of distance.  Because what I was seeing was not only my hometown of Liang Village, but also the “China” that was Liang Village, an observation related to a great deal of complicated rethinking.  The second book, Leaving Liang Village, is more about those migrant workers who had left the village (although the term “migrant worker” is not really appropriate), even if they are part of a huge social problem.   In media reports at the time, migrant workers were talked about a great deal as a group.   Because many in-depth social issues were involved, a theoretical approach was indispensable, but I also had to try my best to write in such a way as to reflect their individual experiences, trying hard to break through everyone’s symbolic understanding of migrant workers, shaped by the media reports. In the third book, I perhaps got closer to everyday life in Liang Village. 
 
A very important person present in all three of these books is actually me.  I often tell readers that my character the books is also a non-fiction character worth exploring. The issues reflected in these three books might also be discussed in other works about "Wang Village" or "Li Village", but the uniqueness of the Liang Village Trilogy lies in the fact that it contains someone who left and then returned to their hometown, which involves a renewed understanding and sorting out of myself and my relationship with my home village.   Part of this “me” has lived in the city for many years, engaged with ideas and theory, which inevitably leads me toward a top-down perspective. In my writing, my most important realization was to admit and to write about my feelings of shock at repeatedly rediscovering my village, and at the same time, I also had to reflect on the meaning of those feelings.   For example, when I visited Liang Village people working as migrant laborers in various cities, my skin would have an allergic reaction to the decrepit places they were often had to live in, which made me hesitate to go in. I had to confront such feelings head on and write about them. 
 
Compared with the first two books, Liang Village Ten Years On is indeed more concerned with everyday life. I think any kind of sustained writing project is constantly changing as the author matures. I’ve been writing about Liang Village for ten years, and life there is more than just those sad stories.   Or to put it another way, the things that shocked me when I first returned to my hometown now turn out to be everyday occurrences, and when I look at my fellow villagers now, they do not seem to be characters from a tragedy but just ordinary people. These people that I write about, like Granny Five, still face difficulties they can do little about, many of which are structural. But when you get close enough to her, what you see is actually an ordinary, sweet little old lady. This feeling is very much like how we deal with our parents. If you were to write a story about your parents, you would of course realize that they have a lot of shortcomings, and you might criticize them, but even as you criticize, you do it out of a deep love, because you are close enough to them to see them for what they are. 
 
Non-fiction writing often falls into traps set by the authors themselves 
 
Liu Yaguang:  These days, many non-fiction writers use oral accounts in their work, as in Gu Yu's 谷雨 There is Nothing More Normal than a Migrant Worker Thinking about Heidegger.  Some people think that this kind of writing gets really "close" to the narrator's genuine experience, while others think that it is misleading, because there is no way for non-fiction to approach “pure writing,” since the writer’s intention is always there in the background, meaning that this kind of narration is merely a “self-asserted objectivity.”   What do you think of this issue in the context of your experience in writing Liang Village Ten Years On.
 
Liang Hong: To my mind, no method of non-fiction writing, be it telling your own story or writing in the third person, can achieve accuracy and perfection, because language itself is rhetorical. What really matters is the writer's own value position: how do you see the group you are writing about? This is the most difficult part of non-fiction writing. Writers need to have a diverse and rich intellectual background supporting them, and at the same time, they need to have a strong value position—but this stance cannot constrain or cover up what they are writing about.  Much of non-fiction writing is a kind of “self struggle.”
 
However, looking at the title of the piece you just mentioned, we might say that the author is focused on pushing back against stereotypes of migrant workers, which in fact might well reflect the author's own stereotypes of migrant workers, so his piece might wind up reinforcing those stereotypes. Of course, preconceptions are hard for anyone to avoid, and the piece we’re talking about is already pretty good. The main point I want to make is that when writing non-fiction, it's frequent to set narrative "traps" for yourself that wind up backfiring.
 
My feeling is that both writers and readers should have a more rational attitude towards non-fiction writing, as it is unlikely that a perfect work will be created overnight, and everything is a matter of process. As I said before, we need to do our best to accurately render the lives of those we are writing about, but it is impossible not to inject our own feelings.  For example, the choices made by main character in Gu Yu’s story are not something that everyone can understand and respect.   But the greatest significance of this particular piece non-fiction is not to promote a certain value, but to help us understand more about the diversity of human ideas through a close, sympathetic depiction.
 
Liu Yaguang:  There is an implicit question of the value position of non-fiction writing here. Non-fiction writing has to be close to the characters to "record" them, but it is impossible not to include the writer's value judgment and even evaluation. As a writer, how do you deal with this tension? 
 
Liang Hong:  My thinking has changed a lot on these issues. A few years ago, I was happy to give advice to others in writing or in person, and was very eager to tell others "what to do.”  But later on it seems like I started listening and observing more, and giving less advice. The reason is simple: it's hard to put ourselves in other people's shoes, whether it's Chen Zhi 陈直, the migrant worker who translates Heidegger, or Liu Xiaoxiang 刘小样 in the People piece on "Nora on the Plain."[3] By the same token, non-fiction writing cannot convey a clear value position through close observation: either Liu Xiaoxiang leaves or she doesn’t.  As writers, we need to be conscious of the fact that writing cannot easily provide answers to such questions.

Liu Yaguang:  When you were writing about Liang Village, you brought with you a sense of being a stranger because you had lived in the city, and you also wrote frequently about feeling “out of place.” Can you share what was the most difficult thing or experience in the overall process of writing the Liang Village Trilogy? 
 
Liang Hong: The most difficult thing was the limitations of my own vision and thinking, which led me to have a somewhat shallow understanding of people and things, which meant that I was ultimately unable to explore the rich inner dimensions of the villagers and the village. Sometimes I thought that I was not getting close enough to that life, which is very necessary for non-fiction writing. If you write historical non-fiction, you may worry because you have a piece of information that you haven’t been able to work in to your narrative, and if you write contemporary non-fiction, if there is a single Liangzhuang villager that you know but haven’t yet been to see, you may feel that you have not exhausted the life as lived here.  This is one aspect.

Another aspect is that, you know, maybe life presents only one particular scene, but there are countless ways to understand this scene, and exploring different angles of entry can reveal different contents and more aspects, but sometimes your learning is not sufficient, or your understanding not penetrating enough.   This can also be a problem.
 
Your home village:  an emotional structure that is difficult to shake off

Liu Yaguang:  Talking about the countryside, in 2021 you appeared in the documentary film "Swimming out til the Sea Turns Blue", which was released in theaters, and many viewers were impressed by the memories of Liang Village you recounted in the film. Especially toward the end of the film, the scene where you teach your son to speak Henan dialect is particularly interesting. In fact, for the young generation growing up in the city, the real sense of "hometown" is very distant, especially for the old home in the countryside, to which many young people feel no attachment. How do you understand the meaning of hometown and the soil to the current generation of young people?
 
Liang Hong: Sometimes I wonder what writing about a hometown means to this generation of young people. In the process of social progress, it is true that many things need to be abandoned, and the old hometown may be one of those things, including a people's way of life and traditions, meaning that part of the overall process of transformation is painful. However, a lot of new things will also be born out of it. The mobility of today’s society nowadays has thrown aside many of our old fixed supports, but will also give birth to many more open concepts.

I think the key issue is that we not essentialize the idea of a hometown, because it was always a very personal concept. I have a hometown, but my son might not.  It may be hard for young people to understand the attachment to a hometown in reading these works about the countryside, but they can see all kinds of people and the many sides of the society, and that's the greatest value of writing about such things.
 
Liu Yaguang:   The "forgetting" of women in the village is related to their being “married off.”   In the emotional structure of traditional Chinese society, getting married remains something that combines joy and sorrow.  One interesting thing is that even in very "modern" families, parents often shed tears when their daughters get married, but not when their sons do.  In some sense, does this suggest a deep-rooted emotional structure? 
 
Liang Hong: My husband and I married without a matchmaker, and when we were dating, I didn't have a strong feeling that I was going to marry into "their family," and it was only until the wedding ceremony came along and someone actually "handed me over” to the other party, that I suddenly had a feeling that I was about to “leave home.”  I feel that this is a rupture in the emotional structure, a kind of cultural inertia left over from the agrarian society, which is very difficult for us to get rid of.  It was very natural for me to cry, even if all my family members were very kind to me, because I still felt like I was being pushed out of my own house and would have to go live with strangers.   This inertia is actually also reflected in names, especially surnames. Behind a name is actually the identification with a culture, a symbolic structure.

Liu Yaguang: Whether it's in your non-fiction like Leaving Liang Village or in other works like The Light of Liang Guangzheng 梁光正的光 or The Sacred Family 神圣家族, you can feel that family is something you actually spend a lot of time writing about. In the movie "Swimming out til the Sea Turns Blue", you also mentioned your father and your older sister. How do you think your family has influenced your writing?
 
Liang Hong: It’s the same ever-mysterious force, emotions that are felt and not spoken.
 
Notes

[1]梁鸿, “让故乡的人们发出自己的声音,” published on the online platform of Beijing News Book Review Weekly/新京报书评周刊 on February 2, 2023.

[2]Translator’s note:  Based on a martial arts novel by Jin Yong.

[3]Translator’s note:  “Nora on the Plain” chronicles the life story of Liu Xiaoxiang, a rural woman in Shaanxi province whose struggle with rural loneliness and isolation was chronicled by a journalist, first in a television interview (available on Youtube here) and then as long-form non-fiction.  “Nora” of course refers to Lu Xun’s essay on “What Happens When Nora Leaves Home?” itself a commentary on Henrik Ibsen’s play “A Doll’s House.”  Someone should look into translating the non-fiction piece, if it is not already done.