Zhao Hong on Alice Munro

Zhao Hong, “A Nobel Prize Winner and a Feminist – How Could She Ignore Her Daughter’s Sexual Abuse at the Hands of Her Step-Father?”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
The text translated here is a Chinese feminist commentary on the revelation that recently deceased Canadian Nobel Prize winner Alice Munro learned – a decade after the fact - that her second husband had sexually abused Munro’s daughter by her first husband, and chose to keep silent, seemingly choosing her husband over her daughter.  The author of the text is Zhao Hong, law professor at both the China University of Political Science and Law and at Beijing University, and reflects conversations she had with fellow feminist and jurist Chen Bi, also professor at China University of Political Science and Law.  Both Zhao and Chen appear to be writers as well, or at least bloggers.
 
Like Munro readers the world over, Zhao and Chen try to reconcile Munro’s deep insight into human behavior with what appears to be Munro’s own fragility on an issue where weakness is difficult to forgive or overlook.  I have not read what feminists elsewhere in the world have said about this, and did not choose to translate this because there was anything particularly Chinese about it.  Quite the contrary, I chose it because it shows that Alice Munro has fans in China who are thinking exactly some of the same things that we are.
 
Translation
 
Recently, the biggest news in the literary world is surely that even Alice Munroe’s star has fallen.  Looking through my friend circle, the last time anyone posted about her was when she died, a couple of months ago.  And the hit to her reputation is for a really strange reason:  Munroe’s daughter was sexually abused by Munroe’s second husband when the daughter was 9 years old, and while Munroe learned about what had happened a decade or so later, she kept silent about it for the rest of her life.  
 
I was talking about this on a train to Nanjing with my colleague Chen Bi[2], saying that we used to readily forgive bad boy artists when they took drugs or slept with prostitutes and even wrote essays insisting that it is ridiculous not to view their private lives and their lives as artists as separate things, and then wondering why it is why have such a hard time forgiving Munroe.
 
We came up with two possible reasons.  First, Munroe was a feminist writer.  Even if she herself rejected that label, her writing is deeply feminist.  I remember that for a long time I kept Dear Life and Runaway on my nightstand, and whenever I reread any of the stories in those books I would always encounter a uniquely female sense of confusion, disorientation, and struggle.  She never offered solutions, and often took the stance of a cold-eyed observer, expressing a sort of exasperation or despair as to whether women can truly get out from under, but her writing speaks to women directly where we live.   
 
We expect that a woman writer who plumbs the depths the situation of women by themselves and women with men will do better than the rest of us in her own life, but the truth of the matter is that even after learning that her husband was a pedophile, she still couldn't escape her need for intimacy and stayed with him until he died, abandoning all moral scruples.
 
This kind of “loving heart” can only lead people to hang their head when they think about the Nobel Prize winner.   First, as a reader, the shock of dashed expectations leaves a lasting sense of unease.  Second, Munro was a mother.  By now, feminism has made it thoroughly politically incorrect to call on women to completely sacrifice themselves to the ideal of being a perfect mother, but to do absolutely nothing when your daughter has been sexually abused, and to express tenderness to the abuser in public interviews, is both the worst possible model of parenting and an act of great harm to the daughter.
 
So on the one hand, we have an apparently happy but in fact dark and turbulent marriage, and on the other a violated daughter who remains troubled even as an adult because of her childhood experiences, and Munro chose the former. This choice is surely a betrayal of her daughter and of own role as a mother. I can only speculate as to how Munro justified her choice, perhaps telling herself that her husband only cheated on her once, and that one woman happened to be her nine-year-old daughter. Perhaps her husband explained away his infidelity by citing, as many men do, an overwhelming "Lolita complex," saying that the daughter had “seduced him” into breaking the taboo.  So she forgave her husband's infidelity instead of his crime.
 
Yet could someone with Munro’s keen intelligence truly believe such self-deception?  It is said that Munro spent the last years of her life suffering from Alzheimer's disease, but in her occasional lucid moments, she still showed concern for the daughter from whom she had long been estranged and tried to do something about the estrangement. This was three years after the death of Munro's second husband and more than a decade after learning that her daughter had been sexually abused, meaning that such a reconciliation was not to be. Probably out of respect for Munro’s reputation as a Nobel Prize winner, but also for the sake of the propriety of the aging mother, all family members who knew the facts about the situation kept silent until Munro died, including Munro’s first husband and the biological father of the abused child, who was the first to learn of it.  But finally, “to not speak ill of the dead” no longer works in the West, and only two months after the author’s death, the family secret which had been buried for more than twenty  years was revealed by a member of Munro’s family.
 
Having learned about this, a close friend of mine told me she could no longer read Munro because she constantly felt the urge to doubt her spiritual core.  I had the opposite reaction, and the incident motivated me to read Munro yet again.  It was as if I had become a detective, taking out my magnifying glass to look for every little detail I had originally missed, seeking out new subtleties and layers of meaning. I suspect that these are the two typical reactions to Munro after she fell from her pedestal, and it’s just a choice, neither reaction is right or wrong.
 
In any introduction to Munro’s work, one issue stands out, that of escape – escaping from marriage, escaping from family, escaping from daily life – and her writing about the urgency of fleeing one’s role or one’s circumstances inevitably struck a chord with women.   Under long-standing constraints of morality and responsibility, escape looked to be the beginning of women's self-knowledge and self-justification. However, escape rarely worked out for the women in Munro’s stories, who either went back because they were too afraid to live independently, or had to face the loss of life and love even if they bravely fought against fate and responsibility. So in the broader picture, there seems to be little difference between hanging in and leaving.  So what is the point of escape?
 
Munro seemed to have opened a huge black hole in the tumult of feminist thought, revealing a brutal truth, a cruel reality:  women have nowhere to run to. This darkness, complexity, and cruelty are what made Munro’s writing invaluable. From today’s perspective, it also seems that this reflects her own life:  even after achieving such remarkable worldly success, women still cannot psychologically shed their dependence on intimate relationships, still cannot summon the mental strength to reject the advances and companionship of unworthy men, and still cannot face the great emptiness of a life alone they cannot know. What does feminism have to offer except criticism and censure? Having understood this, should we not just start over?
 
In my personal reading of Munro, there is another tantalizing theme in addition to that of escape:  seduction and betrayal. There is a story in Dear Life called “To Reach Japan” which has always struck me.  A female poet who remains restless despite having a secure family and a lovely daughter, falls in love with a man from Toronto at a poetry reading.  After suffering for a long time, the opportunity finally arrives for the poet to visit the man, and the story opens with her taking her three-year-old daughter on the train from Vancouver to Toronto. The reader is expecting Munro’s version of “The Bridges of Madison County,” but instead the entire story takes place on the train, where the poet befriends another young man.  The two of them drink and flirt and, once the daughter falls asleep, make love in the young man's compartment. Temptation seems readily satisfied in this instance, where there appears to be no danger. But the woman returns to her own compartment to find her daughter missing, and everything falls apart.  She searches for her daughter like a madwoman, eventually finding her sitting by herself between two train cars.  The woman takes this as a reminder from God that all temptation comes with a price and decides to turn her back on the man in Toronto and return to her family. At this point, the train arrives and she leads her daughter down the steps.  The man from Toronto walks over, takes her bag, and gives her a warm kiss.
 
This is how Munro describes the poet’s reaction: "First a shock, then a tumbling in Greta’s insides, an immense settling. She was trying to hang on to Katy but at this moment the child pulled away and got her hand free. She didn’t try to escape. She just stood waiting for whatever had to come next.”
 
This is how the story ends. So, in the struggle with desire and temptation, do women win? Maybe they get lucky once in a while, but most of the time they lose. We think we are strong enough and smart enough to avoid all the dangers of temptation while staring it straight in the face; the truth of the matter is that it can cost you dearly, so dearly that you can't afford to pay.
 
Have we learned from our failures? Not at all. After a brief awakening, the poet in the story still surrenders herself to another round of uncertain fate, surrenders herself to another temptation; this is human nature.  
 
In the face of temptation, then, women may not be a more advanced species than men, nor can they claim to possess higher morality. We can all be easily captured by our desires, and even if we learn our lesson, we are never transformed into new beings.
 
Whenever I read this story in the past, I always thought that Munro was mocking other women’s weakness and powerlessness; reading it now I think:  how could she be any different?  Even if she possesses greater awareness, there is still a huge gap between knowing and doing. This is incredibly difficult for ordinary people, and it seems to have been the same for Munro.  She used her writing to record these complex vulnerabilities in a clearer way, but in reality she didn't act as boldly or decisively as we do.
 
Online people are saying that it’s a good thing that Munro’s reputation has taken a hit; at least we've accomplished another literary exorcism. And it's probably better to read a writer's work after you've discovered her moral flaws, because at least we won’t buy what she’s selling completely, or expect her to have all the answers. Because you realize that what confuses you, also confuses her, and what holds you back holds her back, even to a greater extent. You ultimately need to find your own solutions.
 
As a female jurist, Munro's attitude toward her daughter's sexual abuse pricked my professional conscience deeply. But professional considerations aside, the Munro case does hint at the extreme complexity of the female situation. This complexity, in turn, demands more from a feminism that is often over simplified. Remember what is written on the back cover of Dear Life: "We always say we can’t forgive them, or that we can’t forgive ourselves.  But we forgive every time." Perhaps this is how Munro managed to achieve peace with herself in her final years. “All the pain that was so hard to let go of is eventually healed by time, and we eventually forgive all of the people and things that we once thought were unforgivable, and our conscience is at peace.” But is this true?
 
Notes 

[1]赵宏, "诺奖得主，一个女性主义者，为什么会无视女儿被继父性侵?" published online by Ifeng Perspective, July 20, 2024.