BOOK REVIEW
Writing Lives in China, 1600-2010 Histories of the Elusive Self
Authors: Dryburgh, Marjorie, Dauncey, Sarah
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2013
Supriya Prasanta
Between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries, Chinese literature saw a slow but steady
flourishing of life narratives of different varieties. Early life narratives in China were mostly
hagiographical in nature. Most of such narratives were published by rulers, administrators as
well as privately on initiative of patrons. There were commonalities of form, content and
objective between these published life narratives. Community, social values and people
played crucial roles in the production and circulation of life narratives in China, and any
reading of these life stories depends on an understanding of that particular social context.
Chinese life narratives existed in an ambivalent relationship to the society in which it was
created as less emphasis was on the individual or self awareness of the subject. Lives of
exemplary men and women were mainly written for the purpose of teaching and cultivating a
sense of propriety and solidarity among people.
In recent years a growing body of literature has addressed the varying role of Chinese life
writing which have explored largely their didactic content and social relevance. Writing lives in
China, 1600-2010 is a significant but different contribution to this existing scholarly body of
work. As the editors Marjorie Dryburgh and Sarah Dauncey explain that they are trying, ‘to
suggest some of the challenges inherent in drawing general conclusions from a body of
diverse, fragmentary material that was produced across many centuries, and whose porous
boundaries are not yet fully charted.’
This book explores the varied and developing anatomy of life narratives in China across five
centuries. Through an assemblage of research papers on different aspects of life narratives,
the book engagingly builds up a comparative picture of life narratives in China and asks how
life narrative as a distinct form evolved in the Chinese literary tradition. It builds on recent
scholarship and brings together essays that reflect a range of themes, and explore common
themes and reflect on the place of life writing in China. Life writing is primarily seen as a
didactic form, and questions such as their authorship, editorship and financial aspects in
which Chinese life writing were written and produced, the relationship of hagiography in
relation to state and their role in shaping intellectual climate, and understandings of the
public have been explored. The editors argue, ‘thus the relation between texts and contexts,
between lives, communities and values, between auto/biographical authors or subjects and
their audiences, and between convention and referentiality undoubtedly shape many written
Chinese lives.’
In one of the perceptive essays of the book, ‘How to write a Woman’s Life into and out of
history: Wang Zhaoyuan (1763-1851) and biographical study in republican China, Herriet T.
Zurndrfer writes, ‘Men and women who merited a biography were those life stories could be
identified with social and moral ideals. In the case of women’s lives, biographies tended to
classify and depict individuals as exemplars of normative social types, whether ‘evil queen’,
‘wise counsellor’, or ‘virtuous wife’.
Another brief but insightful essay looks at Tibetan life writing aptly titled, ‘A Look at
Margins: Autobiographical Writing in Tibetan in the People’s Republic of China by Isabelle
Henrion-Dourcy. This chapter highlights the ‘modern’ Tibetan autobiographies, that is,
those written after the Chinese take-over of Tibetan regions in the wake of the founding of
the people’s republic of China in 1949—and only those written in Tibetan. In quantity,
content, style and authorship, they depart from the traditional genre in important ways.
Though not drastically, but in varying degrees, these are heterogenous, as authors from
different educational backgrounds get inspiration from Tibetan, Western, or Chinese models
of composition.
Similarly, through a study of self presentation in the dramas of Ruan Dacheng (1587-1646),
one discovers how Ruan uses his plays—as he does his poems—not to tell a story as an
impartial narrator but to project his own image. Ruan’s own views on life and experiences
can be seen only directly through his poetic and dramatic writings.
Since the end of the cultural revolution in 1976 in China, and the subsequent opening-up
reforms of the early 1980s, it is commonly seen more and more fictional and non-fictional
life narratives are written with disabled people as subjects in apparently distinct ways of
presentation. Through out this period, the Chinese state has played a pivotal role in
encouraging the production of the life stories of a wide range of people and has used them
for educational propaganda purposes as part of its wider campaign to promote ‘socialist
spiritual civilisation’. As it has moved away from promoting traditional ‘picture-perfect’
heroes, new models as exemplified by disabled writer Zhang Haidi have come to the fore.
However, with the appearance of more independent writings and genres, and most
particularly since the advent of personal websites and blogging, a number of disabled
persons in China have been able to explore their individuality in a way that is devoid of any
political or social intent, and have found avenues to communicate and express their
subjectivities and identities as an effective form of cultural redress.
The eight essays throw light on various aspects of life writing written between the
seventeenth century and the twenty-first century. Commenting on the earlier as well as
recent trends of life writing in China, the editors write—‘Whereas , once it was possible to
understand Chinese autobiography as overwhelmingly Confucian, didactic, state-oriented
and masculine, more recent work have highlighted frequent departures from that apparent
form. Thus the reification of the distance in ‘culture’ between narratives of lives lived and
written in China, and a critical literature largely produced in Europe and North America risks
creating artificial barriers to understanding, and obscuring the equally important distances in
moral and material environment that might separate lives lived, lives written and lives read
across time, even within a narrower spatial or social framework.
This innovative work has surveyed the biographical and autobiographical narratives of men
and women from all social backgrounds in China. It has included diaries, plays, fiction and
blogs, and examined them from different perspectives at times with the help of existing life
writing theories and also with diligent observation and intuition at other times to map this
much neglected field and given attention it rightfully deserves.
Supriya Prasanta