Gendering displacement: Nieh Hualing’s re-membering refugee students during the Second Sino-Japanese War

Abstract

This article analyzes the representation of Nieh Hualing’s war memory as a refugee student during the Second Sino-Japanese War in her creative writings, especially Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China, in intertextual conversation with her autobiography, Three Lives. By centering the intersectional experience of a female refugee student, the analysis enriches war narratives with a combination of diasporic and feminist perspectives on daily life distinguishing itself from male-dominated battlefields. While her war experience as a refugee student constitutes her “first life” in war-torn mainland China among her “three lives” in mainland China, Taiwan, and the United States, Nieh as a writer constantly negotiates with her Chineseness and inquires about her positionality in the world when moving across cultures. While Nieh as a writer embodies a “Chinese cosmopolitanism,” the female protagonist in Mulberry and Peach uses “hypersexuality” to reject patriarchal society and ethnocentric nationalism and go beyond Chinese cosmopolitanism.

How about myself? Exile (流放 liufang) for a whole life. I was a Chinese kid in the Japanese concession in my hometown. At the gate of the park in the Japanese concession, there was a sign stating “No dogs or Chinese allowed.” During the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, I was a refugee (流亡 liuwang) student wandering (流浪 liulang) around. I am a “mainlander” in Taiwan, Chinese in the US, and Chinese American in China. I was laughing while presenting at the convention: who exactly am I? ¹ (Nieh, 2012: 513)

In her autobiography entitled Three Lives (三生影像 Shansheng yingxiang), ² Nieh Hualing (聂华苓) (b. 1925) records her confusion about her multiple identities expressed while presenting at the Convention of International Writers held in Belgrade in 1988 under the conference theme of exile (liufang) and literature (Nieh, 2012: 513). ³ She defines her life experience of mobility as “three lives,” as the title of her autobiography shows. She was born in Hankou (汉口), ⁴ China, in 1925, relocated to Taiwan when the Chinese Nationalist Party was defeated in the Chinese Civil War (1945–1949), and finally emigrated to Iowa, US in 1964.

In the paragraph above, Nieh uses words, such as liufang, liuwang, and liulang to point to her multiple displacements. The Chinese character liu in the words liufang, liuwang, and liulang literally means flow. Compared to the two other terms, liulang is neutral, similar to the connotation of wandering. Liufang is linked to a negative meaning, which means “banishment as a form of punishment by government” and a kind of involuntary exile (Lee, 1991: 212). Liuwang, which can be rendered as “wandering in escape,” is often found in “the circumstances of war or famine, connoting almost the fate of a refugee” (Lee, 1991: 212), a common experience for Chinese people impacted by war during the first half of the twentieth century. Therefore, the keywords to define Nieh’s life experience can be mobility, wandering, displacement, exile, and diaspora.

In this article, I analyze the representation of Nieh Hualing’s war memory as a refugee (liuwang) student during the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression or the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) ⁵ in her creative writings in intertextual conversation with her own war experience depicted in her autobiography, Three Lives. Through writing, she not only remembers her war experience, but also re-members or reconstructs a collection of specifically gendered war memories. This aligns with Takashi Fujitani’s concept of “critical re-membering” in the context of the Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945), which is to both “re-member” or challenge the fixed or official memories and add more complexities to them, and to recover or restore the silenced or nearly-extinct memories (Fujitani et al., 2001: 4). Throughout much of the twentieth century, the portrayal of women in the war was primarily limited to their expressions of grief over the loss of loved ones (Hauser, 1991: 298). Often, they were depicted merely as symbolic representations of the nation’s suffering, a portrayal that both silenced and elevated them simultaneously (Hauser, 1991: 301; Molasky, 1999: 12). In instances of colonization, defeat, or conquest, women were central to metaphors that feminized the nation (Dower, 2000: 138; Gerow, 2016: 196–197; Wang, 2004: 117). While narratives of war have been dominated by nationalist, militarist, and masculine discourses, my article transcends this conventional remembrance of war and demonstrates the existence of female subjectivity in transnational spaces through their embodied memories of war, intimacy, sexual violence, and pleasure. ⁶ In this sense, the gendered aspect of war memory can be considered a form of “countermemory” that is essential for rectifying “the official ‘forgetting’ of women’s histories” (Hirsch and Smith, 2002: 4). I do not mean to essentialize female refugee students’ war memories. Instead, by reading women’s war memories beyond patriarchal and nationalist constructs, my goal is to illuminate the feminist potential of war memories beyond memories of the battlefield. I examine how women navigate and utilize sexuality as an agent of identity-making, acting as countermemory against official narratives. In parallel, the relationship between their literary imagination and war memories recovers experiences of both trauma and empowerment created by and about women in conditions of conflict.

By reading Nieh’s experience as a refugee student in the long trajectory of her “three lives,” I interpret her memories and writings through diasporic and feminist perspectives. From a diasporic standpoint, Nieh’s mobility reconstructs her war remembrance. It is precisely because she has distanced herself from the temporal and spatial dimensions of her wartime encounters that she can reframe her war memories. Simultaneously, the gender dimension is intricately linked to her war memories and writings. I scrutinize the portrayal of female refugee students’ sexuality and intimacy in one of her novels, Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China (桑青与桃红 Sangqing yu taohong, 1976), as a representation of “hypersexuality,” as elucidated by Celine Parreñas Shimizu (2007). Such representation challenges normative power structures, including patriarchy and nationalism within this context, and builds up women’s agency in the war narratives. Furthermore, it serves as a form of “perverse, carnal, pleasure-seeking, traumatized” sexuality that challenges the normative range of sexual desires and behaviors and highlights the sexual agency of the female protagonist, Mulberry/Peach, within the story (Shimizu, 2007: 7). Through performing hypersexuality, Mulberry/Peach presents a possible feminist and diasporic path that is intrinsically “wayward” and cosmopolitan (Hartman, 2019: 227). ⁷ It diversifies our understanding of the myriad ways in which memory exists, evolves, and functions outside of official and dominating structures.

Gendering displaced war memories

The recognition of gender’s significance in memory studies has grown since Joan Scott’s (1986: 1054) influential emphasis on gender as “a category of analysis” in historical scholarship during the 1980s. In their seminal article “Feminism and Cultural Memory: An Introduction,” Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith highlight the dearth of gender analysis in previous memory studies scholarship and call on researchers to consider the gendered dimensions of memory. They recall the initial efforts made in this direction, such as a conference held in 1986 at the University of Michigan and a special issue of the Michigan Quarterly Review focused on “Women and Memory” in 1987 (Hirsch and Smith, 2002: 4). Hirsch and Smith (2002: 4) assert that gendered memory can be perceived as a form of “countermemory,” playing a pivotal role in rectifying the official neglect of women’s histories. Delving further into the feminist approach to analyzing traumatic histories, Hirsch (2012) elucidates the varying roles that gender assumes in shaping the remembrance and forgetting of narratives, the techniques employed in storytelling, and the tropes that make traumatic histories more palatable for succeeding generations. Notably, in the field of China Studies, historian Gail Hershatter stands out for her exploration of gendered memory. She examines the gendered aspects of memory through her research on rural women in 1950s China (Hershatter, 2002: 43). By conducting insightful interviews with marginalized rural women, capturing their experiences and memories within the context of China’s collective movement, Hershatter (2011: 25) vividly demonstrates the gendered nature of memory and underscores the existence of a distinct “gendered past” for women. Her research represents a significant endeavor to retrieve women’s history from the buried past.

In this article, my focus is the gendered war memories of refugee students in both fictional and non-fictional settings. The refugee students’ voices can be found in novels, poems, reportages, biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. These writings inscribe the group of “refugee students” who wrote during the war, or after the war in remembrance of their war experience. ⁸ These works contribute to what Carol Gluck (2007: 57) calls the “vernacular realm,” which encompasses the full production and consumption of war narratives and constitutes the complex picture of war remembrance. While I consider both fiction and non-fiction by Nieh Hualing, I place greater emphasis on the former due to its broader mnemonic scope. This aligns with Ann Rigney’s (2008: 348) assertion of literature’s critical influence in shaping remembrance. Compared to the non-fictional writings, fictions have the “narrativizing and aesthetic power” that cannot be exceeded by the non-fictional ones. Especially for traumatic memories, literature can offer a unique medium, potentially serving as the sole avenue for expressing experiences too challenging for other forms of recounting (Rigney, 2008: 348). Thus, Nieh Hualing’s fictional accounts of refugee students become invaluable, providing insights into the complexities and nuances of the refugee students’ experiences.

Experience and representation of refugee students

In the 1930s and 1940s, there were three waves of refugee students in China, according to Wang Dingjun (王鼎钧) (b. 1925), a prominent writer in the Chinese-speaking world and a refugee student during the Second Sino-Japanese War. These waves comprised: first, youths from Northeastern China leaving Manchuria due to the Mukden Incident on September 18, 1931; second, youths from coastal provinces escaping to inland areas due to the Marco Polo Bridge Incident on July 7, 1937, which was the start of a full-fledged war between China and Japan; and third, youths escaping the Chinese mainland due to the Chinese Civil War (Wang, 2005b: 19). The three waves were related to each other and drove youths to displacement. My focus is on the second wave, since that is the wave that began Nieh Hualing’s displacement. At the same time, Nieh is also part of the third wave and some of her later recollections and representations of the experience during the second wave were colored by her experience of the third wave.

Nieh’s home in Hankou was in the Japanese concession, which was occupied by Japan after the Qing government signed unequal treaties with the foreign powers in the 1850s. In August 1938, her family was forced to leave home to live in exile within China due to the ensuing Battle of Wuhan (June 11, 1938–October 25, 1938) in the Second Sino-Japanese War, with constant air raids in Hankou and approaching Japanese troops (Nieh, 2012: 73). This was an internal displacement.

Living in the Japanese concession, Nieh was a victim of discrimination by foreigners in her own homeland. Wang explains “refugee students” in the second wave as youths who refused to go to Japanese-run schools in the Japanese occupied areas, escaped to the Chinese home front, and attended refugee schools set up by the Nationalist government (Wang, 2005a: 3, 2013a: 1). These refugee schools were usually free of charge and the Chinese Nationalist government offered students loans to maintain their lives (Wang, 2005a: 3). “Refugee students” during the second wave were part of the nationwide refugee flights after the outbreak of full-fledged war between China and Japan (Lary, 2010: 16; Spence, 1990: 445), which can be regarded as “the greatest forced migration in Chinese history” (MacKinnon, 2008: 46–47). ⁹

Wang (2005a: 3) described himself and other refugee students as “patriotic youth” and this is a nationally recognized label. In the minds of refugee students, their homes were merely temporarily occupied by the Japanese troops; they cherished the faith that Chinese people would take the lost land back one day. It was a time of both hope and desperation. While many young people descended into hopelessness and even committed suicide, in contrast, the refugee students’ hope during a wretched time is most clearly shown by the fact that refugee students were usually wholeheartedly devoted to resistance against Japanese aggression by joining the battles and/or through engaging in artistic and cultural activities to publicize anti-Japanese ideologies. Nieh mentions these activities frequently in both her fiction and autobiography, including the singing of patriotic songs, the performing of patriotic dramas, and volunteering to support the daily lives of ordinary people during wartime. And she does so in a way that seems to advocate for patriotic idealism.

While “patriotic” is widely used to describe this large group of refugee students, it is also important to recognize “refugee students” as an existential category. They are “the diasporic within the homeland” who insists “on the impossible in times of extreme violence governed by the logic of bioethnic politics” (Yan, 2017: 259). Many refugee students previously had experienced various foreign cultures, even studying abroad in Japan, Europe, or the United States. They held the dream to be cosmopolitan, but the dream somehow became “impossible” in the heightened nationalism of war. For most of them, since China and Japan were at war, they chose to prioritize the nationalist agenda. Even though they are displaced in their homeland, they remain energetic and enthusiastic, constantly self-reflecting on difficult existential questions and navigating between the obvious ethnocentric nationalism and the seemingly impossible cosmopolitanism. While they were usually involved in involuntary displacement, the refugee students during the Second Sino-Japanese War in Nieh’s works did not leave the Chinese land, and thus they were internally displaced refugees.

The concept of “refugee students” becomes even more complicated if we consider them in a diachronic manner. In retrospect, the displacement caused by the Second Sino-Japanese War was temporary and some of the Chinese people were able to go back to their original homes if they were lucky enough to survive. However, the Chinese Civil War that followed the Second Sino-Japanese War turned the temporary displacement of some Chinese people into a perpetual one. In The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan (2020), Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang (2020: 2, 31, 35) illustrates this continuous “diasporic displacement” (流离 liuli) experienced by mainlanders (外省人 waishengren, literally meaning people from provinces other than Taiwan) who were forced to go to Taiwan from mainland China due to the defeat of the Chinese Nationalist Party in the Civil War. The “diasporic displacement” was not only spatial, but also temporal, as Yang (2020: 10) adds the temporal dimension to James Clifford’s spatial description of the diasporic condition, which is “living here [and now but] remembering/desiring another place [in another time].” Many of the refugee students who experienced these two stages of displacement continued reflecting on their dual war experiences both in literary and biographical genres after the two wars. This was the case with Lu Qiao, Wang Dingjun, and Chi Pang-yuan, as well as Nieh Hualing. While Yang focuses on the diasporic community in Taiwan from mainland China, Nieh’s journey did not stop there. She proceeded to move to the United States largely due to the worsening political atmosphere in Taiwan during the White Terror (1949–1987). ¹⁰ All these experiences are discernible in her works, but the starting point of her diasporic experience is being a refugee student in the Second Sino-Japanese war.

Nieh Hualing’s representation of refugee students

Throughout her writing career, Nieh has narrated her displacement, and the figure of the refugee student appears in all three of her novels—The Lost Golden Bell (失去的金铃子 Shiqu de jinlingzi, 1961), Mulberry and Peach: Two Women of China, and Far Away, A River (千山外，水长流 Qianshanwai, shuichangliu, 1984)—her autobiography, Three Lives, among other novellas, short stories, and essays. As being a refugee student preludes her continuous displaced experience, she keeps coming back to this figure of refugee student, both in (auto)biographical (non-fictional) and literary (fictional) settings.

Nieh’s memories as a refugee student are imbued with the influence of her newer diasporic encounters. While crafting the character of Lingzi, an 18-year-old female refugee student grappling with the tumultuous events of the Second Sino-Japanese War in The Lost Golden Bell, Nieh Hualing draws inspiration from her own name, incorporating the Chinese character Ling (苓) from her name into the protagonist’s name, Lingzi (苓子). This infusion of personal identity endows the character with Nieh’s hopes and beliefs. The novel was penned during a trying period when the progressive journal Free China, for which she served as an editor, was forcibly shut down, and her colleagues were incarcerated by the Nationalist Government during the White Terror in Taiwan (Nieh, 1980: n.p.). In her autobiography, Nieh (2012: 170) recalls the distressing events of September 4, 1960, when her colleagues were arrested by the police and her family turned into “an isolated island” with “police surveillance.” In her essay “Am I the Heroine” written in November 1961, she discloses her struggle with “a serious illness” while composing The Lost Golden Bell, and how “[t]he only thing I can grasp is the enjoyment of being alive and of writing honestly when I’m healthy” (Nieh, 1962: 94–95). Although she refrains from explicitly linking her illness to the political events, the connection is palpable. In this context, the seemingly autobiographical character of Lingzi becomes infused with fervor and passion, embodying the author’s determination to survive the persecution. Lingzi, as a vibrant and spirited figure in the novel, spills over into the author’s own reality, serving as a source of inspiration. In other words, Nieh was the inspiration for the character of Lingzi, while the fictitious character served as an inspiration for Nieh in her real life. For example, Lingzi endures “air raids from enemy planes” and navigates treacherous “whitewater rapids” during her journey from Chongqing (the wartime capital) to her hometown near Wuhan (Nieh, 1980: 1). She also grapples with emotional conflicts among her relatives and neighbors, out of which she matures by learning more about human relationships. Based on Nieh’s essay accompanying the novel, the depiction of the Second Sino-Japanese War in the fiction is juxtaposed with the harsh reality of the White Terror that Nieh was experiencing. Even though direct references to the White Terror are absent in the 1960 novel due to political constraints, both settings echo the menace of violence and the challenges to human existence.

However, Mulberry and Peach was written in a different temporal and spatial setting. By 1963, Nieh (2012: 255) found herself entangled amid the White Terror, grieving the loss of her mother, and burdened by a marriage that offered little solace. It was during the same year in Taipei that she crossed paths with Paul Engle (1908–1991), the organizer of the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. Subsequently, from 1964 to 1966, Nieh engaged in academic pursuits at the University of Iowa and, in 1967, she co-organized the International Writing Program with Paul Engle, fostering interactions with writers from around the world. ¹¹ It was after this period of intellectual and personal growth, characterized by “reading, living, experiencing, thinking, and exploring” in Iowa, that Nieh (1997: 271) commenced the writing of Mulberry and Peach in the early 1970s. The geographical detachment from the two Chinas (the People’s Republic of China, or mainland China, and the Republic of China, or Taiwan), while residing in Iowa, granted her artistic freedom and agency, unfettered by the taboos imposed by Chinese patriarchal and societal values, and the political turmoil of Taiwan. In Mulberry and Peach, Nieh demonstrates audacity by addressing the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War, and alluding to the White Terror. This is in stark contrast to the innocent girl struggling emotionally within China in The Lost Golden Bell, a depiction that clearly entails what a girl is supposed to be like within a normative structure, navigating mother–daughter bonds and romantic anxieties. In this sense, Nieh’s portrayal of refugee students comes to surpass the conventional romantic approach seen in The Lost Golden Bell, and adopts an explicitly sexual approach in Mulberry and Peach, stretching and even breaking normative constraints.

Ultimately, after years of grappling with her writing style, Nieh (1997: 271) reached a profound realization that helped her to find her identity as a writer: “my mother tongue is my root. China is my hometown. Iowa is my home.” This sentiment echoes Leo Ou-fan Lee’s (1991: 215) concept of “Chinese cosmopolitanism,” which is “a purposefully marginal discourse, intended to recontextualize the margins.” Similar to Lee, Nieh occupies the periphery of the Chinese discourse as she resides abroad and on the outskirts of the American discourse as a Chinese American. Nieh has a “fundamental intellectual commitment to Chinese culture” as she works within the Chinese language and engages with the Chinese culture, while also displaying “a multicultural receptivity, which effectively cuts across all conventional national boundaries” (Lee, 1991: 215). The latter is exemplified by her attachment to Iowa as home and China as her hometown.

Within the field of modern Chinese literary studies, questions about Nieh’s identity have arisen. Is she “a Chinese writer, a Taiwanese writer, or an overseas Chinese writer” (Denton, 1989: 137)? One could even add the label of “Asian American writer” to Nieh, given that Mulberry and Peach is also widely discussed in the field of Asian American literature (Chen, 2005; Chiu, 2003; FitzGerald, 2014; Fusco, 2012; Kim, 2017; Micheli, 2018; Wong, 2001). Apart from these obvious national tags, Denton (1989: 137) also proposes calling her the writer of “exile.” But the Asian American Studies scholar Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong (2001: 134) adds that while the writer of “exile” classifies Nieh to be a writer of “world literature,” it “recuperates the notion of a legitimating political and cultural center” of China—a perspective that Wong challenges. In light of this discourse, Nieh’s identity as a writer perhaps can be understood best within the framework of Chinese cosmopolitanism, reflecting a distinctive diasporic condition as she traverses the Pacific Ocean from mainland China and Taiwan to the United States, encompassing multiple identities as Chinese, Taiwanese, and Chinese American. This becomes particularly evident after her relocation to the United States, as readers encounter a greater presence of Chinese American and biracial characters in her works. In addition, Nieh engages more prominently with a transnational storytelling framework in both Mulberry and Peach and Far Away, A River, while The Lost Golden Bell predominantly addresses characters in mainland China.

While Nieh continues to experience diasporic displacement and to explore the interplay between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, the interpretation of the novel Mulberry and Peach developed beyond the author’s expectation, especially taking the transpacific journey of the various readings of the novel into consideration. Mulberry and Peach has a complicated history of publication and literary criticism, which, in retrospect, becomes part of the critical re-membering of the refugee students’ experience in the war because publications worldwide and literary analyses across multiple disciplines—such as Chinese Studies, Asian American Studies, and Feminist Studies—enrich the perspectives to understand Mulberry and Peach beyond the author’s intentions.

When it was first serialized in the United Daily News (a newspaper published in Taiwan) in the 1970s, the novel was censored by the Nationalist Government in Taiwan. The first complete publication in Chinese appeared in Hong Kong in 1976 and it was not until 1988 that the first complete edition was published in Taiwan. ¹² One reason why this novel was censored is that Nieh alluded to the White Terror in the third part of the novel (Xiao, 1980: 187). Another possible reason is that she was translating Mao Zedong’s (1893–1976) poetry with Paul Engle at that time, which made her blacklisted by the Nationalist Government (Zhu, 2012: 219). Thus, the publication history of the novel is “political” (Lee, 2012: 298). When it was first published in mainland China in 1980, the fourth part of the novel was deleted because it was considered too “obscene” with explicit sexual depictions (Pai, 2012: 293). ¹³ In this sense, sexuality is also linked to what is considered political.

The history of literary criticism of this novel has also undergone significant changes from the reading as a national allegory to diasporic and feminist readings. Upon its 1976 release in Hong Kong, the US-based scholar Pai Hsien-yung (b. 1937) emphasized the allegorical reading of the novel—“a fable of the tragic state of modern China”—rather than the personal history of Mulberry/Peach (Pai, 1976: 210). Leo Ou-fan Lee (1991: 146) departs from Pai’s allegorical reading and argues that the novel deconstructs “the master narrative of modern Chinese history” and renews the figuration of “a self-exiled Chinese on the peripheries.” This deconstruction of Chineseness points to what Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong promotes as the Asian American approach of reading the novel (Wong, 2001: 146). As the scholarly discussions of her novel traverse different regions, Nieh’s own interpretation in the forewords and afterwords of different versions as well as her interviews also change from centering on China to highlighting “universality” and “the human condition” (Wong, 2001: 148). Nieh (1997: 272) has expressed her ambition to depict “the conditions of people, not just Chinese people” when writing Mulberry and Peach, emphasizing the portrayal of the cosmopolitan. As Wong (2001: 148) suggests, the novel exhibits a “protean career” with “historical situatedness.” While the labels attributed to Nieh position her in proximity to a center, highlighting cosmopolitanism with an emphasis on Chinese culture as a particular national attachment, the novel itself embodies a deconstructive and adaptable nature (Wong, 2001: 148).

In the subsequent section, I expand on the protean nature of the novel by adopting a diasporic and feminist approach to its analysis. This approach further illuminates the novel’s capacity to transcend the author’s intentions and remain open to diverse readings.

Hypersexuality of Mulberry/Peach

The depiction of sexuality within Mulberry and Peach holds a unique significance, distinct from Nieh’s autobiographical experiences as a refugee student. This narrative introduces two layers of war memories: one through Nieh herself and the other through the female protagonist Mulberry/Peach. In this section, the focus shifts to reinterpreting the female protagonist Mulberry/Peach, exploring how the female protagonist broadens the scope of gendered war memories through a fictional lens.

Mulberry and Peach is divided into four parts in the form of letters written by Peach to the USA Immigration Service with Mulberry’s notebooks attached to the letters. Each of the four notebooks shows a fragment of twentieth-century history. As the story develops, it emerges that Mulberry and Peach are the same woman who suffers from schizophrenia due to her traumatic experience in mainland China and Taiwan. In her life, she tries to escape from her traumatic memories of her family, the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Civil War in mainland China, the White Terror in Taiwan, and the complicated situation as a female Chinese immigrant in the United States. That is why Peach refuses to be recognized as Mulberry and tries to get rid of the memories of Mulberry by recalling and narrating them to the immigration officer. Transforming from a girl within traditional confines to a hypersexual woman, the narrative captures Mulberry/Peach’s evolving journey.

Central discussions about the novel by literary scholars primarily revolve around the female protagonist: her sexual desires and actions, and schizophrenia. How shall we see her sexual desires and deeds? Are these deeds active or passive? How shall we interpret her schizophrenia? Shall we read schizophrenia as a positive or a negative? What will be the final destiny of the female protagonist? Shall we celebrate the novel’s denouement as indicating freedom or lament it as illustrating exploitation? To sum up, does the female protagonist have agency, even in her schizophrenia? To address these inquiries, a feminist perspective is essential in understanding the experiences and memories of the female protagonist. In addition, her life is closely intertwined with her diasporic journey, necessitating the intersection of diasporic and feminist readings.

To contextualize the novel with the historical condition of the refugee students, I emphasize the sexuality of the refugee students in the first part of the novel to read how the female protagonist gradually liberates herself from the patriarchal family and ethnocentric nationalism, including Mulberry’s break from her family and her involvement in a love (more accurately, sexual) triangle with the male Refugee Student ¹⁴ and her lesbian friend Lao-Shih. I also trace the life trajectories of the refugee students in the later part of the novel, especially Mulberry’s schizophrenia.

The writer situates the first part of the novel in the Qutang (or Chü-t’ang) Gorge along the Yangtze River, when the Second Sino-Japanese War was nearing its end between July 27 and August 10 in 1945. While the war is invariably related to horror and cruelty and people involved in the war are required to bear witness to the historical atrocities, the love and sexual triangle can bring fleeting moments of pleasure to the war narrative. It works to challenge the conventional narratives of the war in which everyone is overwhelmed by the atrocious war machine, and it may destabilize the morally justifiable self, acting within this historical violence. The pleasure and struggle experienced through bodies and intimate relationships transcend, even if just temporarily, the extreme condition of the war.

The novel starts with the female protagonist, Mulberry, and her lesbian friend Lao-Shih running away from home to Chongqing (or Chungking). They are both “students at the Provincial High School” (Nieh, 1998: 16). According to Lao-Shih, Chongqing is a paradise for refugee students as it “will take care of our food, housing, school and a job” and students “can do whatever you want” (Nieh, 1998: 16). ¹⁵ Chongqing as the wartime capital signals freedom for Mulberry and Lao-Shih from their patriarchal families. At the same time, it is also the epic-center of patriotism that requires refugee students to fulfill the nationalist agenda of fighting against Japanese aggression. Interestingly, Mulberry’s narrative does not mention whether they reach Chongqing or not, which may signal that resistance against the Japanese aggression is not Mulberry’s major concern. Chongqing as a destination is not significant, but the trip on the move, or the diasporic journey, is. Mulberry and Lao-Shih board the boat to Chongqing with the other three major characters in this part, including the old man, Refugee Student, and Peach-flower Woman. After boarding, the boat becomes stuck on the rocks along the Yangtze River. Although they encounter air raids by the Japanese troops and natural threats of hitting the rocks in torrents, most of the interactions are among the passengers, and they share with each other their wartime personal stories and family memories in this confined space.

The initial segment of the novel signifies Mulberry’s inaugural stride in her defiance against the societal constraints governing Chinese women. Mulberry stole the jade griffin when she ran away from home. The jade griffin is so precious to the patriarchal family because it is the bond of patrilineal inheritance, where only male children can inherit the jade. Her mother hit her when she touched it and even locked her up in the attic because she broke the jade. The figure of the mother here turns into the accomplice of the patriarchal family. According to the Chinese Studies scholar Carolyn FitzGerald (2014: 70), Mulberry’s escape conjures reminiscences of a notable female figure during the May Fourth Movement: Nora, the female protagonist who leaves her family at the end of the play, A Doll’s House, written by Henrik Ibsen. Both Nora and Mulberry are typical characters to symbolize the self-awakening of women out of the patriarchal family. Nora became a famous figure in China in the context of discussions about Chinese women leaving the patriarchal family, because of the modern Chinese writer Lu Xun’s (2017: 256) speech “What Happens After Nora Walks Out.” Lu Xun’s (2017: 257) points out that if there is no social transformation there are “only two options” for Nora: “to fall into degradation or to return home.” Mulberry seems to have followed the first way, as many critics diagnose Mulberry/Peach as having “nymphomania” (Pai, 1976: 210; Ye, 2012: 202). Nieh herself also seemed to categorize Mulberry as such in an interview by stating that she turns into a “sexual pervert” from “such a good girl” (Yao, 2012: 160). However, the two choices of degradation and home-returning suggest a patriarchal interpretation of the possible fates of Mulberry or Nora because, within such confines, “the whorish, the bad, and the dangerous” are to be avoided (Shimizu, 2007: 2). I propose an alternative interpretation, drawing from Shimizu’s idea of hypersexuality. The sexual storyline, conveyed through Mulberry’s letters as presented by Peach, highlights Mulberry/Peach’s practice of agency. Following this line, I will analyze the sexual interaction among Mulberry, Refugee Student, and Lao-shih.

Before they board the boat, Mulberry feels sexually attracted to Refugee Student. Nieh offers here a highly graphic internal monologue:

He’s just escaped from the area occupied by the Japanese. When he gets to Chungking, ¹⁶ he wants to join the army and fight the Japanese. He is barechested, showing off his sun-tanned muscular chest. This is the first time we’ve ever spoken. But I dreamed about him. I dreamed I had a baby and he was the father. When I woke up my nipples itched. A baby sucking at my nipples would probably make them itch like that, itch so much that I’d want someone to bite them. I had another dream about him. It was by the river. A torch was lit, lighting the way for a bridal sedan to be carried up the narrow steps. The sedan stopped under my window. I ran out and lifted up the curtain and he was sitting inside. I told that dream to Lao-shih. She burst out laughing and then suddenly stopped. She said that if you dream of someone riding in a sedan chair, that person will die. A sedan chair symbolises a coffin. I said, damn it, we shouldn’t go on the ship with him through the dangerous Chü-t’ang Gorge if he is going to die! (Nieh, 1998: 21)

From Mulberry’s perspective, Refugee Student’s physical features are sexually attractive to her. Mulberry’s sensual pleasure of the itchiness of the nipples comes from daydreaming about Refugee Student. For the second dream, there is a somewhat unexpected twist because the person sitting in the bridal sedan is Refugee Student and the person to lift the curtain is Mulberry. According to tradition, it is usually the opposite: the bride is the one to sit in the bridal sedan and the bridegroom is the one to lift the curtain. This switching gender roles in a wedding ceremony in Mulberry’s dream can also be read as Mulberry’s first step of self-awakening to control her destiny and sexuality. What is even more intriguing is the way Lao-Shih interprets Mulberry’s dream. She offers a dreadful interpretation of Mulberry’s second dream as if she is jealous of Refugee Student. The reason why I read it this way is because there is a clear description of Lao-Shih as Mulberry’s “lesbian friend” in the English translation (Nieh, 1998: 15). In the original Chinese version, Mulberry and Lao-Shih’s running away from home is described as “elopement” (私奔 siben) (Nieh, 1990: 18); Refugee Student also describes the two as “little couple” (小两口 xiaoliangkou) (Nieh, 1990: 24). ¹⁷ Lao-Shih acts as the guardian of Mulberry and she takes the lead in deciding where to go next. In this sense, Mulberry’s change of affection makes Lao-Shih unpleasant toward Refugee Student.

The next interaction between Mulberry and Refugee Student comes when Refugee Student protects Mulberry by hiding her under him.

Suddenly Refugee Student shoves me to the floor and sprawls on top of me.

A minute ago, we were standing in the aisle. Now our bodies are pressing against each other. He is bare-chested and I can smell the odor of his armpits. Lao-shih’s armpits smell the same way, that smell of flesh mixed with sweat, but smelling it on his body makes my heart pound. I can even feel the hair under his arms. No wonder Mother likes hairy men; I heard her say that once when I was walking by her door. The thick black hair (it must be black) under his arms tickles me. I’m not even scared of the Japanese bombers anymore. (Nieh, 1998: 32)

At this moment, Mulberry’s body is close to that of Refugee Student. She is again sexually aroused by Refugee Student and this sexual attraction also makes her overcome the fear of the war, even just momentarily. This is a significant moment for Mulberry because her sexual fantasy and desire triumphs over the current social concern. At the same time, she also compares Lao-Shih’s and Refugee Student’s odors, and she realizes that she has a crush on Refugee Student. She later compares the hair under Lao-Shih’s arms with that of Refugee Student. Compared to Refugee Student’s “thick black hair,” Lao-Shih “has only a wisp of hair under her arm” (Nieh, 1998: 32). In my reading, Mulberry is more sexually attracted to Refugee Student than Lao-Shih. Although there seems to be some homosexual tendency between Mulberry and Lao-Shih, Mulberry chooses the heterosexual partner.

On the fifth day aground, after dreaming about eagles taking everyone away, which may symbolize everyone’s escape from their destinies, Mulberry has sex with Refugee Student.

Refugee Student, bare-chested, is lying on the deck.

The gorge is black. He reaches up to me. I lie down on top of him. We don’t say anything.

My virgin blood trickles down his legs. He wipes it off with spit. (Nieh, 1998: 45)

Compared to the rich description of Mulberry’s feelings in the previous contacts with Refugee Student, her first sexual intercourse with him is silent. It is perceived by many as a sexual assault because Refugee Student takes the lead and there is no conversational consent. This sexual encounter is contrasted with the seemingly rosy depictions of Mulberry’s sexual desires toward Refugee Student. Yu-Fang Cho (2004: 185, 172) reads this contrast as a “discrepancy between the anticipation and the actual intercourse” and the sexual assault as dramatizing “Chinese male aggression.” However, by borrowing Shimizu’s (2007: 6) concept of “hypersexuality in representation,” which can produce “productive perversity or the critique of the power of normalcy,” I argue that this sexual narrative, which is in the form of Mulberry’s letters offered by Peach, claims Mulberry/Peach’s agency in framing her “erotic journey” (Zhou, 2012: 341). Mulberry later recalls this sexual experience, which is a mixed feeling of pleasure and pain.

I remember when he lay naked on the deck, his weight on my body, head hanging over my shoulder, my thighs wet and sticky. I’m still a little sore there. I couldn’t stop caressing his body, like a rock in the sun, so smooth, warm, hard. So a man’s body was that nice. I wished I could stroke him forever, but when he used all his strength to push into my body, it hurt. How could Peach-flower Woman sleep with her man every night? And even have a baby? I don’t see how she could bear the pain. (Nieh, 1998: 54)

The body touching with Refugee Student is pleasant for Mulberry, but she cannot bear the penetration as a sexually inexperienced girl. This sexual experience also irritates Lao-Shih. When they start gambling on the sixth day aground, Lao-Shih and Refugee Student fight for the ownership of Mulberry by putting her as the wager. Even though Lao-Shih did not witness the sexual intercourse, she somehow knows what has happened and pretends to ignore Mulberry. To cheer her up, Mulberry has seemingly homoerotic contact with Lao-Shih.

I [Mulberry] roll next to her, turn over and climb on her back, as if riding a horse, bumping up and down as if keeping time. I yell with her: “Six points! Six points! Six points! Six points! Six points! If you keep on ignoring me, I won’t let you go. Six points! Six points!”

She [Lao-Shih] suddenly stops yelling, yanks me off and rolls over on the bunk and grabs me. Our faces press together, legs curl round each other, rolling this way and that. She mumbles. “If you ignore me, I won’t let you go. If you ignore me, I won’t let you go.” (Nieh, 1998: 49–50)

As the only homoerotic episode in the novel, it symbolizes the end of Mulberry’s juvenile years. Toward the end of the first part, the gambling is mixed with an atmosphere of everyone being free of moral restriction: Refugee Student cross-dressing as a woman and trying to kiss Lao-Shih; Refugee Student and the old man holding Peach-flower Woman’s feet and “suck[ing] on the cigarettes” (Nieh, 1998: 55). The two men rely on the Peach-flower Woman to take sexual comfort. Unaware of their destinies ahead, they are all in a sexual, carnivalesque atmosphere. It is at this moment that they are told that the Japanese have surrendered, and the boat is able to move again. Even though they are displaced, they are performing vibrancy and opening up spaces for sexual exploration by moving beyond the rigid and heteronormative boundaries imposed by nation-states and regimented daily lives. The displacement becomes paradoxical: although it is out of traumatic experience, the displacement also brings in temporary release from normalcy.

In this carnival, Refugee Student still holds onto his patriotism by critiquing the wrong deeds of the Nationalist Government and being eager to join the army and safeguard the country; at the same time, his sexual affair with Mulberry and his undisguised pursuit of sensual pleasure also loom large. The last depiction of Refugee Student in the first part is ambiguous as “still dressed as the flower drum girl, [he] snatches up a drumstick and pounds on the drum” (Nieh, 1998: 56). It can be interpreted as a dramatic and patriotic scene, which is a typical presentation of refugee students (Li, 1990: 4). However, this interpretation reads the story from a patriarchal and nationalist perspective and puts the male Refugee Student at the center. Noting that Refugee Student still wears women’s clothes due to a gambling loss, this scene showcases his covert exploration of his own body and sexuality as well. In that sense, there is an aspect of subversion, as he acts against the confines of time and place. While he follows the nationalist ideal, Refugee Student also searches for a spiritual displacement out of the gender norms in society.

The sexual affair between Refugee Student and Mulberry has been seen as merely for the “need of the story” to catch readers’ attention (Li, 1990: 4). Compared to the journey of the male Refugee Student, what is more significant is how Mulberry learns about sexuality in such a precarious moment and moves ahead with it. Mulberry does not hide her sexual desire, and she openly explores it to be free of nationalist and gender boundaries. This is an unusual depiction of refugee students that is starkly different from all the depictions in Nieh’s other works. Decentering the male perspective, Refugee Student totally disappears from Mulberry/Peach’s life in the later part of the novel. The only time he is mentioned is during a sexual intercourse between Mulberry and her fiancé, Chia-kang, in the second part when Beijing (or Peking) is besieged by the Communist Party during the Chinese Civil War. Mulberry states that she has “forgotten what happened in the past,” but Chia-kang keeps asking her about Refugee Student (Nieh, 1998: 94). In the fourth part, even though she wants to forget everything in the past, Mulberry suddenly remembers Lao-shih, who was said to be beaten in the student movement during the Chinese Civil War because she was uncertain between the left-wing and the right-wing and she was sleeping with different people (Nieh, 1998: 171). Meanwhile, Peach is resolute in severing ties with Mulberry’s history, embracing a life of hypersexuality. Mulberry/Peach embarks on heterosexual relationships in the United States, including those with Chiang I-po and Teng. While Mulberry grapples with guilt over these relationships, Peach finds enjoyment in them. The prospect of eradicating Mulberry becomes Peach’s aspiration, a way to liberate herself from the constraints of the traumatic past.

You’re dead, Mulberry. I have come to life. I’ve been alive all along. But now I have broken free. You don’t know me, but I know you. I’m completely different from you. We are temporarily inhabiting the same body. How unfortunate. We often do the opposite things. And if we do the same thing, our reasons are different. For instance. You want to keep the child because you want to redeem yourself. I want to keep the child because I want to preserve a new life. You don’t see Chiang I-po anymore because you are scared of the Immigration Service agent; I ignore him because I despise him. When you’re with Teng you feel guilty, when I’m with him I feel happy. (Nieh, 1998: 183)

Throughout the novel, Mulberry/Peach uses her female body and sexuality as a tool to explore the possibility of breaking national and gender boundaries. As I mentioned in the previous section, the interpretations of this novel are moving away from the allegorical reading that reduces Mulberry/Peach to a gendered trope of national sufferings or the maternal embodiment of the nation. Instead, it is more important to recognize how Mulberry/Peach struggles to regain her agency through transpacific sexual explorations. In her lifelong journey, the female protagonist is not searching for one national identity or belonging but overthrows such a necessity; she—as an individual—is the “subject” and “the nation is the ‘other’” (Guo, 2012: 309). Mulberry/Peach’s sexual liberation and defiance of societal norms represent a break from collective memories of the patriarchal traditions. According to the Asian American Studies scholar Tina Chen (2005: 109), viewing her sexuality as reducing women to mere bodies is a patriarchal understanding; rather, “the eroticism of female desire provides a way to break free, however briefly, from the boundaries erected by the flesh.” Paradoxically, the female body can be both confining and liberating within a patriarchal society. Mulberry/Peach’s traumatic memories lead to her schizophrenia that splits one person into both Mulberry and Peach. Schizophrenia is not simply pathological, but also symbolic. It is Mulberry/Peach’s way of restoring her precarious self-identity (Wang, 2013b: 91). Here, schizophrenia turns into a choice for Peach to reclaim her agency. And different attitudes toward sex are part of what distinguishes Mulberry/Peach and allow for the idea of agency to come to the forefront.

In the fourth part of the novel, Mulberry and Peach fight for control of the body, which is explicitly expressed in the novel with Mulberry’s words and thoughts in italicized form. At the end of the novel, Peach seems to win over Mulberry because Peach has the final say in escaping from the psychiatric hospital after being involved in a car accident. ¹⁸ Nevertheless, this struggle is likely to persist, represented by the Sisyphus-like Princess Bird in the epilogue, “flying back and forth between the Sea and the Mountain” to fill the East Sea (Nieh, 1998: 207). This mirrors the ongoing contest between Mulberry and Peach for dominance over the body, the mind, and memory. Various interpretations arise from this conclusion. Grazia Micheli reads this end as “negative mobility and transnationalism,” leading to the female protagonist’s descent into madness (Micheli, 2018: 13). This negative outcome is linked to a life defined by compelled mobility. Conversely, Carolyn FitzGerald (2014: 79) interprets this end on a positive note, suggesting that “it expresses a yearning for new life in a schizophrenic world torn by the madness of war and violence.” This positive perspective encapsulates the ability to forge a fresh existence even after enduring traumatic experiences. FitzGerald’s reading highlights the protagonist’s schizophrenia as a product of the patriarchal power structure. In Tina Chen’s (2005: 107) reading, Mulberry gives way to Peach and Peach embraces madness, as Chen quotes Phyllis Chesler’s statement that “the ethic of mental health is masculine in our culture.” Viewing Peach/Mulberry as requiring psychiatric care succumbs to the patriarchal power dynamic. By ultimately breaking free from the mental institution, she simultaneously liberates herself from that oppressive power structure. This represents her agency and assertion of control. Moreover, it enables her to break free from the shackles of traumatic memories. However, since the struggle between Mulberry and Peach remains unresolved, Mulberry/Peach is not entirely emancipated. Nonetheless she devises a strategy to negotiate with those memories, allowing her to pursue a “wayward” life. In line with Saidiya Hartman’s (2019: 227) insightful declaration in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, “Wayward: the unregulated movement of drifting and wandering; sojourns without a fixed destination, ambulatory possibility, interminable migrations, rush and flight, black locomotion; the everyday struggle to live free.” The term “wayward” implies a departure from the expected path, and a “wayward” life celebrates young black women who navigate uncertainty, resist constraints, and strive to live freely despite challenges and societal norms. In Mulberry/Peach’s case, sexual desires and actions are intrinsically intertwined within the reframing of her agency. These seemingly fleeting sexual gratifications counteract the influence of war and ethnocentric nationalism, signaling a form of cosmopolitanism infused with elements of gender and sexuality.

Conclusion

Mulberry and Peach presents a transformative image of refugee students that challenges the conventional war narratives characterized by patriarchy, nationalism, and patriotism. Through the depiction of the female protagonist’s sexual agency amid the extreme conditions of war, the novel introduces moments of pleasure and discovery that transcend the prevailing representations of wartime experiences. The hypersexual narrative choice serves as a means to disrupt the dominant portrayal of individuals overwhelmed by the horrors of war, and instead, highlights the complexities of human connections and intimate relationships during times of conflict. However, this does not negate the gravity of Mulberry/Peach’s traumatic memories and mental affliction; rather, this fictional account presents an alternate perspective on how one may interpret trauma and mental illness through a feminist lens.

As a writer and immigrant embodying Chinese cosmopolitanism, Nieh Hualing continually draws from her memories to construct narratives of refugee students that engage with her own diasporic experiences. However, the female protagonist Mulberry/Peach in the novel goes beyond the confines of Nieh’s Chinese cosmopolitan identity. Mulberry/Peach utilizes hypersexuality to challenge patriarchal norms and ethnocentric nationalism, demonstrating a perverse resistance even in the face of historical constraints. By journeying across mainland China, Taiwan, and the United States without claiming a stable citizenship, Mulberry/Peach remains boundless and symbolizes the incommensurability of the nationalist narrative of the war.

The portrayal of Mulberry/Peach’s schizophrenia in the novel functions as a “mode of memory for a diasporic unconscious,” inviting reinterpretations of her experiences and memories (Cho, 2008: 185). Through this process of destabilization, the story of Mulberry/Peach reimagines a memorial temporality and space that is feminist and transformative, deconstructing monolithic notions of Chineseness and embracing a profound sense of agency without boundaries.

Based on various interpretations of the novel, Mulberry and Peach emerges to be a powerful and subversive work that transcends traditional war narratives, offering a complex exploration of sexual agency, intimacy, and diasporic experiences within the context of wartime displacement. The novel’s portrayal of the female protagonist, Mulberry/Peach, challenges normative identities and national boundaries, ultimately contributing to a more multifaceted understanding of war memory and human resilience.