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A woman who is inspired by women

By Chitralekha Basu (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-07-09 09:39

Wang Zhousheng owes her writer's vocation to a number of extraordinary women. These include her mother, a soldier's wife who was left to grow cotton to support her nine children in Jiangsu province in the early 1940s, as her father fought the Japanese forces.

"There was no real love between my parents, only a sense of responsibility, binding them to each other," says Wang, grateful for her mother's selfless toil and yet painfully aware of her tragedy.

Later, when Wang went to work on a farm in Chongming Island in 1968, as part of her "reeducation", she met Wang Zheng, a feisty young woman who would talk about evolving ways of fighting the discrimination historically perpetrated on women.

Wang Zhousheng ran into her friend again in the 1980s, in the United States. By then Wang Zheng had graduated from Stanford University and was a rising feminist theorist, trying to motivate the women's associations in China toward greater pro-activism.

Gently prodded by Wang Zheng, Wang Zhousheng went on to enroll in a seminar on Chinese contemporary literature in society at the University of California, Los Angeles. While filling in the form it struck her that there was no field for "sex". The new world's indifference to one's gender unspooled a long yarn of memories and thought in Wang.

The result was Gender: Female, 2001, a novel about a couple who keep trying to have a son but end up producing seven daughters instead, and how their lives pan out against the backdrop of China's turbulent history, 1940 onwards. Wang's soft but unflinching mother, who endured the hardships with a smile, served as a model for the female protagonist.

Her first book, The Student's Wife (Peidu Furen), came out in 1992. "In fact, I was writing all through my farm years (1968 to 79) but was hesitant about publishing till I had developed my own style, rid of stereotypes," Wang says.

Moving to the US with her husband who went there to study for a PhD, in 1985, Wang became a dedicated closet writer.

For four years she played full-time mother to her son even as she was moonlighting as a babysitter, a shop assistant at Papa Fried Chicken and a housekeeper in LA. How she managed to snatch time in between, furiously scribbling down her experiences, is something that still baffles her.

But The Student's Wife, an endearing tale of a Chinese couple's arduous journey in an alien land, having to make do with little money, ramshackle housing and indifferent neighbors, touched hearts and went on to win the Shanghai Prize for outstanding novels and novellas in 2001.

The remarkable life and writings of the author Ding Ling (Jiang Bingzi, 1904-86) remain an enduring influence on Wang's work. Ding's Miss Sophie's Diary (Sufei de Riji), published in 1927, talked about female desire and dissatisfaction with being set up with a spouse, and caused a minor earthquake in the patriarchal Chinese society of the time. Steadfastly committed to the Communist cause, Ding was arrested during the Kuomintang regime and again, later, denounced and put in solitary confinement during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76).

"I was deeply inspired by Ding Ling, especially her point that women should have freedom of choice," says Wang who has written two books on the author. "All her writing is devoted to the cause of woman's liberty."

Wang Zhousheng's new novel, Amnesia, due out this month, is inspired by her mother-in-law, a free-spirited pediatrician with progressive ideas who treated the children of many of the founding fathers of new China, such as Zhou Enlai's adopted children. Late in her life, the accomplished doctor was afflicted with Alzheimer's disease. It reached a stage when she had to check each word in Webster's to remember its meaning.

"I am looking at this development as a metaphor for the nation's forgetfulness," Wang says. "We have forgotten a lot of our history, the poverty and suffering in the 1960s, the deaths caused by erroneous policies."

The young generation is too prone to forgetting, Wang feels.

"If we don't face this history, the young generation will be as restless and radarless as they already are, forgetful of the sacrifice of the Kuomintang in the war against Japanese, for instance. I think we should tell them the truth about the nation's history," she says, earnestly.