CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE: THE FICTION OF CHEN JO-HSI

Chen Jo-hsi (pronounced "Chen Row-Shee" and spelled in pinyin Chen Roxi), who lived in China for seven years during the Cultural Revolution, turned her first-hand experience into fiction, which is part of the trend of Dissent Literature from China. What she portrays, however, extends beyond the particulars of Chinese history to raise such basic questions as the justification of political authority, the need for individual privacy, and the significance of family background. In artistic control and emotional depth, Chen's work is among the best Chinese fiction written for several decades. The stories give poignant insight into the experience of the Cultural Revolution for the Chinese people; they also explore general issues of political power and individual rights: therefore they are not only moving to read but also useful for stimulating far-ranging classroom discussion.

About the Author

Chen Jo-hsi was born in Taiwan in 1938; there she received a pro-Western, anti-communist education. Her writing talent was recognized while she was a student at National Taiwan University, where she majored in Foreign Languages and Literatures and published her first collection of short stories. After her graduation in 1961, Chen Jo-hsi came to the United States to study. In America, she received more positive information about the People's Republic of China, and in reaction against Taiwanese anti-communist propaganda she became an enthusiastic supporter of Maoist China. At Johns Hopkins University, she met Tuan Shiyao, who was a Ph.D. student in fluid mechanics, and they were married in 1964. The young couple shared an idealistic faith in the socialist values and accomplishments of China under Mao; she herself recalled, "We worshipped Chairman Mao then. My husband and I used to read to each other at night from Chairman Mao's poems and then put his book under our pillows before going to sleep" (quoted in Frederick Wakeman, Jr., "The Real China," New York Review of Books, July 20, 1978, p. 9).

In 1966, when her husband had completed his doctorate and Chen Jo-hsi was pregnant, and after two years of soul-searching, they courageously decided to repatriate to China, abandoning their families and western comforts, to "serve the people" in the country they identified as their fatherland and to give birth to their child on Chinese soil as a child of Chairman Mao. They arrived in Peking in October 1966, just at the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution. They spent two years in the Peking Hotel waiting for an assignment to do some useful work. "In those days the status of repatriated Chinese was quite low, especially those who came from America." In the eyes of the rebels, they were either secret agents or incorrigible capitalists. Tuan Shiyao, Chen's husband, was not allowed to teach or to do research in his specialty, but was eventually assigned to work at a waterworks institute in Nanjing which had been closed by the Red Guards. He dug coal for three months, then was sent to undergo "reform through labor" on a May Seventh collective farm in northern Jiangsu. Chen Jo-hsi remained at the Hydraulic Engineering College in Nanjing, helping to care for the thirty or so children whose parents were away undergoing labor reform.

In 1972, Chen Jo-hsi gave birth to another son and was sent to Shanghai Workers' University to learn how model workers taught English. She and her husband were then reunited at the Hydraulic Engineering College in Nanjing. Early in 1973, they requested permission to leave China. Some of the reasons for this second difficult decision, which made then vulnerable to severe criticism, are implicit in "Chairman Mao is a Rotten Egg": the narrator had strong reservations about the effects on children's developing personalities of growing up in such a controlled society. Moreover, the couple probably felt that they could never overcome the suspicions aroused by their backgrounds: Tuan's father had served in the Nationalist Army in Taiwan, and they both had dubious status as intellectuals and as repatriates from America. As Chen Jo-hsi's stories indicate, coming from a "black" class background could be used against any individual-- even a child-- whenever it was convenient.

On November 14, 1973, they left China and settled in Hong Kong. Chen Jo-hsi had not done any writing while in China, and she had determined not to give any account of her experiences after she left, but, as she has explained, she gradually changed her mind while working as a schoolteacher in Hong Kong.

"Originally I didn't wish to talk about my past but wanted simply to get on with the rest of my life. But confined within the human walls of Hong Kong, I felt even lonelier, and I missed my friends on the Mainland.

In my seven-year stay on the Mainland, I accomplished nothing: the land I tilled yielded far from enough even to feed myself. As for teaching, I joined merely in deceiving other people's children. As I thought about this again and again, there was one thing [of importance]: I came to know more about my countrymen. Before, my being a Chinese was taken for granted -- I was born with it and had no choice. After these years in China, I have finally realized that the Chinese people are at once tragic and noble, lovable and respectable: even the most ordinary person has embodied the crystallization of thousands of years of history and culture; he has his own dignity that cannot be altered by any totalitarian political system. Of course, I don't know that many people. But whenever I think of them, it is as if I remembered my relatives and friends in my old hometown in Taiwan, and I feel infinitely warm toward them. To give expression to this sentiment, I again tried to write.

(Translated by Leo Oufan, Lee from Chen's Preface to the Taiwan edition of The Execution of Mayor Yin and Other Stories, in "Dissent Literature," Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, Vol. 1, January 1979, p. 60.)

Chen Jo-hsi's first story, "The Execution of Mayor Yin," was published in the monthly Hong Kong journal Ming Baoin November 1974, a year after her departure from China. This story had tremendous impact in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and among overseas Chinese. It was followed by more stories in Ming Bao in the next two years. In 1976, Chen moved with her family to Vancouver, and a slightly censored version of her collected short stories was published in Taiwan, where they were interpreted as being more unambivalently anti-communist than Chen Jo-hsi had intended. In 1978, these stories were published in English translation and her second collection of stories in Chinese was issued in Taipei. Since then Chen Jo-hsi has also published an autobiographical novel, The Repatriates.