Abstract
The book, The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination, though not the orthodox urban text, is an inspired literary study of contemporary Chinese urban society.
The author Haiyan Lee ‘seeks to delineate the contours of the modern Chinese moral imagination by focusing on the figure of the stranger in literary and popular cultural representations’ (p. 29). One important question she proposes is how people stay and interact with strangers against the backdrop of the dismantling of the socialist planned economy and the waning of Marxist ideology in China. The materials used cover a wide range of literature and art including fiction, film, television and exhibitionary culture, from the early 20th century to the new millennium.
The concept of ‘stranger’ in this book is different from the conventional understanding. It is: defined from a collective point of view, as the one who does not belong to “us,” the in-group, the imaginary self-same community, and who nonetheless lives (temporarily or indefinitely) among “us” and whose presence renders the self incoherent or alienated but also creates possibilities of regeneration and ethical transcendence. (p. 30)
According to this definition, foreigners, peasant migrants, bourgeois intellectuals, class enemies, unattached women, animals and even god, ghost and spirit are all strangers. They are categorised into three groups and elaborated in two chapters in each section of the book.
Part I: Alien Kind refers to apparitions and animals. Lee asserts that, in modern China, ‘apparitions and animals are still the master heterological trope, embodying the illusions of the superstitious peasants, the projections of urban anxieties, the ecological pieties of ethnic minorities, or the precarious life of a subject population’ (p. 31). In Chapter 1, Lee examines four texts of 20th-century literature – The New Year’s Sacrifice, The White-Haired Girl, Soul Mountain and Here Comes the Ghost Eater. In these texts, modern-educated narrators encounter the religious beliefs and practices of peasants or minority groups whose cosmological embeddedness makes them and their deities strangers to secular modernity. Lee’s analyses imply that modernity does not have all the answers to existential questions, and that the banishment of specters has only made the marginalised segments of the population even more vulnerable – not to the blight of superstitions, but to the predation of uneven development. In Chapter 2, Lee contends that animals are the preeminent strangers in human society whose state of being other-than-human is also why they are indispensable to human living, thinking and feeling. She traces the changing human-animal relations in Chinese literature and thought by deeply reading the classic vernacular novel, Journey to the West, and three animal-themed contemporary novels, namely, Such Is This World@Sars.Come, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out and Wolf Totem, as well as the film Cala, My Dog! Two emerging discourses are identified, one totemistic and one humanitarian, which are increasingly entwined with questions of ethnic identity and social justice. Whereas animals are marvellous creatures with fabulous powers in the vertical cosmic order of premodern times, under modernity they have become humanity’s helpless ward (pets) and casual victim (game and livestock), while also serving as living symbols of the state of exception inhabited by human and nonhuman animals alike (p. 31).
Part II: Fictive Kin. Chapter 3 pays attention to the stranger woman, focusing on ‘the woman who drifts in and out of the home/homeland, who comes into contact with the foreign/alien, and who is forever seeking to belong but cannot belong anywhere’ (p. 120). A Flower in a Sea of Sin (and sequels and other variations of the Sai Jinhua legend), When I Was in Xia Village, The Serial Mistress and Hibiscus Town are four key books chosen for analysis. Unlike other interpretations of ‘the strangerhood of women’, Lee proposes two historically connected arguments. First, in the early part of the 20th century, the courtesan house can be viewed as ‘an interstitial public sphere’ which means a fluid assemblage of spaces at the interstices of kinship, officialdom, capitalism and colonialism, and an enabling site for modern subjectivity and political agency. In these spaces, unattached women can create freedom and agency for themselves by acting as intermediaries between antagonistic groups. Second, towards the later part of the century, unattached women have become a menace, a metaphor of the intrusive state and the object of neoliberal ridicule. Chapter 4, titled ‘The Country and the City’, is the chapter most related to urban studies in the whole book. It looks at transplanted or transient strangers such as maids and tenants in the city or exiled coastal intellectuals in the hinterland, who break the social stagnation and moral ossification of the local community. In both cases, the city/country cleavage furnishes the backdrop for rollicking experiments in the art of civility.
Part III: Friends and Foes. In Chapter 5, Lee uses the concept of ‘class racism’ to interpret the exhibitionary practice of a provincial museum called Liu Wencai’s Manor Houses (Liu Wencai zhuangyuan). She attempts to show how class enemies were rendered alien to the socialist nation whose internal fault line of friend and foe fluctuated violently and with fateful consequences for many who regarded China as the ‘motherland.’ Towards this end, Lee emphasises the nationalist face of Chinese communism and how class was racialised to serve as a principle of exclusion and closure in Mao’s China (p. 202). In Chapter 6, Lee turns to foreigners, and examines two visual texts produced in the reform era, Devils on the Doorstep (Guizi laile, dir. Jiang Wen, 2000) and Nannies for Foreigners (Shewai baomu, dir. Zhuang Hongsheng, 2001). The core concept in this chapter is ‘vernacular cosmopolitanism’, a cosmopolitanism of contingency and marginality, which often brushes against the grain of nationalism even while remaining tethered to it (p. 264). By analysing peasants in rural north China under Japanese occupation (in Devils on the Doorstep) and women working as live-in maids in Shanghai’s expatriate homes (in Nannies for Foreigners), Lee argues that a cosmopolitan ethos does not necessarily presuppose mobility but must be alive to experiences of dislocation brought on by war or global capitalism and at tension with hegemonic nationalism (p. 264). She contends that the practice of vernacular cosmopolitanism can undermine hegemonic nationalism and project its transnational aspirations.
Lee closes the book with a short concluding chapter in which she takes up literature’s relationship to ethics and politics. In her mind, the corrective to the overpoliticisation of literature is not the total refusal of politics, but is instead politicisation of a different order. She calls it ‘the ethical turn’, with which she seeks to articulate the ethical and political relevance of literature to such cherished ideals as liberty, justice, democracy and cosmopolitanism.
Obviously, The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination, written by a literature researcher, appears to be a ‘strange’ book to urban researchers. The materials used and the methodology adopted in this text are different from the dominant research interests and approaches in urban studies. However, I still highly recommend this book. The first reason is that its in-depth analyses of strangers in modern China are beneficial to Chinese urban research. The economic reforms of China have dramatically scrambled the webs of familiarity and thrown more and more strangers into proximity in big urban centres and small townships alike. The management of stranger sociality has become a difficult problem. This book can enlighten our research in this field. Second, this book shows us how to analyse the literature and art text sophisticatedly. Many urban researchers have paid attention to literature and other types of texts, but the majority of them haven’t perfectly mastered the approaches and skills of text reading. Lee’s sensitive analyses of stranger-figures are fascinating. She combines text reading with political theories and social theories, interprets various texts with consummate skills, ruminates on the research theme deeply by outstanding and fruitful reading and eventually makes The Stranger and the Chinese Moral Imagination a stupendous monograph. In sum, this is a brilliant book.