| Chapter : | Introduction |
While Li’s identity as a popular writer provides us a glimpse of contemporary Hong Kong popular culture, Li’s literary obsession with the histories and historical texts of both Hong Kong and Mainland China coincides with the complicated negotiations by the colonial and post-colonial Hong Kong for its own cultural and national identities as well as its own cultural and political significance.
I start with Maxine Hong Kingston in Chapter 1 for the reason that the controversy about Maxine Hong Kingston serves as a blueprint for the understanding of the controversies of women authors from other Chinese communities. The controversy of Kingston’s The Woman Warrior has become a classic debate between feminism and cultural nationalism, applicable to women of color in and beyond the United States. A great deal of research has done on Kingston and the controversy, but many only stops at Kingston or the debate itself. For me, revisiting the debate of the past is only meaningful if it sheds light to the development of feminist criticism today. Focusing on the problematic canonization of the Chinese American female body, I argue that Kingston’s The Woman Warrior is an imagination for a Chinese American heroine, who must develop her individuality outside her repressive community in order to come back to transform and remap it, which is what Kingston has done.
Chapter 2 analyzes the phenomenon of Wei Hui in Mainland China, the commercial success and the final ban of her novel Shanghai Baby. It investigates the emergence of beauty writers and hot (or cool) criticisms as a result of the rising commercial popular culture, and it explores the ambiguity and danger of female sexuality embodied in the new-generation urban female author who distances from nationalist discourses, flirts with popular culture, and fully embraces anything Western. The ban of Wei Hui’s book is directly related to the overwhelmingly negative attacks by literary and cultural critics, deeply rooted in revolutionary nationalist discourses. It reveals the predicament of sex phobic and homophobic state-approved contemporary Chinese nationalist feminism, protected and largely consumed by the nationalist discourse.
Chapter 3 turns to Li Ang, a veteran controversial author of Taiwan and her 1997 The Beigang Incense Burner, focusing on her negotiation between feminism and nationalism in oppositional movement against KMT dictatorship.