If Shao simply wants to contain these out-of-control female (textual) bodies so that the literary circle would get out of the “impotent” (tanruan) entrapment and rid the “plague” circulated by these contaminated female bodies, then TaAi’s A Condemnation on Ten Beauty Writers seems to fall into the same commercial trap of selling sex. A glimpse will suffice to find the titles of the chapters are rather sexually suggestive or explicit, much more so than the writers he attacks.17 In a sense, while the production of “Beauty Writers” was important, it was equally important to let the label live through circulation. Ta Ai’s attack on the Beauty Writers actually ensures it by becoming part of the cultural production of the meanings embodied by these women writers.
There are different ways to interpret the controversies about these women writers of different global Chinese locations, for the controversies were not only the products of their specific times and spaces. They also depend on the unique time and space of the critic. I conducted this research as a Chinese-born, naturalized Chinese American feminist critic, and it is certainly an ongoing study, which is what makes literary and cultural criticism interesting. Meanings are produced, and significance can be changed.
I would like to end this preface with an important note on the flexibility of meaning production. While I group the English texts with the Chinese ones based on their shared negotiated experience with Chineseness and feminism, Brian Hooper’s Voices in the Heart: Post-colonialism and Identity in Hong Kong Literature reminds us of the bilingual tradition of Hong Kong literature. He deals with the identities of Hong Kong through three Hong Kong writers—Patrick Acheson, Lee Ding Fai, and Timothy Mo—whose writings in English are linked to and compared with English literary tradition,18 a radically different approach to Hong Kong literary writings. It not only provides another perspective for the fluidity of Hong Kong writing, but it also sheds light on the social, cultural, and linguistic contingency of such terms as nationalism, feminism, and global Chineseness. While a difference is intended with this cultural “un-production” of controversial Chinese women authors, it is also important to note that this study is product of its own time and space.