Chinese Literature and Culture Volume 6 — Eileen Chang

Slavoj Žižek looks awry at classical Chinese thought, “Is, then, Heaven not the Chinese name for the big Other? Is not, in this sense, the Communist Party rule legitimized by the Mandate of Heaven...” Our gaze shifts to see a surprisingly contemporary relevance in the ongoing battle between Confucius and Hanfei. In Eileen Chang's “The Blockade,” as the trolley car comes to a standstill, time itself veers into an eternal moment of free imagination, revealing the fantasy underpinnings of humdrum life. In “A Xi's Blind Dates,” Chinese writer Yan Xi Zao vividly depicts the everyday life in Southern China, and the spiritual quality of optimism of the hero, A Xi, in harmony with the varying social and cosmic forms taken by fate. The stories and essays of this volume present a Chinese culture from past to present bubbling with vitality and value for today's emerging cultural paradigm. The plot of Eileen Chang's “The Blockade” deals with a few minutes of time in a tram car during a blockade of Shanghai, focusing on the actions and thoughts of a married man and a young woman university teacher. The unique circumstances of the blockade suspend normal reality, allowing the mind of each to fantasize a relation with the other, the blockade breaking the normal flow of life and instigating in the young woman a moment of desperate reflection on the situation of her marital status. With the lifting of the blockade, the imagination is again blocked. “A Xi's Blind Dates” is one of two stories in this volume by Yan Xi Zao, a woman writer from mainland China currently living near Chicago. The hero, A Xi, is an unmarried man in his fifties, whose mother is pressuring him to find a suitable wife to comfort him in his elderly years. The blind dates arranged by a matchmaker dominate the gossip of the country wives at the village well and provide a spark of life in the dreary environment of the spring damp, typical of China's southern coast. A Xi's demeanor and optimism in view of his fate reflect the core of the Chinese character in coming to terms with pivots of meaning beyond social discourse. “The Cobbler,” the second story by Yan Xi Zao, presents the life of a working couple running an independent and very small business. In a situation very typical in any of China's metropolises, Old Zhang the cobbler and his wife are trying to make money in the city to provide a future for their children that they've left back home with their own parents. The somber opening scene presents the framework of the story, the cycles of nature, return of life to dust. A tragic scene within this story bears out a fundamentally Chinese world-view, the unity of the spiritual and material facets of existence, the holiness and sacredness of the moment.