Abstract
Situated within the changing economic and political contexts of China’s modernization and globalization, children’s fantasy novels prove to be apt vehicles for exploring the plights and challenges that women and girls face in the new millennium in China. This article provides a feminist critique of two contemporary Chinese children’s fantasy novels, My Mother is a Fairy by Chen Danyan and Jiujiu From the Ghost Mansion by Tangtang, and examines the marginalization and silencing of the otherworld female/child characters in these narratives. It focuses on how they rework old literary tropes and conventions, employing female children as focalizers. These novels are found to construct a binary opposition between the fantastic-female-child and the rational-male-adult, with the latter dominating the female and the child by repressing their propensity for imagination and fantasy. However, although these fantasy novels might seem to conform to the ideological status quo in terms of the patriarchal family structure, they also have a subversive edge in the way that the binary opposition between male and female is transgressed. Such novels point to the formation of a new kind of intersubjective relationship that is based on understanding and tolerance rather than refusal and dominance.
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Notes
Zhang Jiahua (2006) uses Qin Wenjun’s school story series to discuss the contest between essentialism and constructionism and the gendered depiction of femininity and masculinity in Qin’s characters. Qiao Yigang and Wang Shuainai’s article (2017) is a comprehensive literature review of scholarly works that employ feminist theories to analyse Chinese children’s literature; Lisa Chu Shen’s two articles (2017, 2018) focus on the queer possibilities of anti-stereotypical transgressive figures, such as tomboys and effeminate boys, in several realist children’s fictional works.
There is an abridged English translation of the novel by J. J. Jiang and published by Better Link Press in 2006. I use Jiang’s translation as a reference point for my analysis, with some modification. Jiang’s translation uses the past tense, but it is necessary to keep in mind that the Chinese language has no obvious tense signs, such as changes in the verb form. It is also worth noting that the abridged translation does not include any of the photo illustrations that feature in the original novel.
The original Chinese word in Chen’s novel would translate as “jingling,” which is a traditional term referring to unreal beings. It has become the corresponding translation for the English word “elf” in the modern era, so that Tolkien’s word “elves” is translated as “jingling” (Reinders, 2014, p. 6). The word can also refer to Shakespeare’s Ariel, leprechauns, djinns or the Smurfs (“lanjingling,” literally means “blue fairies”), all of which are imported terms, and thus have become words that implicitly signify Western literature and culture. Here I follow the practice of the translator, Jiang, in translating “jingling” as “fairy,” while Chengcheng You translates the title as “My Mother is a Goblin” (2017, p. 97). However, I think “goblin” is less accurate because it connotes beings who are small, ugly, and mischievous, whereas in Chen’s description, “jingling” is another kind of being, blue in colour, transparent, and fragile, but superior to humans because of her ability to fly. I also chose “fairy” as the translation because it has multiple literal and conceptual implications, just like the Chinese “jingling.” As Clare Bradford expresses it: “Fairies may be human-like, but they are not human, and their alterity takes on a variety of forms depending on the conventions, the ideological directions and the literary and historical contexts of the texts in which they appear” (2011, p. 117).
In the following excerpts, I use italics to identify sentences which have been omitted from Jiang’s English version. The translations in italics are mine.
“The Legend of the White Snake” is a famous Chinese legend, which tells of the love story between a female White Snake spirit and a human male, Xu Xian. The earliest full-length version of the legend is a vernacular story recorded in 1624. Hereafter, the story has been continuously rewritten and adapted to suit numerous genres and mediums. For detailed information on this legend, see Idema (2009, 2012).
An English translation of this novel is not available, so all translations are my own.
Jiujiu’s self-denial of her previous, ghostly identity is manifest in the name “Jiujiu,” which is given by her human parents to pair her with her sister. Although she has an original ghost name, Man Xiaoyi, she is very happy to have a new human name and prefers being called by the latter. When her parents refuse to accept her otherness and try to get rid of her, they call her Man Xiaoyi, which hurts Jiujiu’s feelings: “I’d like to be called Jiujiu,” she insists (Tangtang, 2010, p. 148).
These sentences are from Chen’s Afterword for the new edition of her novel, included in the 2014 Chinese version, but omitted from Jiang’s English version.
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Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this paper was first presented at International Research Society of Children’s Literature Congress, 29 July–2 August 2017, Toronto, Canada. The author thanks John Stephens for his insightful comments on this article. The author also acknowledges David Rudd for his thoughtful editorial suggestions as well as two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of this manuscript. This study was funded by China Scholarship Council (CSC) - Macquarie University Joint Postgraduate Scholarship Program.
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Cathy Yue Wang received her PhD degree from Macquarie University. Her project focuses on the transformation and adaptation of traditional stories in contemporary fantasy films and novels in China. Her forthcoming publications include book chapters in Sexuality and Sexual Identities in Literature for Young People and Transmedia in Asia and the Pacific - Industry, Practice, and Transcultural Dialogues and journal articles in Asian Studies Review and Series: International Journal of TV Serial Narratives.
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Wang, C.Y. Disappearing Fairies and Ghosts: Female and Child Characters as Others in Chinese Contemporary Children’s Fantasy. Child Lit Educ 51, 433–450 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-019-09391-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-019-09391-8