Abstract
This article reads contemporary Chinese children’s author Yin Jianling’s novels The Paper Puppy (Zhiren) and Orange Fish (Juzi Yu) alongside her letter collection Fifteen Letters to Girls (Zhi Weilai de Ni) to explore the overarching themes of femininity, difference and female sexualities. The Paper Puppy weaves homoeroticism, heterosexuality, pre-marital sex and teenage pregnancy into one single novel. Homoeroticism, linked with the curiosity for the changing adolescent female body, marks the end of sexual innocence and the beginning of sexual awakening for protagonist Su, which is entwined intricately with the adolescent girl’s physical, emotional and psychological maturation. In contrast, heterosexuality is portrayed in both novels as a deviant and potentially perilous site for adolescent girls. Fraught with the attendant risks of pregnancy, abortion and even suicide, adolescent heterosexual relationships are to be cautioned against. The analysis suggests that despite her self-proclaimed re-traditionalisation and anti-feminist stance in the letters, the sexual discourses in Yin’s novels are much more subtle and complex, saturated with feminist and queer overtones. Significantly, in the development of adolescent female sexualities, whether homoerotic or heterosexual, the role of motherhood and adult mentorship is highlighted.
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Notes
I am not applying the term Bildungsroman to my discussion of contemporary Chinese female coming-of-age narratives because, although according to some scholars the Bildungsroman genre has expanded in recent decades (see, e.g., Graham, 2019) to accommodate “coming-of-age narratives that bear only cursory resemblance to nineteenth-century European models” (Boes, 2006, p. 231), historically, discussions of the Bildungsroman have been characterised with andro-centricity (see, e.g., Buckley, 1974), as is the case with many other genres in the male-dominated literary traditions. Although the term “female Bildungsroman” has been employed by scholars examining patterns of female coming of age in the recent decades (Labovitz, 1986; Fuderer, 1990; Maier, 2007; McWilliams, 2009), there is also marked suspicion with such usage (Pratt, 1981; Abel et al., 1983; Lazzaro-Weis, 1990; Fraiman, 1993).
There is an English version of the novel Paper Puppy which was published in 2016 by Dolphin Books in Beijing, China. However, all the quotations in this article, including those from Zhiren (Paper Puppy), are my own translations from Yin’s original Chinese works.
A case in point is a 1995 conference in Beijing on Chinese Women and Feminist Thought, hosted by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, where many Chinese women intellectuals refused to be associated with the term “feminism” which, to them, produced a series of negative implications. Harriet Evans notes that many of the women participants voiced the opinion that “feminism” was “an expression of the individualistic tendencies of Western ideologies and of attempts to assert power over men” (1997, p. 223).
In Between Women, Sharon Marcus draws a distinction between homoeroticism and homosexuality by distinguishing the erotic from the sexual. She draws on Roland Barthes’ definition of the erotic “as an affective valence defined by intensity, obsessiveness, theatricality, and pleasure” (2007, p. 114). Sharon suggests that Barthes locates the erotic not in sexual acts but in practices of classifying, ritualisation, and image-making and in emotional states: “Erotic relationships involve intensified affect and sensual pleasure, dynamics of looking and displaying, domination and submission, restraint and eruption, idolization and humiliation” (p. 114).
Published first in 1986 in Taiwan, Paper Marriage (Zhihun) was authored by Chen Ruoxi (Chen Jo-his), a native Taiwanese writer. Her novel came out three years after the publication of Taiwanese author Pai Hsien-yung’s Crystal Boys (Niezi), commonly recognized as the first modern queer novel in Chinese. These two novels stand apart from earlier works that contain explicitly homoerotic undertones, although Chen’s work has not received the same kind of critical attention from queer scholars. Although Pai’s novel is more famous in the West, Chen’s Paper Marriage is considered by Chinese critics to be a milestone in the history of modern queer literature as well (Liu, 2010, p. 316).
According to Castle, the lesbian novel of adolescence “depicts female homosexual desire as a finite phenomenon—a temporary phase in a larger pattern of heterosexual Bildung”. As such, it is almost always dysphoric in tendency (p. 85). On the contrary, the lesbian novel that is euphoric in tendency contains “an essentially comic, even utopian plot pattern” where there is no going back for the female character who has developed homosexual desire (p. 86).
For Yin’s adolescent female characters, abortion seems to be the only viable option after pregnancy. This is in accordance with mainstream Chinese culture that deems teenage motherhood as completely unacceptable, which explains why adolescent fiction portraying teenage motherhood is almost nonexistent in contemporary Chinese literature. For teenage girls who become pregnant, abortion is the only choice left to them. Yin’s story makes it clear, through the fate of the girl in adolescent Xia’s school, that a teenage mother has no future. This stands in contrast with cultures in which teenage motherhood is a reality represented in young adult fiction and a possible topic of contention (Coffel, 2002; Nichols, 2007; Smith, 2017).
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Shen, L.C. Femininity, Homoeroticism and Heterosexuality in Yin Jianling’s Female Coming-of-Age Narratives. Child Lit Educ 52, 378–395 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-020-09417-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-020-09417-6