Introduction

With the advent of Western colonialism in China from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,Footnote 1 literary works that represent the China-West encounter inevitably bring issues of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality and gender into dialogue with one another. Such texts, ranging from Lao She’s Er Ma (Mr. Ma & Son) (2018/1931) in modern literature to Hong Ying’s Yingguo Qingren (English Lover) (2003) in contemporary literature, lucidly illustrate the intricacies and dilemmas faced by protagonists caught in cross-cultural settings. The question of the racial/ethnic Other speaks to the very nature of children’s and young adult literature which has long been conceived as a mechanism for socialisation and enculturation, a mechanism that presents models for understanding the world, the self and others. With increased mobility and migration in recent decades, the racial/ethnic Other has become increasingly visible in Chinese children’s and young adult literature. How do different categories of identity interact with one another to give form to the varied representations of cross-racial interactions? How do gender and sexuality in particular intersect with race and ethnicity to produce overseas Chinese subjectivities? In this essay, we read the serial fiction of Chinese-German children’s author Wei Cheng to explore the ways in which national and racial distinctions merge, interlock and subsequently complicate—and are in turn complicated by—patriarchal gender dynamics. In Disturbing the Universe, Roberta Seelinger Trites posits contemporary young adult literature as a postmodern form representing conflicts of power and institutional discourses experienced by young adults, who “learn to negotiate the levels of power that exist in the myriad social institutions within which they must function, including … social constructions of sexuality, gender, race, class” (2000, p. 3). For those caught in China-West cross-cultural encounters, the challenges to negotiate and maneuver those social constructions prove to be more daunting and formidable due to the country’s colonial past.

Our choice of Wei Cheng’s fiction is tactical—it is an effort to grapple with the multitude of challenges presented by complicated structures of power in the field of Chinese children’s and young adult literature where discussions of cross-racial tensions have been largely absent, due partly to the prevalence of the humanist discourse which, in celebrating human dignity and equality, is inclined towards positive, sanguine messages, and partly to the dismissal of overtly politicised interpretations of literary texts produced for children. Prize-winning children’s author Cheng was born in 1957 in Jiang Su Province to intellectual parents who cultivated in her an ardent love for literature. She started to publish literary works in 1975, the year when she graduated from high school. However, like many of her contemporaries, Cheng had to go to the countryside and become engaged in agricultural work for a while before she was able to come back to the city to attend university. She graduated from the Department of Chinese in Nanjing University in 1982, by which time she was already a member of the Chinese Writers Association, writing and publishing literary works for young readers. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Cheng, having graduated from university, was selected for a place on a China-Germany cultural exchange program where she earned an opportunity to study at the University of Hamburg. Having worked at a television station in Jiang Su for a while after graduating from university, Cheng, who had by then accumulated some work experience in the television industry, went on to study at the then West Berlin International Television Center and remained in Germany, where she worked for Second German Television (ZDF or Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen). For more than a decade, Cheng traveled to China numerous times to help produce documentaries on subjects ranging from Confucius to the First Emperor of Qing, from Marco Polo to the Silk Road. In 2008, after sixteen years, Cheng decided to officially return to writing fiction for young readers in China.

Cheng’s fiction produced after 2008 frequently addresses the dilemmas faced by young Chinese girls in Western contexts. Her Shaonv hong (Red Girls) serial fiction effectively reveals how certain reified ideas about China and the West work their way into the representation of gender in fiction. On the surface, these ideas suggest how a Chinese writer represents China and the West for her young Chinese readerships. On a deeper level, however, they bear on how the West is conceived by a Westernised Chinese intellectual, and how China and the Chinese are perceived through an Orientalist gaze.Footnote 2 In contemporary critical vocabulary, the term “Orientalism” is most closely associated with Edward Said (1978). The question of representation necessitates revisiting the terms which Said and his critics have expounded (Clifford, 1988; Schaub, 1989; Prakash, 1990; O’Hanlon and Washbrook, 1992; Lowe, 1994; Bayoumi and Rubin, 2000; Irwin, 2006; Dodson, 2010; White, 2013; Makdisi, 2014; Gallien and Jovik, 2015). In Orientalism, Said famously argues that the Orient was almost a European invention, a system of knowledge (or discourse) about the Orient, through which the Orient is filtered through to the Western consciousness: Orientalism is, in short, “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (1978, p. 3). Said highlights the fact that the Orient and the “Orientals” are made Oriental by the West (p. 6). Orientalism, however, is in fact a relationship, whose emergence is predicated upon the complicity of the “Orientals” themselves. Although the Orient in Said’s theory consists mainly of the Middle East and the Near East, critics have effectively extended the scope of Said’s analysis to the Far East, including China. The term self-Orientalisation has been theorised, most notably, by Arif Dirlik in the context of China studies. Dirlik points to the contemporary “self-Orientalisation” of Chinese intellectuals, emphasising the complicity between Westernised intellectuals and the discourse of Orientalism: Orientalism, regardless of its ties to Eurocentrism both in origin and in its history, in some basic ways required the participation of Orientals for its legitimation (1996, p. 112). This essay argues that Cheng’s fiction engages in an act of self-Orientalisation, whereby racial and colonial discourses intertwine with patriarchal ideologies to produce versions of Chinese femininity that are deeply Orientalist. As someone regarded as an “Oriental,” Cheng, having emigrated to Germany, where she has lived for more than two decades, could be considered as an Orientalist at the same time, a Westernised Oriental female intellectual who narrates China and the Chinese as the Other—first in German TV documentaries and then through her fiction—despite the fact that her fictive stories are written in Chinese for her young readerships in China.Footnote 3 A critical, more nuanced reading of her texts shows, however, that self-Orientalisation does not have to be complicit with Orientalism. Instead, it could function as strategic essentialism that interrogates and counters the underlying premises of Orientalism, inherent in which are crucial inner contradictions that allow for the emergence of the counter-gaze.

Under the Gaze of the Orientalist: Western Masculinity and Chinese Femininity

In contemporary cultural criticism, the “gaze” is often associated with cultural hegemony. In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault develops the concept of the “gaze”Footnote 4 as an apparatus of power in institutional settings such as the prison and the school, used as a means of supervision and discipline. The gaze “manifests the subjection of those who are perceived as objects and the objectification of those who are subjected” (1995/1977, pp. 184–185). As such, it signifies an unequal power relationship, one that grants authority and superiority to the gazer, and renders the object of the gaze powerless. Around the same time, John Berger, in Ways of Seeing (1972), introduced the concept of the “gaze” when analysing the image of woman as passive and sexualised objects in European art and culture. The concept was subsequently picked up by Laura Mulvey to critique traditional representations of women in cinema. The term “male gaze,” attributed to Mulvey (1975), has since been applied, in feminist studies, to refer to an act of depicting women and human experience in general from a masculine, heterosexual perspective, signifying unequal gender relations and power difference. Similarly, the concept of the “Orientalist gaze” has been used, in postcolonial studies, to analyse unequal power relations and its representation in national culture (Zerman, 2019), popular media (Park and Wilkins, 2005; Gates, 2021) and literature (Bloom, 2001; Klein, 2013). Although the “gaze” is nothing new in children’s literature, with fresh perspectives emerging in recent years (Dula, 2020; Helm, 2023), questions of how the “Orientalist gaze” colludes with the “male gaze”—how it is complicated by and in turn complicates gender dynamics—still await to be explored to generate interesting perspectives.

As a field, children’s literature responded, rather belatedly, to postcolonial theory at the turn of the century, two decades after the publication of Said’s work.Footnote 5 The earliest attempt at engaging Said’s theory was made by Perry Nodelman (1992) who, in his essay “The Other: Orientalism, Colonialism, and Children’s Literature,” establishes children as a colonised group of people who stand in a similar relationship to adults as Orientals do to Orientalists. Nodelman’s construction of children as the Other, however, is metaphorical, and therefore does not address postcolonial concerns. The situation has changed since the turn of the century (see Khorana, 1998; McGillis, 2000; Bradford, 2007), with new additions to the existing body of scholarship in the last decade (Grzegorczyk, 2014; González, 2018). Still, the deployment of postcolonial theory in children’s literature promises to open up new interpretive spaces when gender perspectives are brought into view. Shaonv de Hong Chenyi (The Girl’s Red T-Shirt), to be discussed in this section, introduces a Chinese girl raised in Germany, the European country which became the author’s own second home. Germany is an archetypal Western country, an unequivocal representative of the Occidental world. When gender is brought to bear on the cross-cultural encounter, the union between a white German man and a Chinese woman accentuates the collusion between Orientalism and patriarchy to the greatest possible extent.

The protagonists in The Girl’s Red T-Shirt are female twins named Tang Ni and Tang Li. The twins are separated as babies when their parents divorce. Tang Ni is taken by the mother to live in Germany while Tang Li remains in China to be raised by the father. They are only reunited when 15-year-old Tang Ni makes up her mind to find her sister in China during a summer vacation. Though they look almost the same, the twins find, to their dismay, how different they are due to their different upbringings. The portrayal of Tang Ni implicates categories of age, gender and race in the construction of an overseas Chinese subjectivity. She is not only the child Other, but also the feminine Other and the “Oriental” Other to the sophisticated white German male professor whom her mother re-marries. Caught between the Chinese mother and the German stepfather, Tang Ni finds herself at a crossroad which, nonetheless, does not pose any difficulty to the young girl. Mentored by the German stepfather since a young age, Tang Ni certainly knows which direction to take. The novel portrays the Chinese mother as an autocratic, domineering figure who attempts to constrain the thoughts and actions of her daughter, reminding the reader of the “tiger mother” stereotype (Chua, 2011). The German stepfather, on the other hand, is portrayed as the complete opposite—open-minded, liberal, understanding, supportive, and good-tempered—a true gentleman, whose words Tang Ni “remembers by heart and abides by in action” (2015a, p. 40).Footnote 6

The representation of the Chinese mother and the white German stepfather is intriguing and suggestive of the intricate collusion between Orientalist and patriarchal ideologies. To be sure, the term “Oriental” connotes not only difference and exoticism, but also inferiority and objectification. The difference signified in the term is not only geographical, socio-political, and cultural, but also sexual. The history of the Western encounter with China has been a history of attraction, fascination, exoticisation and subjugation. That history is neatly crystallised in the very first encounter between the German professor and the Chinese mother. It is a story that has been told many times. As Tang Ni later recounts to her sister: one afternoon, sometime after her arrival in Germany, their mother walks out of the university library with a pile of books in her hands. The book on the top of the pile drops to the ground. At this moment, the German professor who passes by kneels down to pick up the book. The professor, famous for his belief in celibacy, is stunned and fascinated by the mother’s exotic beauty and marries her shortly afterwards (2015a, p. 36). In The Asian Mystique, Sheridan Prasso succinctly points out that Asian women are taken as the objects of “an almost mystical sexual fascination” (2005, p. 10) with the rise of European colonial involvement in Asia, and such fascination contributes to “identifying Asia with ‘the feminine’” (p. 11). If, as Linda Hutcheon suggests, women have been historically “relegated to the fringes of the dominant culture” (2002, p. 17) in the West, what does it mean, then, to be an Oriental female in Germany? What does it mean to be an Asian woman, the stereotypical image of the Exotic Other in the West? In “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Chandra Talpade Mohanty contends that a homogeneous notion of the oppression of women as a group produces the image of an “average third world woman” who leads an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender and her being “third world” (1997, p. 95). Since the Orient/China is feminised when it is colonised, the Chinese woman suffers what might be called double feminisation (see, for example, Arisaka, 2000).

In her protest against feminism’s exclusion of women of color, black American feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw calls for an understanding and recognition of the difference that difference makes (1997, p. 190). In the context of Asian feminism in the West, particularly as it relates to an intersection of multiple identities, “difference” takes on various dimensions not solely limited to gender, but incorporating race/ethnicity, class, and sexuality. Said refers to Flaubert’s encounter with an Egyptian courtesan which produced “a widely influential model of the Oriental woman”:

she never spoke of herself, she never represented her emotions, presence, of history. He spoke for and represented her. He was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male, and these were historical facts of domination that allowed him not only to possess Kuchuk Hanem physically but to speak for her and tell his readers in what way she was ‘typically Oriental.’” (1979, p. 6)

The Orientalist representation of the Asian woman thus often cast her as timid, exotic, sexually alluring, unenlightened, passive and submissive (Chow, 1991; Mohanty, 1991; Mann, 2004). These adjectives have also figured in Western feminist discourses about the Asian woman who has tended to be constructed as the passive victim, the “non-feminist Other” vis-à-vis the Western feminist subject (Ong, 2001). As Asian feminist scholars have made clear, however, this is only part of the story. The Oriental woman, the Asian woman in particular, can be broken down further into two contrasting types: the docile doll/Lotus Blossom type and the diabolic Dragon Lady type (Tajima, 1989; Chen, 1992; Shah, 1997; Uchida, 1998; Prasso, 2005; Sengupta, 2006; Clark, 2012).Footnote 7 By depicting all Chinese mothers as autocratic and disrespectful of the free will of their children, Cheng’s novel not only assigns the value of liberty and autonomy to the West, but further Orientalises and dehumanises the Chinese woman, fitting her neatly into the diabolic Dragon Lady category and banishing her to the uncivilised who need to be enlightened by the civilised, masculine West. Understandably, therefore, as a Chinese woman, the mother, the female Oriental Other to the modern masculine West, is relegated to the very bottom of the gendered and racialised hierarchies, at the top of which stands the white German stepfather.

It may be tempting to argue, nonetheless, that the Chinese mother represents all parental figures in China, or more broadly, the unenlightened Oriental masses vis-à-vis the enlightened West. Since the feminisation of the Orient has applied to the Oriental man, scholars have analysed how the Chinese male, constructed as weak and effeminate, remains the feminised Oriental Other to the Western man (Louie and Edwards, 1994; Song, 2004).Footnote 8 The same rationale that makes the Chinese woman desirable renders the man unmanly and undesirable. Although Tang Ni’s biological father, the successful Chinese businessman named Tang Jianguo, is depicted in a far more positive light than the mother, he is still overshadowed by the German stepfather. In a revealing dialogue between Tang Ni and her newly found biological father in China, the reader learns how the Chinese father, like his daughter and ex-wife, holds the German stepfather in extremely high regard. He looks up to the German for the excellent job the latter has done in raising his daughter:

Pausing for a second, Tang Ni continued: “Dad, do you know that my German dad is extremely good?”

“I know.” Tang Jianguo replies briefly.

“He is so good to me as well.” Tang Ni adds warily.

“I know.”

“How do you know?” Tang Ni does not like perfunctory answers. The German dad never does that, neither should her biological dad.

Tang Jianguo stops walking. Holding Tang Ni’s face in his hands, he sighs with emotion and says: “My child, I saw him in you. I am grateful to him!” (2015a, p. 190)

Instead of being resentful, the Chinese father is grateful; and the child also looks up to her white father as her role model, whom she shows great admiration. Although she clearly wants to be equal with her Chinese father in every possible way, Tang Ni “would heed every word uttered by the German stepfather, and act accordingly” (2015a, p. 62). Her obedience toward the white German father illuminates the destiny of the gendered and racialised child Other in Western contexts.

Written more than two decades after the author’s emigration to Germany, Cheng’s novel presents a great case in point for what has been called “positional superiority” (Vukovich, 2012, p. 3), the underlying foundational rule of colonial discourse that places “the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing him the upper hand” (Said, 1978, p. 7). To be sure, Cheng’s novels are not devoid of so-called progressive ideals. Yet, her idea of “progress” is deeply shaped by linear, teleological readings of history, which hold up the Western notion of progress as a universal referent to which Oriental countries aspire. Self-Orientalisation in this case can be deeply coercive and complicit with Euro-American power. In Orientalising the Self, Cheng’s novel also constructs the myth of the Occident for her young Chinese readerships, a vision of Occidentalism that reinforces the West as the ideal of progress. The term Occidentalism, which emerges as the mirror image of Orientalism, refers to stereotyped representations of the West: “The view of the West in Occidentalism is like the worst aspects of its counterpart, Orientalism, which strips its human targets of their humanity. […] Occidentalism is at least as reductive; its bigotry simply turns the Orientalist view upside down” (Buruma and Margalit, 2004, p. 10). At the root of Occidentalism, according to Buruma and Margalit, lies the resentment of the West and its imperialist logic, manifested in its past military aggressions and the contemporary spread of Western ideologies. Xiaomei Chen situates the term Occidentalism in post-Mao China. Focusing mainly on the period from the late 1970s to the 1980s, Chen argues that Occidentalism has been used by various groups within the Chinese intelligentsia as a powerful anti-official discourse for political liberation against state ideological oppression (2002, p. 5). According to Dai Jinghua, such Occidentalism “has fundamentally disappeared” (2002, p. xxiii). It seems, however, that whereas Occidentalism as an anti-official discourse may have disappeared within China, its memory has survived amongst the overseas Chinese community and its lingering influence can still be felt today. Cheng, having left China at the beginning of 1990s, has clearly carried that memory with her, as she went on to produce fictive stories about the Chinese that are deeply symptomatic of that discourse. While Occidentalism in The Girl’s Red T-Shirt works with self-Orientalisation to cast the “Orientals” in an unflattering light, in Shaonv de Hong Faqia (The Girl’s Red Hairpin), to be discussed in the following section, Occidentalism, as an attempt to essentialise the West, works with self-Orientalisation to achieve a radically different end.

When the “Oriental” Gazes Back: Chinese Femininity and the Subversive Power of Self-Orientalisation

In his preface to Orientalism, Said recognises his debt to Foucault, pinpointing the significance of Foucault’s ideas such as discourse, knowledge and power in the shaping of his own views.Footnote 9 Mainstream interpretations of Said also point to the important role of Foucault in Said’s writings (e.g., Turner, 1994; Ashcroft and Ahluwalia, 2008; Kennedy, 2013). To be sure, Foucault does not engage directly with colonialism, but his theorisation of the ways in which power is constructed and disseminated, and how power relates to discursive formation and knowledge production proves illuminating for postcolonial critics like Said who sought to identify the mechanics of colonialism. The differences between Said and Foucault, however, should not be underestimated. James Clifford, in The Predicament of Culture, charges that Said remains “ambivalently enmeshed in the totalizing habits of Western humanism” (1988, p. 271). In another early critique of Said, Uta Liebmann Schaub points out wryly that “whereas Foucault allows for the emergence of counter-discourses beneath the official discourse of power, Said ignores Western discourses about the Orient that oppose Western expansionism and subvert, rather than support, Western domination” (1989, p. 308). Indeed, critics have long accused Said of providing “a monolithic and hegemonic version of Orientalism as discursive formation” (Gallien and Jovik, 2015, p. 121). The critical analysis of The Girl’s Red Hairpin in this section endeavours to look into an allegedly ignored and less explored side of Orientalism and its implications.

The novel is woven together by two parallel stories, one of which features a group of Chinese adolescents for whom America is a wonderland. The mentalities of the adolescents in this story are juxtaposed with the thoughts and feelings of Meng, the protagonist in the parallel story. While many could only dream of going to America, Meng, a lucky Chinese girl, successfully realises the dream of her younger counterparts in China by marrying a white American man named Michael, whom she meets in China. Like the German professor in the previous novel, Michael finds exotic beauty irresistible and takes Meng to live in the United States, where she is expected to commit herself to the role of the gentle Oriental wife. In her letters to her ex-boyfriend Jiatong in China, Meng reveals herself to be caught in a dual dilemma: the confines of her gender identity are exacerbated by her racial identity in a foreign land. Subjected to both gendered and racialised forms of marginalisation, Meng is haunted by a deep sense of loss. In her private letters, the reader learns that, although Meng tries hard to grow into her expected role for Michael, there is a part of her that refuses to, a part that lurks beneath her obedient feminine façade. Contrary to Jiatong’s suggestion that she should settle down and consider having as many children as possible, Meng confesses that she is in fact unprepared for such a life (2015b, p. 87). If this side of Meng runs counter to the conventional conception of Oriental femininity, then what follows as the story unfolds goes blatantly against the underlying premise of Orientalism.

Living in America enables Meng to take a fresh look at herself, her life and her personality, which surprises even herself. Equally surprising is how she starts to perceive China through an Orientalist gaze by engaging in self-Orientalisation. From time immemorial to the present, China, the mysterious land of the East, beckoned to the West with its exoticism. From Serica in Greco-Roman times to the famous Cathay under Mongol rule to the fall of the Manchu Dynasty, China has never failed to dazzle and baffle those in the West (Guadalupi, 2004). Being in America, Meng manages to take a critical distance from the land where she has spent her entire life. This distance, while endearing her hometown to Meng, also turns China into the mysterious land of the East. As Meng recounts in her second letter to Jiatong: “China’s Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism are emblematic of the profound philosophy of the mysterious Orient” (2015b, p. 88). Meng goes on to express her strong interest in Jiatong’s upcoming holiday trip to China’s Northwest: “Is Dunhuang in your plan? […] I think I would have epiphanies in front of the Buddha and the murals that have stood there for thousands of years” (2015b, p. 88).

All the while, Meng tries hard to adapt to her new wifely role for her white American husband. In the midst of writing her letter, Meng hears the sound of Michael’s car. She continues: “[…] he is back. I have to stop now, and greet him like a gentle Oriental wife in the Western imagination. I will take off his coat and say to him ‘you’ve had a hard day’” (2015b, p. 88). If the Chinese mother in the previous novel fits one archetype of the Asian woman in the West, Meng in this novel is highly conscious that she is expected to fit the other: the docile doll/Lotus Blossom archetype—gentle, docile, obedient, submissive, and hyper-sexual—a perfect Oriental wife. Meng’s predicament shows that the stereotypical expectations of Asian women in the United States have oftentimes been internalised by Asian women themselves: “Being perceived generally as subservient, obedient, passive, hard-working, and exotic, Asian American women themselves become convinced that they should behave in accordance with these stereotyped expectations” (1989, pp. 367–368). Critical analysis will reveal, however, that the novel’s characterisation of Meng ultimately breaks such stereotypes of the Chinese woman.

In her act of self-Orientalisation, Meng shows how her new life is predicated upon her perceived “otherness.” The fact that Meng craves a different life but is at the same time acutely aware of what is expected of her stands as a mockery of the self-proclaimed intellectual superiority of the Orientalist West. For Said, the Orient stands for Europe’s Other, and the Orientalist is assumed to occupy a position of mastery and dominance over the “Oriental” by claiming to possess an intellectual superiority that enables him to study, analyse and narrate the latter. It is also assumed that the “Oriental,” when subjected to the gaze of the Orientalist, suffers a loss of autonomy. This is especially true when gender is brought into play to enhance the hierarchical dichotomy. Already feminised, the “Oriental” is further objectified being a female subjected to the white male gaze. Rather than being a passive object to be studied and narrated, however, Meng pauses to take a penetrating gaze back at the white male Orientalist subject, literally “playing” the role expected of her, which is the result of a careful analysis of the Orientalist/masculinist psychology. The counter-gaze, far from being content to observe what was plain and self-evident, is smart and calculating. At this very moment, the Orientalist/masculine falls under the scrutiny of the “Oriental”/feminine and is turned into a visible object to be studied and narrated. The scenario casts doubt on the position of mastery and dominance that the Orientalist is supposed to occupy.

This study makes itself clear when Meng ruminates on the possibility of travelling to Dunhuang by herself and eventually goes. In his reply letter to Meng, Jiatong assures her that Dunhuang is covered in his plan: “[…] I want to see with my very own eyes the art treasure our ancestors managed to build with the power of faith. That is the one place every Chinese must visit” (2015b, p. 91). Despite Michael’s proposal to accompany Meng to Dunhuang, she flatly refuses, insisting on travelling on her own. An encounter between Meng and Jiatong explains why. Although she does not tell the latter that she is going alone in the summer, Meng nevertheless bumps into Jiatong and takes him by surprise. Meng, however, is not a bit surprised: “I had this hunch that we would meet” (2015b, p. 205). Jiatong smiles, and says that Meng has not changed a bit. Indeed, Meng’s constant invocation of “hunch” or “intuition” in her daily life with Michael earns her a nickname from her husband: “My little Oriental witch.” (2015b, p. 164). Meng goes on to explain that the reason she refused Michael’s company was that the latter would never understand things like “hunch”, “fate” or the mysterious power Dunhuang holds for her. Meng sounds extremely helpless: “He believes in science. That is pathetic, isn’t it?” (2015b, p. 206).

Meng’s remark enables the reader to get an inside look at a popular myth about the Orient/the feminine perpetrated by the West/the masculine—that “Orientals” are irrational and uncultivated. Her self-Orientalisation goes hand in hand with an Occidentalism that essentialises the West, thereby casting into doubt the so-called “positive” characteristics associated with the West. Indeed, the progress made by the West since the Enlightenment has been largely attributed to the primacy attached to reason and the development of science, and the backwardness or weakness of the Orient is accordingly seen as the result of its inability to exercise reason. Such a myth, itself a result of power relations and knowledge production, has been internalised by the “Orientals” themselves. Meng, however, uses the word “pathetic” to describe Michael’s single-minded belief in science, a critique that readily brings to mind the doubt the West itself has cast on reason and science since the Enlightenment. More than that, in her effort to Occidentalise the West, we are reminded of the bitter resentment shown by the non-West toward the West for the alleged superiority of reason, and of the claim that the imperialism of the mind imposed by spreading the Western belief in scientism, the faith in science as the only way to gain knowledge, has been more corrosive even than military imperialism (Buruma and Margalit, 2004, p. 95). Meng’s retort is therefore more than a passive internalisation. Rather, by essentialising both the Self and the Other, she calls into question the very nature of those “essential” characteristics. Rather than being read for its complicity, self-Orientalisation in this case might be more appropriately understood as strategic essentialism which works with Occidentalism in its resistance against the collusion between Orientalism and patriarchy, interrogating the supposed superiority of the West/masculine and the alleged feeble-mindedness of the “Orientals”/feminine. Indeed, complicity alone does not do justice to a term whose liberating potential may be released and mobilised to the advantage of the “inferior”. In “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography?” Gayatri Spivak posits that, although essentialism is highly problematic, there is sometimes a political and social need for “strategic essentialism” (Spivak, 1996, p. 214). In China studies, Dirlik calls attention to the part that self-Orientalisation as a form of strategic essentialism may play in the struggle against hegemony (Dirlik, 1996, p. 114). Self-Orientalisation, according to Dirlik, may be “an expression not of powerlessness, but of a newfound sense of power” (p. 113).

Significantly, Meng’s retort seeks to stand the reason-unreason hierarchy on its head before collapsing the entire dichotomy. In Madness and Civilization (1973), Foucault challenges the reason-unreason hierarchy through a nuanced study of madness and its institutionalisation in European history. In this novel, a similar undertaking is being performed. The Oriental’s perceived irrationality, an unambiguous downside under the Orientalist gaze, is being complicated and turned into a source of power for Meng. Concomitantly, the rationality that the Orientalists pride themselves on is taken as a handicap, a sign of weakness. The hierarchical relationship between reason and unreason is thus turned upside down. But if we pursue this idea further, Meng’s retort does more than challenge the reason-unreason hierarchy: it collapses the entire dichotomy. In Writing and Difference, Derrida argues that Foucault treats madness/unreason as reason’s other, situated outside of the self-contained structure of reason and rationality. As such, Foucault consolidates the reason-unreason dichotomy at the very moment as he sets out to collapse it. Derrida goes on to argue that madness/unreason, instead of being the other, is in fact the différance, a linguistic supplement at work within reason—that which reason is unable to exclude. Derrida writes: “Madness is therefore, in every sense of the word, only one case of thought (within thought)” (2001, p. 68). Derrida prompts us to rethink the place of otherness in relation to a hegemonic discourse. To be sure, the doubt Meng casts on reason and science is reminiscent of the West’s own critique of enlightenment ethos since the late 18th century. However, the fact that reason and science are being reevaluated in this case by the most unlikely critic demonstrates the intellectual capacity of the “Oriental” for reasoning and critical thinking. If the “Oriental” is equally capable of reason, where then does her unreason stand in relation to reason? Is unreason indeed the différance within reason, rather than an outsider to it? Is it indeed possible that a penchant for hunch and intuition might be seen as one case of reason, and as Meng suggests, would serve one better than the blind faith in reason alone—a reason that is deeply limited in its attempt to exclude unreason? Are the “Oriental” and the Orientalist not in fact the “Other” to each other, as commonly assumed, but rather, always already deeply implicated in each other? Meng’s counterattack, which prompts the above questions, invalidates the basic premise underlying Orientalism.

Indeed, the very foundation upon which Orientalism is built has been interrogated by scholars from different fields of inquiry. Ernest Gellner argues, in an early critique of Said’s theory, that Said’s Orientalist discourse neglects the fact “that the industrial/agrarian and Western/Other distinctions cut across each other, and obscure each other’s outline …” (1993). In colonial Indian historiography, Gyan Prakash believes that Said’s Orientalism makes it possible to “articulate a post-Orientalist interpretive position that would trace third-world identities as relational rather than essential” (1990, p. 399). In recent studies of cultural history, Daniel E. White calls our attention to the mutually imbricated construction of metropolitan and colonial identities (2013), and Saree Makdisi, in a similar fashion, throws into doubt the oppositional relationship between metropolis and colony, between the imperialists and the colonised at the heart of Said’s version of Orientalism (2014). In the field of children’s literature, the interrogation was started by scholars such as McGillis who recuperates the notion of “otherness” as “always an aspect of each of us” (1997, p. 223). “[T]o enter the world of another,” he writes, “we ourselves must become ‘Other’ than we are. We are always faced with the ‘Other.’ We cannot escape otherness” (p. 223).

Unlike the Chinese girl in The Girl’s Red T-Shirt, Meng, instead of waiting to be enlightened, urges the reader to ponder the nature of enlightenment. In the end, her rejection of Michael’s company is more than a display of the Oriental woman’s autonomy and sophistication—it stands as an affirmation of the bankruptcy of the Orientalist project. Seen from the Orientalist point of view, the “Oriental” seems to preserve a space that renders the Orient a land of mystery to the West, hence legitimating the West’s desire to narrate and subjugate it. Whatever Meng calls it—“hunch,” “intuition” (2015b, p. 205), “premonition” (p. 164), “the fateful” or “the mysterious power” (p. 88)—has been treated as the opposite of reason and located outside of it. The twist comes when the Oriental woman engages in self-Orientalisation to counter such an ideology. The space of mystery is now situated not outside of the conceptual framework of reason, as most would assume, but rather, within it: it is the différance that reason is unable to exclude, nor to capture, which threatens to challenge the very foundation of Orientalism. It turns out, therefore, that rather than being a coherent and unified discourse, Orientalism is permeated with ambiguities. Said himself almost acknowledges this in an interview: “Orientalism is theoretically inconsistent, and I designed it that way: I didn’t want Foucault’s method, or anybody’s method, to override what I was trying to put forward. The notion of a non-coercive knowledge, which I come to at the end of the book, was deliberately anti-Foucault” (Salusinszky, 1987, p. 137). Interestingly, in his attempt to oppose Foucault, Said paradoxically came up with a theory that allows for the emergence of counter-discourses. In her study of French and British Orientalisms, Lisa Lowe seeks to destabilise the power of orientalism as a monolithic and reductive system of representation (1994, p. 10) by calling attention to the ways in which Orientalism has been bound up with alternative discursive forces such as race, sexuality and class. Similarly, Robert Irwin argues that the view that Orientalism was “the hegemonic discourse of imperialism” created a pervasive “distortion” against which it became impossible to “reflect rationally and dispassionately about the subject” (2006, p. 4).

When the hegemony of Orientalism is cast into doubt, we are able to reflect rationally about the female Oriental subject who, through the strategic act of self-Orientalisation, shows herself to be perfectly capable of reasoning, and of reinventing and recreating an identity for herself. The independent trip to Dunhuang marks Meng’s success in carving out a niche that allows her to reassert her new-found identity in a foreign land, which contradicts her earlier effort to play the perfect Oriental wife. Meng’s breaking out of the entrenched Orientalist stereotype speaks to the sentiments of an increasing number of Asian American women who have become aware of their complicity in perpetrating the docile doll archetype. In the feminist context, these Asian American women have brought attention to distinctly Asian American women’s experiences, which mainstream feminist scholarship has tended to marginalise (Roces and Edwards, 2010; Bulbeck, 1998, 2002; Noh, 2003). Importantly, Meng’s new-found identity is made possible by a strong link with the Oriental past. It is a hybrid product that knows no distinction between the Self and the Other, reminiscent of what Homi K. Bhabha calls “a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation” (1990, p. 211). Self-Orientalisation could thus work effectively to reveal an often overlooked side of Orientalism and the ruptures inherent therein.

Conclusion

In the Introduction to Teaching Children’s Fiction, Catherine Butler observes that to study children’s literature today is “to be involved in an exciting and rapidly-changing area, in which no one set of texts or critical approaches has achieved clear dominance” (2006, p. 2). This is where intersectional approaches could be most fruitfully employed to shed light on texts whose meanings may not otherwise be readily perceptible. This essay, which attempts a critical reading of two texts produced by a diasporic writer for young readers in her home country, brings together gendered and postcolonial approaches to children’s literature. Whereas the portrayals of the cross-racial encounter in The Girl’s Red T-Shirt reiterate received ideas about the Orient and may thus be read as a product of self-Orientalisation, The Girl’s Red Hairpin reveals the ways in which self-Orientalisation could function as strategic essentialism that allows the “Oriental” female Other to gaze back and interrogate the validity of any attempt to essentialise and homogenise. In true Spivakian fashion, Betty Joseph proposes that a critical stance of postcolonialism “shot through with a feminist perspective” (2004, p. 3) provides a compelling alternative to conventional narratives of colonial encounter centered on the representative man. This essay tries to demonstrate that, while a postcolonial approach aided by gendered perspectives allows us to grasp the power dynamics of the China-West encounter, a treatment of gender in postcolonial contexts complicates and expands our understanding of Orientalism as a power discourse.

Produced by diasporic writers caught between two cultures, texts such as Cheng’s could very well turn out to be the most intriguing site in which to examine struggles for power in today’s global culture where different categories of identity contest with one another to produce meanings which young readers need to be trained to grapple with. Insofar as the fundamental nature of criticism is “oppositional” according to Said in the introduction to The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983, p. 29), intersectional readings endeavour to make visible the ways in which young readers can be rendered less susceptible and vulnerable to dominant ideologies, especially as they pertain to decolonising education, in terms of both gender and race. Intersectional approaches to children’s and young adult texts promise to act as a crucial intervention in the struggle against hegemony—they are what practitioners, scholars and educators need to wrestle with in order to help young readers develop a lucid understanding of reality and maneuver the complex challenges presented by multifarious structures of power in today’s global culture.