Poetry, History, Memory

For a considerable period, the literature written by “Chinese quislings” (Hanjian) has been “an elephant in the room” carefully avoided by scholars of modern China. Among poet-politicians in Republican China, either quislings or patriots, Wang Jingwei (1883–1944) is still one of the most controversial. Most scholars don't want to openly talk and write about Wang because either they believe that Wang is too despicable to discuss, or they are too afraid to mention him for fear of touching a political taboo. Courageously, Zhiyi Yang's new book Poetry, History, Memory studies the life and poetry of Wang Jingwei and his pivotal roles in the politics and culture of Republican China, thus treading onto tricky territory in modern Chinese literature and history.The introduction outlines the chapters and states its methodology, which sets up three quixotic “windmills” of history, poetry, and memory and convincingly argues that “Wang's lyric poetry, as the public performance of a private voice, played a central role in constructing his political identity and posthumous memory” (3).Part 1 of the book, from chapter 1 to chapter 3, offers an exhaustive biography that takes up over half the book. Yang divides Wang's life roughly into three stages: a revolutionary in his adolescence, a statesman in his prime, and a “traitor” in his later years until his death. This book instantly becomes the definitive version of Wang's biography for English readers.Part 2, “The Poetics of Memory,” comprises three chapters on Wang's poetry showing the textuality, temporality, and spatiality of the poetic memory of Wang and his followers. Chapter 4 starts with Wang's heptasyllabic regulated poem “Night Onboard” (1939). Through a detailed interpretation of the poem and meticulous textual research on the dates of its creation, Yang points out that this special poem is a mnemonic atlas that leads to multiple forms of memories and “unfolds itself into an open space of creative cacophony” (191). Chapter 5 investigates a collection of Wang Jingwei's and his fellow collaborators’ poems on the painting of Jing Ke (d. 227 BCE), whose image shifted from that of an ambivalent hero in ancient times to that of a Republican and National martyr in twentieth-century China. Yang points out the marvelous overlap between the cultural image of Jing Ke and the iconography of Wang Jingwei, especially considering Wang's early experience of being an assassin. However, Yang argues, the martyrdom in these poems is a floating symbol assuming meanings of both resistance and collaboration. Thus Wang Jingwei, like Schrödinger's cat, was legitimized simultaneously as a self-sacrificing nationalist and a justified pan-Asianist. Chapter 6 expands the scope to include other poets in occupied Nanjing and beyond. Nanjing, as an ancient capital, suffered a cyclical fate of prosperity and destruction in Chinese history. Yang demonstrates that the poetic history in classical-style poetry has transformed Nanjing into a “site of memory” (lieu de mémoire) in Pierre Nora's sense. She argues that the weight of memory in Nanjing was too heavy for collaborator-poets to bear, so it caused amnesia and aphasia. The history fails to remember, but postmassacre Nanjing is a city that never forgets.“Epilogue: Poetry against Oblivion” discusses Wang Jingwei's reception in postsocialist China and his “reincarnation” in films and other multimedia forms. Yang concludes the book with her proposition of a “happier memory,” a more wholesome and healthy memory that “strikes a balance among the justice of memory, the truth of history, and the salubrious task of forgetting,” (259) to deal with the history of Wang's regime, known as Reorganized National Government (RNG, 1940–45), and related traumatic memories.As a whole, the imbalance between the two parts of the book, with only 70 pages (as opposed to the 146-page-long biography) dedicated to the three chapters of literary and theoretical investigation, is evident of the discrepancy between historical observations and the affective and literary understanding of Wang. By dividing the biographical and the poetic analytical apart, Yang draws a line between historiography and hermeneutics. This division then prompts the questions whether memory theory is indeed fit to glue the two parts together and unify the different personas of Wang, and whether aphasia is inevitable when we proceed without Western-originated theories. In other words, what can the book, grounded in the Chinese context, contribute to memory studies at large? To answer these questions, I believe Yang's theory of “poetics of memory” and “poetic memory” are fine additions to memory theory. While “poetics of memory” is the art of using memory, “poetic memory” points to the memory related to poetry. Yang testifies not only that memory in the poems serves as a proper venue for acquiring historical knowledge and a channel for exploring poets’ mentality, but also that the poetics of memory can be regarded as a subversive way of contesting the interpretation of fait accompli in the past and the established official rules of representation.The poetics of memory enables Yang to treat Wang's political maneuvers and his predicament with an affective understanding. For not only does Yang point out Wang's historical contribution and offer better insights into the nature of RNG, but she also analyzes Wang as a tragic political figure with flaws. Yang shows the weakness of Wang's character, his self-destructive passion, indecisions, and misjudgments, while not omitting the wrong policies that RNG made at the institutional level. Exploring nuances in RNG's situation and treating the moral ambiguity of Wang as a real individual, Yang's book finds a gray area of justice for Wang's story. She observes that while Wang as a historical figure has suffered a long period of damnatio memoriae (the official erasure of the memory), he never really faded out from Chinese thinkers’ and classical-style poetry readers’ horizon.In this regard, Yang's analysis transcends moral criticism and circumvents vulgar Manichaeism. Though I doubt if a “sympathetic impartiality” is possible, the valor itself she shows by writing a book about Wang is laudable. Since her first article on Wang Jingwei was published in 2015, throughout the years Yang synthesized a rich collection of Wang's materials. The book draws from archives in France, Germany, Japan, and the United States, especially the archives from the Hoover Institution and the Wang family. It sets a high standard for future scholars to study this (in)famous poet-politician, contributing to three overlapping subfields: (1) in the study of Chinese poet-politician in Republican China, the book could be read along works on Qu Qiubai (1899–1935) and Mao Zedong (1893–1976), together with extant research on figures such as Zheng Xiaoyu (1860–1938) and Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967);1 (2) in the historical study of political collaboration with Japan, the book is in dialogue with the works of Poshek Fu and Yidan Yuan on Chinese collaborators and puppet regimes; and (3) in terms of modern classicism, a concept strongly advocated by Yang herself, the book is closely associated with the field established by works of scholars such as Jon Eugene von Kowallis and Shengqing Wu.2 This book easily becomes a must-read for scholars in the above fields

Archaeology · Art · China · Literature · Poetry · Chinese history and philosophy · History

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