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Women's Culture and Writing in the 1990s |
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Part 5: Cities and land of sisters
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"I am a black man and am very much in love with a Chinese woman who also loves me very much. "
SIDHARTHA11
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Zhang Mei, a woman writer from Canton, painted with her pen a new picture of the city
of women in the 1990s. Shao Jian, a well-known critic, describes her works as a Yamato-
e characterized by its simplicity, disorder, gloom, stillness and aroma.
Like others, Zhang Mei also writes about the special alignment among women. But such
an alignment is actually cooperation under unavoidable circumstances. As part of the
whole literature in the 1990s, Zhang Mei's novel series bring back a picture of a new
group of noble women rising from a new structure of classes. The convergence and
permutation of the past privileged group and the new noble group produces a new
connotation to the life of urban females. In the course of social progress, when women
get their sex roles they certainly deserve, they encounter such a familiar languid and
unavoidable downthrow.
Women, Games, Afternoon Tea by Zhang Mei is as fine as a folding screen which
displays new ruled sexual games. In the dense atmosphere in Zhang's works, women's
mirrors also make a Yamato-e of modern China.
Frequently compared with Chen Ran by critics, Lin Bai is largely mentioned for her
works of personalization, autobiographic style and privacy revealment.
In the style of city life, women seek emotional survival among themselves. But it is the
city itself that erodes and narrows their possible space of life and culture. In a way, Chen
Ran's latest works represent a new trend of women's literature in the 1990s. In her Break,
she throws up again the overstepping of the rules and order for sexes in the land of
sisters.
With the prosperity of literature by women writers in the new period, women's writing in
the 1990s achieved a more and more mature and massive pattern in the sense of sex
consciousness and literary consciousness. But just like women's brambly fate in the
society, it is destined to encounter brambles in its progressing course. It rises and falls.
But each fall forecasts a new rise, which is often bound to construct broader cultural
space for women.
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This article is based on an article by Zai Jinhua in Chinese, translated and edited
by Ye Qinfa and Jun Shan.
