Red Is Not the Only Color: Contemporary Chinese Fiction on Love and Sex between Women, Collected Stories (Asian Voices)

Description

The first English-language anthology of its kind, Red Is Not the Only Color offers a window into the uncharted terrain of intimate relations between Chinese women. As urban China has undergone rapid transformation, same-sex relations have emerged as a significant, if previously neglected, touchstone for the exploration of the meaning of social change. The short fiction in this volume highlights tensions between tradition and modernization, family and state, art and commerce, love and sex. These stories introduce an emerging generation of acclaimed, and at times controversial, women writers, including Chen Ran, Bikwan Wong, and Chen Xue. By presenting fiction from the PRC, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, the collection deliberately maps the literary contours of same-sex intimacy in broadly cultural rather than purely political terms. The perceptive and informative introduction surveys the social evolution of female same-sex intimacy in twentieth-century China, examines how each author engages with her Chinese context, and discusses how the stories compare with earlier representations of Chinese same-sex intimacy in the United States. Compelling for its literary quality, the anthology will also spur reflection among scholars of modern Chinese literature as well as readers interested in questions of gender, sexuality, and cross-cultural representation.Anyone fascinated by the covert lesbian love affair in Anchee Min s Red Azalea will readily understand the poignant appeal of the stories in this groundbreaking anthology, in which women s love for each other must find (or lose) a place for itself in a repressive and closely guarded society. Editor Patricia Sieber, whose introduction could almost serve as a freshman course in contemporary Chinese culture, has worked with Chinese colleagues to bring together eight lesbian-themed stories from the 1980s and 1990s. Some of the stories were prizewinners in China or Taiwan, while one is published here for the first time. In Zhang Mei s "A Record," a young woman of ambivalent feelings is asked to accompany a film director and producer into the countryside to interview the last few of the "self-wedded women," part of a feminist movement of independent working women in Guangdong in the 1920s. In Chen Ran s "Breaking Open," two friends obsessively discuss the gulf between the sexes as a covert way of declaring their happiness with each other: "My friend Yunnan--she utters strange conglomerations of words casually. Her intuitively artistic way of expressing herself often causes me to sigh in admiration--the innate beauty of her words sets me aflutter with emotion and makes me feel that my lips are merely a pretty but ultimately useless ravenous red insect." An absorbing, often beautiful glimpse of same-sex relations in a rapidly changing culture. --Regina Marler