Liu Na’ou 劉吶鷗/刘呐鸥

1905-1940

Présentation

par Brigitte Duzan, 12 février 2024, actualisé 16 février 2025

　

Liu Na’ou

　

Écrivain représentatif du mouvement néo-sensationniste des années 1930 à Shanghai, Liu Na’ou a également réalisé quelques courts métrages inspirés du cinéma étranger.

 

Sa naissance est restée controversée pendant longtemps : d’après le « Historical Dictionary of Modern Chinese Literature » de Li-hua Ying[1], il serait né au Japon, mais, selon Isabelle Rabut[2], il était Taïwanais de mère japonaise, et éduqué au Japon. Il est effectivement né à Tainan, le 22 septembre 1905, et il a vécu là jusqu’à l’âge de 16 ans, après quoi il est parti poursuivre ses études au Japon. C’est sa mère qui lui a longtemps fourni son « argent de poche ».

 

À Tokyo, il étudie l’anglais, puis, de retour à Shanghai en 1925, il s’inscrit en 1926 à l’université Aurora (震旦大学) pour étudier le français. C’est là qu’il rencontre les poètes Dai Wangshu (戴望舒) et Du Heng (杜衡)[3] ainsi que l’écrivain Shi Zhecun (施蛰存). C’est avec eux, après de nouveau un bref séjour au Japon en 1928, que Liu Na’ou fonde en 1932 la revue mensuelle Xiandai, sous-titrée « Les contemporains » (《现代》杂志), dirigée par Shi Zhecun, après quoi Dai Wangshu part en France pour étudier à l’Institut franco-chinois de Lyon.

 

Traductions, édition et nouvelles

 

Jusqu’en 1934, sous l’égide de ses cofondateurs, la revue publie des textes et poèmes du courant néo-sensationniste (新感觉派) : courant calqué sur le mouvement moderniste japonais Shinkankakuha (新感覚派) lancé en 1924 par des jeunes écrivains autour, en particulier, de Kawabata que Liu Na’ou avait rencontré à Tokyo. Nouvelle littérature inspirée entre autres par l’œuvre de Paul Morand érigé en symbole de l’ère nouvelle, dont Liu Na’ou a d’ailleurs traduit des récits.

 

Entre-temps, en avril 1930, il avait publié le recueil de nouvelles « Paysage urbain » ou « Ligne d’horizon urbain » (Dushi fengjing xian《都市风景线》), traduit par Marie Laureillard « Scènes de vie à Shanghai » (voir Traductions ci-dessous) : des histoires d’amour qui reflètent l’atmosphère de Shanghai comme épitome de la vie moderne, entre désir dramatisé et culture matérielle exacerbée. Shanghai était en effet pour lui une ville métissée, entre Orient et Occident, qui exerçait sur lui un attrait ambivalent : dégoût pour son luxe excessif et son atmosphère décadente, mais aussi fascination pour la magie qu’elle opérait (上海的“魔力”).

 

Ces nouvelles ont été initialement publiées dans la première des revues que Liu Na’ou a créées, en septembre 1928 : « Le train sans rails » (《无轨列车》杂志). Le recueil était inspiré du film de Fritz Lang sorti en 1927 : « Metropolis » (en chinois 《大都会》). Dans l’édition de 1930, le recueil portait en sous-titre « Scène ».

  

Dushi fengjing xian

　

Le recueil est aussi à replacer dans le contexte de la fugace maison d’édition et librairie qu’il avait fondée à Shanghai en 1928, « Culture de l’éros » (Seqing wenhua 《色情文化》), où il publia des nouvelles japonaises - maison d’édition et librairie qui furent bien vite interdites par le gouvernement nationaliste.

 

Cinéma

 

En 1932, Liu Na’ou fait une incursion dans le domaine cinématographique : il signe des critiques, s’intéresse à l’écriture de scénarios et dirige une revue, « Cinéma moderne » (Xiandai dianying《现代电影》). Il produit même en 1938 un film inspiré de « La Dame aux camélias » (Chahua nü《茶花女》), à la compagnie Guangming (光明影业公司). Il s’agit de l’un des derniers films réalisés à Shanghai par Li Pingqian (李萍倩), après la destruction des studios de la Mingxing par les bombardements japonais lors de la bataille de Shanghai.

 

Chahua nü

 

Assassinat

 

Le 3 septembre 1940, alors qu’il était rédacteur en chef d’un journal nationaliste (《国民新闻》), édité par le gouvernement de Wang Jingwei (汪精卫政权), il est assassiné à la porte de l’hôtel Jinghua (上海京华饭店) sans que l’on sache encore trop pourquoi : sans doute parce qu’il était soupçonné d’être un traître par les nationalistes, mais peut-être aussi bien en raison de ses liens avec les Japonais. Il avait 35 ans.

 

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Traductions en français

 

- De l'inconvénient d'avoir tout son temps, dans Le Fox-trot de Shanghai et autres nouvelles chinoises, trad. Isabelle Rabut et Angel Pino, Albin Michel, « Les grandes traductions », 1996, p. 295-306.

- Scènes de vie à Shanghai (Dushi fengjingxian《都市風景線》), recueil de douze nouvelles sur les quinze du recueil original, traduit et postfacé par Marie Laureillard, Serge Safran, 2023.

1.  Jeu    游戏

2.  Paysages  风景

3.  Flux  流

4.  Un cœur ardent  热情之骨

5.  Rituels et hygiène  礼仪和卫生

6.  Deuil  残留

7.  L’équation  方程式

8.  Sous les tropiques  赤道下

9.  La couverture ouatinée  绵被

10. Tentative d’assassinat  杀人未遂

11. A Lady to keep you company 

12. L’éternel sourire  永远的微笑

 

Dushi fengjingxian, rééd. 2004

 

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Traductions en anglais

 

- Diary, tr. Edward M. Gunn, in Yung-sheng Yvonne Chang, Michelle Yeh and Ming-ju Fan eds., The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan, Columbia University Press, 2014, 56-57.

- Scenery[4], tr. Travis Telzrow, MCLC Resource Center Publication, June 2019.

- Attempted Murder[5],  tr. Paul Bevan, in Intoxicating Shanghai–An Urban Montage: Art and Literature in Pictorial Magazines during Shanghai’s Jazz Age, Brill, 2020, 253-63.

- Urban Scenes (《都市風景線》), tr. Yaohua Shi and Judith Armory, Cambria, 2023.

 

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Note sur l’écriture de Liu Na’ou [6]

 

Quiconque tente de lire les nouvelles de Liu Na’ou en chinois ne peut qu’être dérouté par la langue, qui ne correspond pas au « mandarin standard ». On a parlé d’exotisme, mais il est intéressant d’aller un peu plus loin.

Dans son article sur les écrits de Liu Na’ou dont on trouvera ci-dessous un extrait significatif, l’auteur Ying Xiong explique que, ayant été éduqué au Japon, Liu Na’ou avait le japonais pour langue maternelle, et que son chinois était pour le moins hésitant, ce qu’ont corroboré les témoignages de ses amis, dont le néo-sensationniste Shi Zhecun (施蛰存). En même temps, Ying Xiong souligne que, quand Liu Na’ou est rentré en Chine, en 1927, le chinois lui-même était dans une phase de transition après l’adoption encore récente du baihua, de même que la littérature moderne. Donc la langue de Liu Na’ou et son style ainsi que ses nouvelles sont à reconsidérer dans ce contexte.

(les passages soulignés en gras sont de mon fait. BD)

 

From Taiwan to China via Japan    

 

Around 1928, Liu Na’ou shuttled back and forth between different territories. Unsure where to stay, Liu finally decided to settle in Shanghai. His determination to stay in Shanghai had two dimensions: the economic and cultural advancement of Shanghai; and, in sharp contrast, the cultural backwardness of Taiwan. Shanghai in the 1930s was among the top ten cities in the world, a centre that could lay claim to modern industry, burgeoning finance, and extremely busy ports. As early as 1896, a year after the inception of film in France, western films appeared in Shanghai, bringing the earliest practice of the movie to China. From that time on, the development of Shanghai was inscribed with the growth of the Chinese film industry. In 1927, the year Liu arrived in Shanghai, the city witnessed the debut of the talking film, only one year after its debut in Hollywood. The maturity of cultural capitalism not only lured Liu from Tokyo but also laid the foundations for his later career. However, in sharp contrast, at the time, Taiwan was under the colonial government of Japan. Native Taiwanese could not receive a proper education due to the imperial education system introduced by the Japanese colonial government. Colonial discrimination worked to block the advancement of the native Taiwanese. For this reason, many opted to study in either Japan or China. Against this background, Liu went to Japan in search of educational opportunities. Most of the pages in the newspapers in Taiwan were printed in Japanese: only a quarter of the space allocated to Chinese.23 Chinese journals at the time were preoccupied with classical poetry.24 It is not surprising that Liu chose to go to Shanghai rather than return to Taiwan. “Go back home! Go back to the warm south” and “The banian trees are the origin of our happiness, reflecting the strength of people living in the South” are two quotes cited by many Taiwanese researchers to show Liu’s Taiwanese nationalism. […] The above quotations are the only two occasions Liu explicitly expresses his love for Taiwan. The former was written when his career in Shanghai was jeopardized, while the latter was composed when he went back to Taiwan for his grandmother’s funeral. In general, Liu stayed in Shanghai for pragmatic considerations. […]

 

From Beijing to Shanghai

 

In contemporary scholarship addressing Liu’s modernist writings, there has been a trend to associate his work exclusively with semi-colonial Shanghai, stressing the overwhelming effect of Shanghai on his writings. However, Beijing, as a part of the Chinese power, also exerted a great influence on Liu’s writing, not only providing him with a personal relationship upon which to forge his later career but also offering a direct Chinese experience on his writing. Liu’s literary career encapsulated the social and political changes in China of the late 1920s. Rather than being isolated from the rest of China, Shanghai’s cultural exuberance was formed in part as a result of political struggle as well as social change in China.

 

Prior to the beginning of his literary career in Shanghai, Liu embarked on a pilgrimage to Beijing. This seldom-mentioned experience was carefully recorded in Liu’s diary in 1927. On 28 September 1927, Liu set out by sea and arrived in Tianjin on 1 October. From Tianjin, Liu took a train to Beijing, where he spent the next two months. It was not until 3 December that Liu returned to Shanghai. The days spent in Beijing offered Liu a chance to experience first-hand contact with Chinese culture and Chinese literature for the first time. The cultural atmosphere in Beijing made Liu realize that the reason he could not get a feeling of the real China from the literary texts he used to study was because he had not actually been to Beijing. In other words, the trip to Beijing reflected the start of Liu’s understanding of China. The significance of his trip to Beijing is also evident in the fact that during this trip, Liu established the personal connections necessary for his later career in Shanghai. In other words, his experience of Beijing, to some extent, laid the foundations for his career. In Beijing, he encountered Feng Xuefeng (冯雪峰), who later became a significant figure in the Chinese Communist Party. After settling in Shanghai, Feng published many books through Liu’s Publishing House, at one time working there as a main editor. Many members of Liu’s Publishing House, including Feng, Yao Pengzi (姚篷子 1891–1969), and Xu Xiacun (徐霞村1907–1986) all fled Beijing for Shanghai when the political and cultural situation in Beijing deteriorated. Post-1927, Beijing, the cultural centre of China, was under the political control of the Kuomintang. The year Liu settled in Shanghai saw a large number of writers leave Beijing and other places for Shanghai, in order to avoid political prosecution. Lu Xun (鲁迅), Hu Shi (胡适), Guo Moruo (郭沫 若), Mao Dun (茅盾), Jiang Guangci (蒋光慈), and many other significant figures in Chinese modern literature arrived in Shanghai in 1927. Concomitant with the decline of the Beijing era was the birth of a new modern Shanghai, which sustained Liu’s image of China in the years that followed. Liu’s Publishing House rode the trend of intellectual mobility of the China of 1927.

 

The advancement of the cultural market in Shanghai which was largely held as the enzyme for Liu’s literary career, should not be separated from the cultural accumulation in Beijing. Liu’s trip to Beijing also directly contributed to his writing material. According to his diary, while living in Beijing, Liu frequently visited a prostitute named Lü Xia (绿霞) who may have inspired Liu’s “Etiquette and Hygiene” (礼仪与卫生)[7], which depicts a similar experience with a prostitute named Lü Di (绿弟) […]. Liu’s visit to Lü Xia in Beijing ended in failure…. Liu’s nasty mood in Beijing was reflected in the male protagonist Yao Qiming’s evaluation of modern prostitution [in the story] : “there should be a thorough reformation, since they [prostitutes] are not professional in dealing business, demanding improvements on simplicity and efficiency. They seem to deliberately decorate their occupations with unnecessary rituals and trivialities, lacking efficiency.” In the end, Liu chose to live and work in the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai, which was home to migrants from all over the world. In fact, by 1927, Shanghai had attracted many Taiwanese besides Liu. For example, Zhang Wojun (张我军 1902–1955), the father of Taiwanese modern literature, arrived in Shanghai as early as 1923. Huang Chaoqin (黄朝琴 1897–1972), who later worked in foreign diplomacy for the Republic of China, arrived in Shanghai around the same time as Liu, and eventually became one of his neighbours. As such, the birth of Liu’s writing should be located in the historical background of East Asia in the 1920s and 1930s, fully taking into account its cultural mobility. Liu’s writing was initially propelled by two cultural and geographical torrents, one flowing from Taiwan to China via Japan, the other from Beijing to Shanghai.

 

The Modernist Writing of “Intertwined Colonization”

 

The modernization of language played a significant role in the establishment of nationalism. As pointed out in contemporary studies; “In spite of their reading knowledge of foreign literatures, modern Chinese writers did not use any foreign languages to write their work and continued to use the Chinese language as their only language.”[8] Reading foreign literature and practicing writing in foreign languages only acted as a means through which the writers could acquire new knowledge. It was thus an instrument that served nationalism. Leo Ou-fan Lee triumphantly declared that unlike some African writers who were forced to write in the language of the colonizer, Chinese writers fortunately never confronted such a threat. Therefore, he drew the conclusion that Chinese modernist writers’ Chinese identity was never in question. The ‘Chinese modernist writers’ Leo Ou-fan Lee referred to included Liu Na’ou, who was one of the core writers of ‘modern Shanghai.’ Notwithstanding this, inside China, or even Shanghai, intellectuals’ circumstances differed in countless ways. For Liu, the strategy of language not only reflected his connection with Chinese culture and literary history but also revealed the colonial reality of Japan and Taiwan.

 

Heritage of May Fourth Spirit

 

All of Liu’s works were written in Chinese. There is no denying that his choice to write in Chinese was related to the objective requirement for him to publish novels in China. But there were other reasons hidden deep in his cultural background. Although Liu’s Japanese was more fluent than his Chinese, and most of his diary was written in Japanese, he did not publish his works in Japanese. This was a common strategy adopted by many Taiwanese writers during the period of Japanese colonization. Liu insisted on writing his stories in his ‘awkward Chinese.’ According to his diary, by 1927 he had received a Japanese education for more than ten years, but this did not essentially hinder his Chinese writing. Without the special attention he paid to Chinese writing, apart from the normal education in Japanese, he could not have published his first Chinese collection shortly after he finished his overseas study in Japan. Liu also actively encouraged people around him to learn Chinese. For example, he subscribed to Short Story Monthly (小说月报) for a whole year so that he could help ‘A’Jin’ (阿津), his peer from Taiwan, to study modern Chinese. As for family communication, according to Liu’s children, Liu taught them the Shanghai dialect and Taiwanese instead of Japanese when Liu’s wife and children moved to Shanghai in 1934. Given the relations between Taiwan and Japan, … Liu’s modernist writing can be regarded as an escape from Japan’s assimilative colonial policy and Japanese literature, or a protest of the colonized against the colonizer. By creating Chinese modernism in China’s mainland via Japanese modernist writings, Liu conquered the double challenge of Japan’s colonial language policy and Taiwan’s old literature, finally converging into the tradition of China’s modern literature. Liu’s insistence on writing in Chinese and his persistent interest in participating in the modern Chinese literary arena formed the basis of his national identification with China. This is the facet that has been exclusively stressed in contemporary literature reviews in Mainland China.

 

The Fragility of Modernist Writing

 

Ironically, Liu’s writing in Chinese also reveals the ambiguity of his identity. The novelty of Liu’s modernism was largely achieved by borrowing Japanese concepts in his grammar and vocabulary development. This fully demonstrated Japan’s colonial influence on Taiwan and also in turn on Chinese modernist writing. The formation of Chinese modernist writings was forged by the colonial relationship between Japan and Taiwan, leaving remarkable colonial scars in both languages. In the short stories translated by Liu, specific Japanese characters can be found everywhere. … some were even grammatically modified, or exotically embellished with a ‘foreign tone.’ For example, when studying Liu’s translation of Japanese Neo-Sensationalists’ writing, it is easy to find that in the original Japanese version, the ‘foreign tone’ was not necessarily evident from beginning to end, however, once translated by Liu, the proportion dramatically increased[9]. In other words, Liu introduced an exotic flavour that could not be found in the original Japanese versions.

 

For example, Chinese term 葬礼 (zang li) which means funeral was expressed by Liu in the Japanese term葬式 (sōshiki). The Chinese term 一分 钟 (yi fen zhong), meaning ‘one minute’, was expressed as the Japanese term 一分间 (ippunkan). As such, 葬式 and 一分间, both Japanese characters, were preserved by Liu Na’ou without differentiation. In Liu Na’ou’s “Erotological Culture”, there is a translation that literally reads ‘to take out the words about food’ (把关于食物的话拿出来). This is actually another example of translating Japanese in an ‘exotic’ way. The corresponding Japanese compound word for 拿出来 (to take out) is 持ち出す (mochidasu) which has many meanings, including “to take out” and ‘to start talking’[10]. In this context, it should be translated into ‘to start talking’ rather than ‘to take out.’ This extraordinarily exotic usage was not only confined to translations. Conversely, it was scattered throughout his own fiction.

 

Take the following [11]: “The Russian who is selling newspapers brings out a page of foreign language in front of him. The front page is a foreign emperor’s coronation ceremony. However, what is the relation between the coronation ceremony of a foreign emperor and the life of people in this country? Jing Qin wonders whether it deserves such a huge report.” (卖报的俄人在他的脸前提出一页的外国文 来了。头号活字的标题报的是外国的皇帝即位祝贺式的盛况，但是外国 的皇帝即位跟这国的这些人们有什么关系呢，镜秋想，那用得到这么大 的报告吗) In this short quotation, in four places the Chinese words have been replaced with Japanese words: 提出 (teishutsu, bring out), 外国文 (gaikokubun, foreign language), 祝贺式 (shukugashiki, ceremony) and 报告 (hōkoku, report). Although similar in appearance to the Chinese characters and imbued with almost the same meaning, these Japanese words provoke a feeling of alienation in the Chinese context.

 

Even the titles of articles were imbued with Liu’s particular tone of writing. In the August 25, 1935 issue of Women’s Pictorial (, with Liu as editor in-chief, an article appeared, titled ‘Problems Confronted by Chinese Cinema’ ( 中国电影当面的问题). 当面的问题) “Problems Confronted” is a transplantation of a typical Japanese expression 当面の問題 (tōmen no mondai). Analysis suggests that the Chinese modernist writing of Liu was mostly realized by substituting Chinese with Japanese. Such borrowing of Japanese expression rendered Liu’s texts as exotic as foreign writings. The linguistic borrowing and transplantation reflected in Liu’s works was not his voluntary choice but resulted from his particular cultural…. Growing up in colonial Taiwan and the experience of studying in Japan affected Liu’s acquisition of Mandarin. Liu’s close friend Shi Zhecun recalled that Liu’s Chinese was so awkwardly bad it was as if he were writing Japanese[12].

 

This experience of writing in the Chinese language also affects the plots of Liu’s writing, which can be read as a reflection of his bewilderment over his own national identity. Liu kept wandering between different cultural and geographical boundaries. This disjunction is reflected in the hero and heroines in his fiction who are often single and have no connection with their families. They are strangers: they have no knowledge of each other’s past and future; they simply encounter each other at a specific time. What they care about is ‘Now’. Day and night they haunt the public consumption space in the city, possibly “walking on an insensible road”, “from the race club to teahouse”, or “from tea house to the busy street”, “five minutes later”, they may appear “in one corner of the dim ball hall”[13]. […] considering Liu’s personal experience and the linguistic ambiguity demonstrated in his works, these segments capture the essence of Liu’s life as a colonial writer [...]  the disjointed images and a writing experience coloured by dichotomous national boundaries further deepened Liu’s personal alienation and sense of homelessness. Once embodied in writing, this feeling of exile constitutes a view of some fragile semiotics morphing together. This apparent lack of coherency and consistency, which is regarded as one of the hallmarks of modernist writing, was not merely a novice’s literary experiment related to the cultural importation from Japanese Neo-sensationalism but the result of the cultural and psychological influence of colonialism within Asia.

 

As Liu recorded in his diary in July and August 1927, … Liu was plagued by neurasthenia and insomnia to such an extent that he mentioned committing suicide in his diary. Half of the space in Liu’s diary in 1927 was consumed by his ongoing complaints about his neurological disorders. This deteriorated further when he was shocked by the news of Japanese famous writer Akutagawa Ryūnosuke’s suicide. Yu Dafu (郁达夫), a writer of the Creation Society that Liu so highly endorsed, stated, his life “was a pursuit of sensory pleasure when one was too depressed to feel the happiness of life.” This mode of living, which was spiritually decadent and preoccupied with seeking pleasure, was described by Yu as fin-de-siècle aestheticism (世纪末思潮) in China, a type of Chinese modernism similar to its European counterpart. Liu, along with other writers of the Creation Society, shared the same processes of sinking into self-doubt and anguish, of modernity and a trend towards seeking pleasure while their hearts were steeped in gloom. Liu had in addition to contend with a feeling of rootlessness engendered by his colonial experience, and this was beyond the understanding of Chinese native intellectuals living in Shanghai. The male protagonists in Liu’s stories were characterized by the same amount of melancholy and frailty. This in turn reveals Liu’s own psychological state. They were ignored by ‘modern’ girls because they still observed the outdated morality of the patriarchy. Some, like the protagonist Bu Qing in “Games” (游戏), were too preposterous, too sentimental and too romantic[14].  Others, like Jing Qiu in “Flow”[15], wallowed in immeasurable melancholy, and spoke as though they were composing a poem.  The protagonists were pursuing not only modern girls but also a time beyond their capability. Rather than looking at Liu’s stories as reflections of a kind of total moral decadence …, I suggest regarding these protagonists, who seem unable to catch up with the present, as incarnations of Liu’s anxiety concerning the sense of time, a failure to connect the past with the future. In a word, the figures under Liu’s pen, such as the modern girls who are out of reach and the male protagonists who suffer from incomprehensible sentimentality, reflect Liu’s uneasy soul and unrestrained anxiety. Similar to Japanese Neo-Sensationalism, which emerged after the Great Kantō Earthquake in 1923, Chinese modernist writings were also generated in a loose atmosphere. The difference was that the decadent atmosphere of Chinese modernistic writing was in part resulted from Japan’s colonization of Taiwan.

 

[…] The writing style of image juxtaposition not only indicated Liu’s innovative form but also his psychological status. The vagueness and rupture of Liu’s use of language would probably have influenced his recognition of national identity. Identities are negotiable, and subject to mutations and changes. […] As a component of national identity, language can both affirm and deny certain national identification, not necessarily generating an imagined community. Liu Na’ou’s short stories were created mainly in the two years from 1928 to 1929, when he first sojourned in Shanghai. Except for his sporadic writings between 1932 and 1934, no new literary works appeared after 1934; and almost no movie reviews or journal publications after 1935. It may have been that with the further strengthening of the imperialist aggression against China and the deepening of Liu’s awareness of his own situation, his persistence in China, or rather in modernism, disappeared along with his initial arguable Chinese national sentiment. Therefore, neither the Chinese nationalism nor the cosmopolitanism, two opposite stances in the contemporary debate over how to define Liu’s writing and his identity, offers sufficient summary of his writing. Instead, a new framework of “intertwined colonization” and the inner triangle of China, Japan and Taiwan, reveals the complicity and tensions between these two ends.

 

Reflection on modern Chinese literature

 

Although Shi Zhecun … indicated that Liu wrote in Chinese as if he was writing in other foreign languages, was the novelty the only reason the reading market accepted his works? The situation might be even more complex if the development of new literature and language reformation in China is taken into account. Liu’s writing was tolerated and even embraced in China around 1928 perhaps also because of the immaturity of the Chinese national language and Chinese modern literature which started to develop only after the late 1920s. […] ‘Being Chinese’ requires a device for producing “a palpable sentiment of nationality” which further depends on the creation of “a mother tongue”, a native language, or a national language. This argument is largely valid whether in the case of the Japan that Naoki studies or in the case of Europe which is Anderson’s focus. The rule also can be applied to the process of Chinese modernity and the modernization of Chinese literature. […]

 

Nation building in China entailed a process of reforming both modern Chinese language and modern Chinese literature. The naissance and reformation of China’s modern language can be traced back to 1887, when Huang Zunxian (黄遵宪 1804–1905) highlighted the importance of the consistency between oral words and written words in his “Record of Japan” (日本国志). After that, the will among Chinese intellectuals to reform modern Chinese was unwaveringly sustained until the pinnacle of Chinese nationalism of the May Fourth Movement finally arrived. Although the subject of national language entered the curriculum of elementary schools in 1913, the setup of a similar subject in middle schools was only realized as late as 1923. The textbooks for the education of national language used in middle schools in 1925 were occupied by essays and short stories such as “Hometown” (故乡) written by Lu Xun, whose works cannot be said to be written in an exemplary modern Chinese. The modernization of Chinese went through a long period of several decades, even extended into the post-war periods under the supervision of Mao Zedong. It is obvious that amid the promotion of vernacular, many official documents and newspapers were still written in classical Chinese. The 1920s was located in the initial stage of this long process. In other words, the 1920s still saw a certain degree of flexibility and multiplicity in written Chinese. In this broadly experimental environment, Liu’s novel, albeit impure, found its place. The paradox of modern Chinese is that on the one hand, “modern Standard Chinese, Putonghua Mandarin and Guoyu Mandarin have been set in opposition to local language as the signifier of the historical past”, while on the other hand, the history of the standardization of the Chinese national language is unable to eliminate the local elements which were prevalent in literature and the media. The paradox can be further complicated if ‘locals’ are historicized in a colonial context.

 

Chinese modern literature … cannot be reduced to a national facet of homogeneity; rather, it contains various heterogeneous voices serving as the signifier of various historical pasts, among which is the modernist literature rendered by Japanese colonization. Liu’s writing involves variations that could not be simply reduced to the Chinese written language, and these deviations only can be understood in the process of historicizing Chinese modernist writings in “an intertwined colonial situation”. These variations in modern Chinese and the incommensurability of modern Chinese and the sentiment of Chinese nationalism can lead to a possible reflection, by using an Asian example, on the “discontinuity-in connectedness” raised by Anderson. According to Anderson, the concrete formation of nation-states is “by no means isomorphic with the determinate reach of particular print-languages”. The discrepancy between print-language, the national consciousness, and nation-states results in the so-called “discontinuity-in-connectedness”, which is evident in nation-states of Spanish America, the “Anglo-Saxon family”, and many ex-colonial states such as Africa[16]. Yet, this “discontinuity-in-connectedness” can also be found in modern China … Liu’s Chinese writing, which was mixed with Japanese in various levels, … reached a symbolic realm, signifying a cultural and historical specificity. The impurity of Chinese modernist writing should not be reviewed merely in the rigidly demarcated borders of China; it ought to be understood in the cultural interchanges between China and Japan. It reveals not only the political and social influence of the colonial encounter between Japan and Taiwan but also the influence of a rising Japan within Asia. In her “Translingual Practice”, Lydia H. Liu offers many good examples of Japanese loanwords in modern Chinese to demonstrate how Chinese intellectuals managed to speed up Chinese modernization by introducing modern European concepts via Japan [17]. Similarly, although the initial interest in phonetic writing of Lu Kanchang … was aroused by the Romanizing activities of the missionaries, his later work was inspired by the Japanese linguistic system.

 

Nevertheless, centuries before Chinese nationalists reformed the Chinese language by the emulation of Japan due to their admiration of Japanese achievements, it was Japan that imported Chinese cultural and characters from China. […] the origin of Japanese writing derived from Chinese books such as the Confucian Analects (论语) and Thousand-Character Classic (千字文). Yet, when it came to the Edo period, the school of national learning (国学者) denounced the influence of Confucianism and tried to revive Japanese by rejecting the use of Chinese words and Chinese characters in Japanese. The attitude toward Chinese characters and the corresponding confidence in Japanese language were further developed to an extreme degree, encapsulated by the idea of making Japanese the Asian common language in 1941, with the establishment of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. In modern Asia, the enthusiasm among Chinese nationalists for absorbing and borrowing Japanese words was diametrically the opposite…. Liu’s modernist writing, a direct result of an output of Japanese into China after 1905, can be read as the reification of the changed power structure of Asia, specifically, the diminishment of Chinese cultural power and, conversely, the rise of the Japanese empire. Therefore, inspired by Arif Dirlik’s articulation of the relations of power when studying the discourse of Orientalism[18],59 the Chinese modernist writings of Liu were a product of the unfolding relationship between countries of Asia, reflecting a process of power shifting. It is an issue of political and cultural interactions of East Asia instead of a problem only pertinent to Chinese literature.