Multi-lingual-sinophone? The transnational and rhizomatic politics of creativity in Wong Bik-wan’s fiction

Abstract

Hong Kong writer Wong Bik-wan (黃碧雲) is an experienced veteran of colonialism who has seen it all. Whether she is read as a national allegory, the usual women’s writing, or in comparison to Lu Xun, Zhang Ailing or Wang Anyi, like cannon to canons, she throws creative myths both East and West on their heads. The creolized colonial subject cannibalizes her multi-cultural heritage matter-of-factly, in retribution to literary tributes. Refusing to massage the muscles of Westerncentrism and Sinocentrism through vertically imagined identity politics, Wong’s cultural and affective affinities are rhizomatic. She traverses the oral histories and oracular voices of the ‘wretched of the earth’, the Romano Gypsy, Hakka, Cuban, Cantonese, guerrilla, and working class women. The peasant, the cripple and the sick come together at the mahjong table. As an alluring and transgressive traveler (Meixingzhe 媚行者), her Sinophone graphic and phonic subversions force the Chinese language to embrace Portuguese and Cantonese syntax and diction, working class slang, tempos of other cultures, the poetic in the prose, and the inarticulacy of pain. Traditional pious women (烈女) enter history only when they practice extreme obedience to patriarchal and national imperatives. In Wong, this extremity (暴烈) becomes the tactics of subversion. Wong’s peasant, working class and nomadic women survive sexual, familial, and national trauma as unprotected bare life (cangsheng蒼生), scavenging the violence of the nation and the home. Their decomposer’s feminism de-aestheticize sacrifice and cruelty, and give civil war an intimately violent re-interpretation.