MCLC: Li Xiaoyin and Yu Dafu essay

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Li Xiaoyin and Yu Dafu essay
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Modern Chinese Literature and Culture and MCLC Resource Center are pleased
to announce publication of Felicia Zhang's (with Christopher R. McMahon)
essay "Li Xiaoyin: Yu Dafu's Lover or Muse?" Too long to post here, the
essay's permanent home is:

http://mclc.osu.edu/rc/pubs/zhang.htm

Find below, the opening two paragraphs of the essay, a teaser, if you
like, for the essay as a whole. I thank Professor Zhang for sharing her
research about her mother and her mother's "relationship" with Yu Dafu.

Enjoy,
Kirk A. Denton
Editor, MCLC 

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Li Xiaoyin: Yu Dafu's Lover or Muse?
By Felicia Zhang, with Christopher R. McMahon
MCLC Resource Center Publication (March 2014)
http://mclc.osu.edu/rc/pubs/zhang.htm


The classical poetry of Yu Dafu (郁达夫) remains important to historians and
critics seeking to come to terms with the modernization of China, the
events of World War II, and subsequent developments. While some critics
are interested in how women are constructed in his literary works (Levan
2010; Ahn 2006; Hu 2012; Feng 2004), or with the question of how the
construction of Chinese women is intertwined with Yu Dafu’s
self-construction, Chinese masculinity, and the condition of Chinese
nationhood (Levan 2010), most Chinese critics assume that the women in his
poetry and fiction have a quasi-autobiographical origin. They tend to see
his texts as windows into the hidden truth of Yu Dafu and the real women
in his life.

One such woman is my mother, Li Xiaoyin (李晓音), the alleged inspiration of
the first seven of the eleven “Miscellaneous Poems of Chaos and
Separation” (乱离杂诗) composed while Yu Dafu was exiled in Sumatra in 1942.
Hu Yuzhi, rather than Yu Dafu himself, likely supplied the title for this
cycle of poems. (Some annotators in Chinese call the cycle “Miscellaneous
Poems of Separation and Chaos” [离乱杂诗].) Indeed, my mother’s reputation
has 
largely been consumed and transformed by her role as Yu Dafu’s “lover,”
becoming a chapter in the mythical trajectory of the career of this great
poet. My mother is repeatedly represented as having had some grand love
affair with Yu Dafu—a representation that Yu Dafu, if he did not actively
encourage, did nothing to clarify. Yet there never was such an affair; all
the “evidence” for the alleged affair is culled from the poems themselves
and the spurious testimonies of a handful of “friends” and “witnesses.”
. . .