MCLC: Youth Literature About Sino-Japanese War diss

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Youth Literature about Sino-Japanese War diss
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Source: Dissertation Reviews: http://dissertationreviews.org/archives/8007

A review of ”‘Friends and Foes on the Battlefield’: A Study of Chinese and
U.S. Youth Literature about the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945),” by Chen
Minjie.

Youth literature is a powerful form of inter-generational storytelling,
whereby one generation can pass along experiences of traumatic events to
younger generations born into considerably different circumstances. In
this capacity, youth literature also functions as a conduit of national
myth-making and social reproduction, transforming a diverse multiplicity
of individual lives into the recognizable types and tropes of desirable
historical narratives. In her ambitious and insightful dissertation on the
seventy-year role of youth literature in shaping postwar Chinese
understanding of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), Minjie Chen
interrogates the nation’s authorization of who gets to tell the war story
in two ways. First, as indicated in the subtitle of the dissertation, Chen
uses a comparative framework to analyze the different ways youth
literature in China and the United States has (or has not) offered ethnic
Chinese youth a narrative connection to Chinese experiences of World War
II. Second, Chen provocatively challenges the hegemony of male,
conflict-centered youth literature in China by producing an oral history
of the wartime experiences of women in Yunhe 云和, Zhejiang, demonstrating
how a different trajectory for youth literature in China may have looked
through the authorship of marginalized and excluded voices. The
dissertation utilizes a variety of methodologies to show how youth
literature (including lianhuanhua 连环画, or “popular pictorial reading
material”) has over the course of seventy years contributed to both
historical memories and amnesia surrounding the Second Sino-Japanese War
that retain political, economic, and social significance today.

Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the overall research project.
Beginning with an anecdote about a conflict surrounding the Chinese
translation of Neil Gaiman’s children’s fantasy novel The Graveyard Book,
Chen illustrates how youth literature continues to bring attention to the
fact that “physical wounds and psychological trauma resulting from
Sino-Japanese military conflicts remain raw and sensitive in contemporary
Chinese society” (p. 3). For Chen, this outrage in the present moment is
rooted in the history of Japanese atrocities in China during WW2 and the
postwar Japanese state’s refusal to recognize and offer reparations for
those atrocities. However, questions remain about how such a visceral
outrage could be expressed by generations of Chinese who had no direct
experience or memory of the war, which questions launch Chen’s research
into the history of youth literature in the chapters that follow.

In Chapter 2, Chen provides an extensive history of youth literature in
China, meanwhile challenging the conventional boundaries of the category
by also including a parallel history of lianhuanhua, or popular texts that
extensively link word and image. Building on the prior scholarship of Mary
Ann Farquhar and Wang Quan-gen, Chen provides an account of youth
literature in China that is concise but complex. She impressively traces
the development of the genre (if it can be called that) through its major
writers, journals, and works while remaining attentive to the way in which
social and political contexts played a major role in shaping the contours
of what youth literature could or should be. Indeed, it is noteworthy that
Chen uses an almost identical periodization for both youth literature and
lianhuanhua (1919-49, 1949-66, 1966-76, 1976-89, 1990-present), suturing
the continuities and discontinuities of these categories of cultural
production to the century’s most significant political transformations.

Of course, such a move is not particularly surprising as periodization,
but it is insightful and significant in how Chen uses it to bridge the
chasm between a reified conception of youth literature and the denigrated
and neglected lianhuanhua. For Chen, there is an intimate relationship
between youth literature and lianhuanhuaas information sources for youth,
and “to continue to disregard LHH [lianhuanhua] would miss an important
part of the reading history of Chinese youth” (p. 60). The significance of
Chen’s point is hammered home in a footnote: “When I first discussed my
research project with a renowned Chinese scholar in youth literature
studies, the professor was almost indignant that I considered LHH as
children’s literature. Five minutes into my explanation of the purpose of
my study, the scholar, then in his fifties, told me that he grew up
reading LHH voraciously, having rented them from book stands” (p. 59, n.
1).

Chapter 3 is in many ways the core chapter of the dissertation, as it
presents an analysis of lianhuanhua and youth literature about the Second
Sino-Japanese War published in China between 1937 and 2007. After a
detailed explanation of methods used in selecting and categorizing a data
set of 360 lianhuanhua titles and 22 titles of youth fiction, Chen
effectively combines a quantitative analysis of the broad trends across
the data set with closer, literary readings of particular texts. This
approach seems to be resonant with Franco Moretti’s recent call for a
practice of “distant reading,” although Chen does not mention Moretti as a
theoretical interlocutor. Chen’s general analysis reveals patterns
regarding authorship, geographical setting, subject matter, political
membership of main characters, gender, and portrayal of military combat;
the texts were overwhelmingly written by male Communist Party members and
portray men fighting for the Communists against the Japanese in North
China in the early-1940s. They tend to vilify Nationalists, downplay
Japanese atrocities and Chinese suffering (while offering up a more vague,
stereotypical image of ruthless Japanese), and celebrate the heroism of
Communist soldiers. Particularly compelling about this analysis, however,
is not simply the conclusions reached, but how these trends are manifest
in the various individual texts to which Chen turns throughout the
chapter. Looking more closely at particular cases in her larger analysis,
Chen breathes life into the literary texts and demonstrates how these
works contribute to the creation of these patterns, rather than simply
functioning as formulaic derivations.

But Chen pursues her analysis deeper than these surface revelations. She
is interested in examining how the patterns change over the course of
seven decades, which attention to change brings greater nuance to what may
have otherwise have seemed to be a homogeneous mass of war stories, and
also gives rise to moments where the reader can see Chen confronted by
unexpected results. For example, Chen states:

My most unexpected finding is that, in half of the stories published
during the 1980s and alluding to war crimes, the victims are Japanese
military and civilians (5 titles), as well as ethnic Chinese people from
outside mainland China (2 titles). A common pattern emerges from stories
that portray Japanese victims: victims and their families turn out to be
the ‘good’ Japanese in this war and are likely to become helpers and
Chinese allies in fighting the Japanese army (p. 137).

In addition to this observation, Chen notes that there is a notable drop
in coverage of Japanese war crimes in lianhuanhua and youth literature of
the 1980s. In explaining possible reasons for these trends, Chen proposes
three factors strongly related to political and industrial context: “a
lack of secondary sources about Japanese war crimes for LHH creators who
grew up in postwar China, continual political barriers to historical
research and to the production of secondary sources, and the decline of
the LHH industry after 1985” (p. 142). The dissertation invites the reader
to speculate as to the reasons underlying this change, and one cannot help
but wonder what role the experience of the Cultural Revolution may have
had. This period also is the beginning of a marked change in the portrayal
of Nationalist participation in WW2, and opens the door to a possible
reconsideration of how the Second Sino-Japanese War serves as a trope
through which writers may comment on their own moment through the
representation of history.

A second way in which Minjie Chen pushes beyond the broad patterns of
representation and narrativization of the Second Sino-Japanese War in
China is to interrogate the archive and inquire into the structural
absences that make dominant types and tropes possible. It is in this
spirit that Chen embarks on perhaps the most ambitious project of the
dissertation: an oral history of women in Zhejiang who lived through the
war. As Chen frames the move, Chapter 4 “moves from publicly available
cultural artifacts to examine a private information source about World War
II—family oral narrative—through a case study of three families in Yunhe
County, Zhejiang Province, which was the target of the Zhejiang-Jiangxi
Offensive, 1942, and Japanese biological warfare attacks” (p. 189). The
project of this chapter could itself be a dissertation, and it is to
Chen’s great credit that she is able to keep it within the schematic of
the project. A native of Yunhe, Chen openly acknowledges her family
connection to the five women she interviewed. It is, after all, the
archive of local, family storytelling that lianhuanhuaand youth literature
suppress in their production of historical narratives, and women and
ethnic minorities are particular victims of this form of archival
domination that Michel Troulliot has famously titled Silencing the Past.

It is not easy to draw a single conclusion from the women’s narratives
reported in this chapter, nor does the content of the women’s various
narratives contrast simply with the general trends described in the
previous chapter. However, there is an affective power to reading the
chapter that suggests an entirely different possible trajectory for the
inter-generational transmission of wartime experiences from those dominant
narratives in lianhuanhua and youth literature. This is true not only in
the open discussion of Japanese biological warfare and starvation under
the Communist regime, but perhaps even more so in rumor as a mode of
knowledge, facticity and detail of personal events, and intimate
transmission of narratives to private audiences.

In Chapter 5, Minjie Chen shifts her focus to an examination of ethnic
Chinese wartime experience as depicted in the youth literature of the
United States. As Chen describes, the “purpose of this chapter is to
discover how publication patterns correlate with the political and
cultural context of a racialized American society” (p. 236). After tracing
a history of representations of WW2 in American youth literature, Chen
notes a major problem with the small number of texts she was able to find
through her search: “The first thing noticeable about this search result
is that little has been told about ethnic Chinese experience during World
War II in American juvenile fiction, particularly when we interpret the 31
titles, produced over a span of 70 years in the context of the much
celebrated body of American youth literature about World War II” (p. 254).
Chen attributes this to a combination of Cold War censorship and
racialized American society, and it intriguingly mirrors her previous
discussion of Chinese youth literature in that both Americans and Chinese
have largely written one another out of their national youth literature.

Perhaps the great irony is that this production of what Chen terms
“historical amnesia” in both American and Chinese youth literature is
accompanied by the almost complete absence of any treatment of Japanese
war atrocities in either country’s books for children. In America, this
seems to be facilitated by the exclusion of Chinese-American authors of
youth literature concerning WW2, as well as the intimate postwar
relationship between Japan and the United States, which kept documents
concerning Japanese biological warfare classified for decades. This led to
a situation in which the Cold War “manipulated Chinese American youth
literature, which avoided the ‘wrong’ topics, the Sino-Japanese War being
one of them, and instead established the postwar routine of celebrating
Chinese cultural customs and heritage in American youth literature” (p.
275).

A summary of the concluding chapter of the dissertation might be combined
with an assessment of its potential impact. Coming out of a library and
information science program, Chen makes a powerful statement about the
relationship of her research and her field in the concluding chapter:
“Until the day teachers and librarians who collect, review, recommend, and
teach youth literature stop perceiving the war experience of some groups
as significant ‘mainstream’ stories for all mankind, and of other groups
of stories as serving their self-interest only, there cannot be said to be
a real understanding of the role of multicultural youth literature for
young people” (p. 280). Minjie Chen’s dissertation moves beyond an account
and criticism of youth literature to question the archive itself and
suggest possible ways in which scholars might approach questions of the
representation of the Second Sino-Japanese War differently. Her
flexibility and combination of various methodologies in pursuing this
research project provides a lesson for historians and literary scholars
alike.

Stephen Poland
East Asian Languages & Literatures
Yale University
stephen.poland at yale.edu

Primary Sources
National Library of China
Shanghai Library
Shanghai Children’s Library
Yunhe County Public Library
Interviews with Women in Yunhe, Zhejiang
Dissertation Information

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 2011. 312 pp. Primary Advisor:
Betsy Hearne.

Image: San Mao Joins the Army [三毛从军记]. Chinese Pamphlet Digitization
Project <http://ecollections.crl.edu/u?/hunters,10255>.