Three Legendary Women Born in 1920

[Randy W]

from the Sixth Tone on Facebook

https://www.facebook.com/1570821646570023/posts/2853408574977984/?substory_index=0

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A series on three legendary women born in 1920:
Zhou Xuan: The Singer Whose Songs Traced History http://ow.ly/3pGD50D4a8j
Sister Jiang: The Martyr in the White Scarf http://ow.ly/nZtQ50D4a2A
Elieen Chang: The Writer Who Chronicled a Grand Era’s ‘Small Histories’ http://ow.ly/R1rv50D4a7P

 

Edited January 25, 2023 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

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This article is the first in a series on the lives and legacies of three women born a century ago, and how they intersected with and reflected some of the major trends of the past 100 years of Chinese history.

Born in 1920: The Martyr in the White Scarf
Sister Jiang is one of China’s best known Communist martyrs. How she got that status is a tale fit for an opera.

Promotional images from the 2010 TV series “Sister Jiang” (left) and 1978 film “Sister Jiang” (right). From Douban

China's Betsy Ross?

A GIF shows Jiang Zhujun sewing a red flag with her fellow inmates, from Zhang Huoding’s Peking Opera adaption. From @huhan1988 on Bilibili

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Jiang started working as a member of an underground CPC cell near the anti-Communist Kuomintang (KMT) government’s wartime capital of Chongqing, not far from where she grew up. In 1945, her superiors arranged a cover marriage with a fellow CPC agent named Peng Yongwu. Although Peng was already married to another woman, the pair grew close, and in April 1946 Jiang bore him a son. She later told the brother of her husband’s other wife that they would sort out the complicated three-way relationship “if the revolution is successful, and if we’re all still alive.”

Jiang continued her activities after the end of WWII and the recommencement of China’s civil war. Peng was killed in 1947. A year later, Jiang herself was arrested. While detained at the Sino-American Cooperative Organization in Zhazidong, on the outskirts of Chongqing, her fellow inmates gave her the nickname “Sister Jiang.”

Then, on Nov. 14, 1949, as the victorious People’s Liberation Army neared the outskirts of Chongqing, Jiang was taken from her cell and executed. She was 29 years old.

Before she died, Jiang managed to smuggle out a letter. In it, she acknowledges that her death may be close and entrusts her son to the family of Peng’s first wife. “If the worst should happen, I leave Yun (her son) to you. I hope you will teach him to follow in his parents’ footsteps, to devote himself to building the new China, and to fight until the very end for the Communist revolution.”

 

 

[Randy W]

Born in 1920: The Writer Who Chronicled a Grand Era’s ‘Small Histories’
The literary tradition Elieen Chang represented was essentially broken off on the Chinese mainland for 40 years. By the time she was rediscovered in the 1980s, that legacy couldn’t be recovered, but it could be rewritten.

Left: The cover of Eileen Chang’s collected essays “Written on Water,” published in 1944; right: A portrait of Chang from the book. From Kongfz.com

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Although she was among the most popular authors in occupied Shanghai, her work earned her the scorn of writers more preoccupied with the immediate task of national salvation. With China on the verge of collapse, many writers saw it as their mission to take up the pen as a weapon and do their part to save their country. The era itself, the fires of war and the struggle for survival, became their protagonist, the people its manifestation. It was time to rally around the collective, not indulge in individual pursuits.

But for Chang, who, unlike many of these intellectuals, spent the war in occupied territory rather than retreating into the interior, the times and the war were only ever a background. She wrote about the world and its chaos; she didn’t feel the need to write about war or become a hero. Compared with the eagerness of that generation of intellectuals — torn between the pursuit of individual enlightenment and their duty to join the collective and save the country — her writing seems calm, pessimistic, disinterested. When she wrote about the people, it wasn’t to lionize them, but to explore their selfishness and their real feelings, their scheming and their reflections on life.

In response to the famous translator Fu Lei’s criticism of her limited outlook, Chang wrote: “My novels … are full of characters who are not deep, who are not heroes, but who bear the greatest burdens of the age.” She wrote about the war, but through the eyes of caretakers who rejoiced when a terminal patient stopped moaning and finally died; students in Hong Kong who spent the occupation shopping for food, cooking, and flirting because they had nothing else to do; and people who rushed into marriage for lack of a job or simple entertainment and solace.

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“Man lives in an age, but this age is disappearing like a shadow, and man feels himself abandoned,” Chang once wrote of life in World War II. “In order to confirm one’s existence and to grasp something real and fundamental, one cannot help but turn to ancient memories, memories of all the times in which man has lived.” Chang always seemed somewhat detached for her time. But that didn’t mean she had no worldview. No matter the crisis, no matter how all-consuming it may seem to those caught up in it, underneath it all, humanity is still, constantly, humanity — and life goes on.

 

Edited January 11, 2021 by Randy W (see edit history)

[Randy W]

Born in 1920: The Singer Whose Songs Traced History
Zhou Xuan appeared on Shanghai’s entertainment scene at exactly the right time. But her good fortune didn’t last.

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More than 60 years after her death, her songs are still sung, and she remains universally famous in the Chinese world. Nowadays, people reimagine the bustle and glamor of a bygone Shanghai through her. But the romanticization of her legacy obscures the full story. Zhou Xuan and her work are closely interwoven with the twists and turns of China’s modern history, and it wasn’t always glamorous.

Zhou Xuan was born in 1920 in Changzhou, a city close to Shanghai. Abducted and sold as a child by her uncle, an opium addict, she was eventually adopted by a Shanghainese family surnamed Zhou. In 1931, she joined the Bright Moon Dance Ensemble under Li Jinhui, a pioneer in Chinese pop music. From there, she gradually made a name for herself in musical theater, singing, and film.

Three years later, Zhou entered a singing competition hosted by several Shanghai radio channels, which kick-started her steep ascent to stardom. Despite an arguably unfortunate childhood, she burst onto the scene at an opportune time: Culturally, materially, and otherwise, Shanghai had all the right characteristics in place to embrace a rising class of female stars.

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Works of popular culture — stories, songs, films, and the like — became seen as tools for propagating revolutionary ideas, as well as educating and uniting the people. The great author Lu Xun offers a case in point: He chose to write, rather than study medicine, because he wanted to shake the masses out of their stupor through the power of the pen.

Consequently, left-wing intellectuals came to regard popular urban culture and entertainment — often focused on romance — as vulgar, decadent music that only poisons and corrupts the people. Ironically, in so radically rejecting and renouncing Chinese tradition, they actually upheld Confucian tradition, which regards music and painting as means for improving one’s character – not entertainment.

This disdain for the popular in times of crisis is mirrored in a line from a classical Chinese poem: “The courtesans still sing ‘The Song of Courtyard Flowers’ from across the river / Unperceiving the eternal regret of a vanquished nation contained within its lyrics.” Under the looming threat of national extinction, “decadent” music about passionate love or sorrow over the passing of the seasons faces more scrutiny and criticism.