Can Xue

Can Xue (Chinese: 残雪; pinyin: Cán Xuĕ), née Deng Xiaohua (Chinese: 邓小华), is a Chinese avant-garde fiction writer, literary critic, and tailor. She was born May 30, 1953 in Changsha, Hunan, China. Her family was severely persecuted following her father being labeled an ultra-rightist in the Anti-rightist Movement of 1957.^[1] Her writing, which consists mostly of short fiction, breaks with the realism of earlier modern Chinese writers. She has also written novels, novellas, and literary criticisms of the work of Dante, Jorge Luis Borges, and Franz Kafka. Some of her fiction has been translated and published in English.

Life

Can Xue was born in 1953 in Changsha, Hunan Province, China. Her early life was marked by a series of tragic hardships which influenced the direction of her work. She was one of six children born to a man who was once the editor-in-chief of the New Hunan Daily (Chinese: 新湖南日报; pinyin: Xīn Húnán Rìbào). Her parents, like many intellectuals at the time, were labeled as ultra-rightists in the Anti-rightist Movement of 1957. Her father was sent to the countryside for two years in retribution for allegedly leading an anti-Communist Party group at the paper. Two years later the entire family was evicted from the company housing at the paper and moved to a tiny hut below Yuelu Mountain, on the rural outskirts of Changsha. In the years that followed, the family suffered greatly under further persecution. Her father was jailed, and her mother was sent along with her two brothers to the countryside for re-education through labor. Can Xue was allowed to remain in the city because of her poor health. After being forced to leave the small hut, she lived alone in a small, dark room under a staircase. By the time of the Cultural Revolution, Can Xue was thirteen years old. Her formal education was permanently disrupted after completing primary school.^[1][2]

Can Xue describes the horrors of her youth in detail in her memoirs titled “A Summer Day in the Beautiful South” which is included as the foreword to her short story collection Dialogues in Paradise. Throughout this period, her entire family “struggled along on the verge of death.” Her grandmother, who raised her while her parents were gone, soon succumbed to hunger and fatigue, dying with severe edema, a grotesque swelling condition. While the family was forced to scavenge food, eventually eating all of the wool clothes in the house, Can Xue contracted a severe case of tuberculosis.^[3]

Later she was able to find work as a metalworker. Ten years later, in 1980, after giving birth to her first son she quit work at the factory. She and her husband then started a small tailoring business at home after teaching themselves to sew.

She began writing in 1983 and published her first short story in 1985,^[1] at which point she chose the pen name Can Xue (Chinese: 残雪; pinyin: Cán Xuĕ). This pen name can be interpreted either as the stubborn, dirty snow left at the end of winter or the remaining snow at the peak of a mountain after the rest has melted. Publishing under a pen name allowed Can Xue to write without revealing her gender. According to Tonglin Lu, once critics found out she was a woman, her “subversive voice within the supposedly subversive order [of avant-garde fiction]”^[4] made them uncomfortable. (Tonglin Lu coined this "double subversion."^[4]) Not only was she writing avant-garde fiction, but she was also a woman -- so male writers and critics attempted to analyze her works by psychoanalysis of the author, and some even went so far as to suggest she was certifiably insane.^[4] In 2002, she said, "Lots of [the critics] hate me, or at least they just keep silent, hoping I'll disappear. No one discusses my works, either because they disagree or don't understand.”^[5]

More recently, however, many critics have paid tribute to her work,^[4] drawn to the careful precision she uses to create such a strange, unsettling effect on the reader.

Work

Can Xue's abstract style and unconventional narrative form attracted a lot of attention from critics in the 1990s. A variety of interpretations of her work have been published, but political allegory has been the most popular way of understanding her early short stories. Many of the images in her stories have been linked to the Cultural Revolution, the Anti-rightist Movement and other turbulent political movements of the early People's Republic of China although direct references to these events are uncommon.^[6] The author herself explicitly denies most forms of political commentary others claim to have found in her work, stating once in an interview, "There is no political cause in my work."^[7]

On the contrary, Can Xue says she treats each story as a kind of life experiment in which she is the subject.^[8] “In very deep layers,” she says, “all of my works are autobiographical.”^[5] As for those who struggle to find meaning in her stories, Can Xue has this to say: "If a reader feels that this book is unreadable, then it’s quite clear that he’s not one of my readers.”^[9]

List of works

As of 2009, Can Xue has published a total of three novels, fifty novellas, 120 short stories, and six book-length commentaries.^[10] Only a few volumes of fiction, mostly short stories, have been translated into English.

• Dialogues in Paradise, translated by Ronald R. Janssen and Jian Zhang (1989)
• Old Floating Cloud: Two Novellas, translated by Ronald R. Janssen and Jian Zhang (1991)
• The Embroidered Shoes, translated by Ronald R. Janssen and Jian Zhang (1997)
• Blue Light in the Sky and Other Stories, translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping (2006)
• Five Spice Street, a novel translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping (2009)
• Vertical Motion, translated by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping (2011)

References

External links

• MIT Contemporary Chinese Writers: Can Xue