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This paper examines two pieces of Chinese female writing, Shanghai Baby and Mistaken Love.(1) Shanghai Baby is a self-declared semi-autobiography by Zhou Weihui, a controversial Shanghai-based woman writer who when publishing dispenses with her patronymic, Zhou. Mistaken Love is a Chinese-Australian autobiographical novelette by Shi Guoying, a Sydney-based Chinese woman writer whose earlier article on relationships between Chinese women and Western men roused a furore in the Chinese-Australian community. Shi's argument is that Chinese men are inferior to Western men in bedroom skills: `Eight out of ten Western men are sensational, and two out of ten are ordinary; while two out of ten Chinese men are ordinary and eight out of ten are pathetic.'(2)
Both texts explore female experiences -- especially sexual -- in an international perspective. Through the prism of these two writings, I will look at often highly contentious not to say scandalous trends in the representation of sexuality in Chinese (including ethnic or diasporic Chinese) literature today. A further consideration, developed only tentatively below but of great symptomatic meaning for the contemporary development of Chinese cultural politics, is the convergence of Chinese literary and personal-political concerns across national boundaries, and the emergence of a transnational Chinese literature whose globally dispersed practitioners open up new horizons for one another, in dizzying interaction.
Weihui belongs to a literary tendency known to the official literary mainstream as xin sheng dai (usually rendered as `nascent generation') but which calls itself wenxue xin renlei (new literary humanity). Shanghai Baby is perhaps best known, both inside and outside China, for its banning by the mainland authorities in the summer of 2000, when the official Chinese propaganda machine denounced it as `vampish' pornography and vilified its author as `a decadent and debauched exhibitionist, a slave to foreign culture, an outlandish creature of the night, a writer of bad-taste trash.'(3) It was a bestseller in China until its removal from the bookstalls, and also sold well in Japan.
Shi Guoying is another modern-day `disreputable' woman writer. Unlike the mainlander Weihui, however, Shi Guoying is an overseas (or diasporic) Chinese who usually sets her plots both in China and abroad (mainly Australia). She maintains close ties with Chinese literary circles: her works are mostly published in mainland journals. Her texts explore...