Professor Hu Ying (East Asian Studies, UC Irvine)

This talk imagines a dialogue between Lu Xun and Eileen Chang, usually believed to belong to diametrically opposing camps, political vs. apolitical, left vs. right, feminist vs. feminine. I argue that the concerns of Lu Xun and Eileen Chang converge more often than not. The points of their divergence provide us a window into the gendered positioning of each writer and their respective response to the formation of modern subjectivity. In putting the two greats of modern Chinese literature side by side, my goal is to think with them on the conditions, limitations and pitfalls of the modern individual, whose “walking out” serves as a foundational metaphor of her agency and modernity.